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Wednesday, September 20, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
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P
I
N I
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Jonah
Goldberg
Letters to the Editor…
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ters to the Editor is an open forum for the community and contains unsolicited opinions not necessarily shared by the Editor.
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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
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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
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Opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer and
are not necessarily shared by the Editor or The Nugget Newspaper.