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About The nugget. (Sisters, Or.) 1994-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 20, 2017)
2 Wednesday, September 20, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon O P I N I O N Jonah Goldberg Letters to the Editor… The Nugget welcomes contributions from its readers, which must include the writer’s name, address and phone number. Let- ters to the Editor is an open forum for the community and contains unsolicited opinions not necessarily shared by the Editor. The Nugget reserves the right to edit, omit, respond or ask for a response to letters submitted to the Editor. Letters should be no longer than 300 words. Unpublished items are not acknowledged or returned. The deadline for all letters is noon Monday. To the Editor: The recent events associated with the Milli wildfire have caused me to wonder about the Forest Service, both state and federal, and their management policies and practices and the resulting impact on budgets, jobs and air quality. I do not understand how environmental groups could endorse a no-cut timber program that results in huge wildfires. This does not seem to be an environmentally sensible thing. I cannot help but wonder about the envi- ronmental damage caused by an out-of-control wildfire in our forests as compared to a well- managed logging program. Wildfires do provide some short-term employment in a very hot and dangerous pro- fession and a great deal of air pollution, while destroying hundreds of thousands or millions of board feet of valuable timber. Wildfires are also a huge drain on the forestry departments’ already strained and meager budgets. I also wonder if the heat generated by a wildfire con- tributes to global warming. Wildfires do an incredibly huge amount of damage to wildlife and their habitat, while a well-managed logging program may do some minor damage for a very short time with mini- mal wild life loss. I believe a well-managed logging program that logged 1 percent of our forestlands every year would provide a renewable and sustain- able never-ending supply of 100-year-old trees and result in a vibrant and diverse timber industry. Furthermore, a well-managed logging pro- gram would also reduce the ladder fuels that contribute to wildfire growth. Logging roads See LETTERS on page 28 Sisters Weather Forecast Courtesy of the National Weather Service, Pendleton, Oregon Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Showers likely Chance Showers Slt. Chance Showers Mostly Sunny 49/28 53/34 59/31 65/34 Sunday Monday Sunny Sunny 68/35 71/46 The Nugget Newspaper, Inc. Website: www.nuggetnews.com 442 E. Main Ave., P.O. Box 698, Sisters, Oregon 97759 Tel: 541-549-9941 | Fax: 541-549-9940 | editor@nuggetnews.com Postmaster: Send address changes to The Nugget Newspaper, P.O. Box 698, Sisters, OR 97759. Third Class Postage Paid at Sisters, Oregon. Publisher - Editor: Kiki Dolson News Editor: Jim Cornelius Production Manager: Leith Easterling Classifieds & Circulation: Teresa Mahnken Advertising: Karen Kassy Graphic Design: Jess Draper Proofreader: Pete Rathbun Accounting: Erin Bordonaro The Nugget is mailed to residents within the Sisters School District; subscriptions are available outside delivery area. Third-class postage: one year, $45; six months (or less), $25. First-class postage: one year, $85; six months, $55. Published Weekly. ©2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. All advertising which appears in The Nugget is the property of The Nugget and may not be used without explicit permission. The Nugget Newspaper, Inc. assumes no liability or responsibility for information contained in advertisements, articles, stories, lists, calendar etc. within this publication. All submissions to The Nugget Newspaper will be treated as uncondition- ally assigned for publication and copyrighting purposes and subject to The Nugget Newspaper’s unrestricted right to edit and comment editorially, that all rights are currently available, and that the material in no way infringes upon the rights of any person. The publisher assumes no responsibility for return or safety of artwork, photos, or manuscripts. I used to worry that Donald Trump was Lonesome Rhodes in a better suit. I’m starting to wonder if he’s Chance the Gardener in a worse one. Just in case you don’t get the references, Rhodes was the lead character, played by Andy Griffith, in Elia Kazan’s 1957 film “A Face in the Crowd,” the best movie ever made about the dangers of populism and mass media. Chance the Gardener was the lead character, played by Peter Sellers, in Hal Ashby’s “Being There,” a brilliant 1979 film based on the Jerzy Kosinski novel about a simple-minded gardener who had never been out- side his employer’s home until the man died. Because Chance speaks in fortune cookie aphorisms about gardening (and has one impeccable custom-tailored suit), he’s mistaken for a man of deep wisdom and is lifted to heights of power in Washington. President Trump isn’t nearly as kind-hearted as Chance, nor as dimwitted, but there are two relevant similarities. First, both have an unhealthy addiction to television, preferring it to reading. Second, neither really understands what’s going on around them but benefits from being sur- rounded by people who see what they want to see. Last week, the presi- dent took the opening offer on a debt-limit deal from Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leaders in the Senate and House, respec- tively. A person close to the GOP leadership told Axios, “He accepted a shakedown when he was holding all the cards. ... This is quite literally a guy who watches ‘ER’ trying to perform a surgery.” According to reports, the president was ecstatic over the favorable cover- age he received for his “bipartisanship.” “I got a call early this morning,” Schumer told the New York Times. “He said, ‘This was so great!’ Here’s what he said: ‘Do you watch Fox News?’ I said, ‘Not really.’ ‘They’re praising you!’ Meaning me. But he said, ‘And your stations’ — I guess meaning MSNBC and CNN — ‘are praising me! This is great!’” Despite his “fake news” refrain, Trump doesn’t hate the mainstream media the way his most ardent sup- porters do. They sincerely believe it’s a hostile oppo- nent in the culture war, while Trump’s anger is more that of a jilted lover. His whole life has been marked by an obsession with publicity. His supporters, though, are oddly blind to that fact. Normally, when conserva- tives or Republicans devi- ate from the party line, the knee-jerk assumption among activists is that they are doing so out of a desire to win praise from the lib- eral media and invitations to Georgetown cocktail par- ties. If that’s often unfair, it may actually be the case for Trump, and yet his base insists that if he “wins,” it must also be a win for con- servatives. So deep is the desire to see the Trump they thought they were getting, they bend the facts to fit their heroic narrative. In his “60 Minutes” interview, former White House strategist Steve Bannon insisted that the establishment is “trying to nullify the 2016 election.” Never mind that the House has passed most of Trump’s agenda (Obamacare repeal and replace, funding the wall, etc). Bannon is work- ing on the assumption that Trump has a mandate for Bannon’s potted theories of “economic nationalism.” The truth is that Trump’s real mandate was to be “not Hillary Clinton” —and he fulfilled it on Day 1. With the exception of appointing conservative judges, all of Trump’s other scattershot policies earned only partial support from GOP voters. The other truth is that Trump craves praise more than he cares about imple- menting his defenestrated strategist’s political fan- tasies. And his supporters want Trump “wins” more than conservative ones, which is why we can expect more of what we saw last week. © 2017 Tribune Content Agency, LLC Opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer and are not necessarily shared by the Editor or The Nugget Newspaper.