Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About The nugget. (Sisters, Or.) 1994-current | View Entire Issue (Nov. 8, 2017)
2 Wednesday, November 8, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon O P I N I O Jonah Goldberg The Nugget Newspaper salutes our Veterans WITH DEEP GRATITUDE FOR YOUR SERVICE & SACRIFICE 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 Unpublished items are not acknowledged or returned.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: Normally I am in full agreement with your thoughtful and well-written commentaries. But your November 1 commentary entitled: “Meet the new boss: Dawn of the Red Century,” was a bridge too far. It is agreed that communism has failed miserably in most respects, but then you airily proceeded to malign demo- cratic socialism and connect it to the red menace. You darkly warn “...that it (democratic socialism) is vulnerable to being highjacked by control-freak tyrants whose intentions are far from benign.” You further state the “Iron Law of Oligarchy” inevitably means that oligarchies of elites eventually take con- trol. And, the “...elite cares more for their own power and control rather than your well-being.” You see democratic socialism, to a greater or lesser degree, successfully practiced in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Canada, France, Germany and other countries. Evidence their well-developed universal healthcare and free or low-cost college education systems and other benefits for the people. See LETTERS on page 22 Sisters Weather Forecast Courtesy of the National Weather Service, Pendleton, Oregon Wednesday Thursday Friday N Saturday Sunday Monday Rain Freezing rain Chance rain Partly sunny Chance rain Chance rain 43/31 47/33 45/29 48/29 48/31 46/30 The Nugget Newspaper, LLC 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. Editor: Jim Cornelius Production Manager: Leith Easterling Classifieds & Circulation: Teresa Mahnken Advertising: Karen Kassy Graphic Design: Jess Draper Proofreader: Pete Rathbun Accounting: Erin Bordonaro Owner: J. Louis Mullen 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, LLC. 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, LLC 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. The GOP is running as smoothly as a dry Slip ’N Slide made from sandpaper. That the party is as dysfunc- tional as the human resources department at the Weinstein Company stems from a host of ideological, political and structural problems that are only compounded by the fact that the president grabs the public’s attention like a spi- der monkey running through a church with a lit stick of dynamite. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, has gotten drunk on the spectacle. And as with many a drunk, it’s grown oblivious to its own decrepitude. Donna Brazile, the longtime high-ranking Democratic functionary, was made interim chair of the party shortly before the 2016 election in the wake of revelations that the previous chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, seemed to be play- ing favorites in the pri- maries, tilting the scales toward Hillary Clinton and against Bernie Sanders. In an excerpt from her forthcom- ing book, “Hacks,” Brazile reports that Wasserman Schultz wasn’t simply partial towards Clinton. She was in fact Clinton’s vassal. It’s widely known that Barack Obama left the Democratic Party in sham- bles. On his watch, the party lost more than 1,000 elective offices at the federal, state and local level. One under- reported reason for this is that Obama opted to create a parallel institution out of his 2012 campaign outfit, Organizing for America. The renamed Organizing for Action siphoned money and the president’s energies from the DNC. Brazile reports that the party was so hollowed out with debt that Hillary Clinton essentially scooped it up in a distress sale. Wasserman Schultz cut a deal with the Clinton campaign in which Clinton would raise millions ostensibly for the party, par- ticularly at the state level. But those funds were sluiced back into the Clinton cam- paign coffers in Brooklyn, and the campaign extracted de facto control of the party’s messaging and hiring. Team Clinton mocked Sanders as a paranoid dotard for claiming that the Democratic primary system was rigged against him. As it happens, his para- noia didn’t go far enough. It seems axiomatic that any party weak enough to be taken over by Hillary Clinton is not in good health. Today, the Democratic Party’s sole unifying prin- ciple is opposition to Donald Trump. Given Trump’s standing in the polls, that may be good enough for the 2018 midterm elections. But when it comes to ideas about governing, all of the passion is reserved for two things. First, there is Sanders’ idea of “socialism,” which is really an unworkable stew of banalities and nostrums stemming from a nostal- gic idea of a “Scandinavian model” that no longer exists (if it ever did). It’s as if Fabian socialists created an Epcot Center exhibit of Sweden in the 1950s, and irascible tour guide Bernie rides by in a trolley, shout- ing: “This could be us!” The second source of passion is the angry, sancti- mony-besotted identity poli- tics popular on college cam- puses and a handful of left- wing websites. The DNC’s data services manager recently sent out an email soliciting applications for new hires in the IT depart- ment. She cautioned that she wasn’t looking for any “cisgender straight white males.” If you want to know how Trump was elected, ask yourself how a laid-off, cis- gender, straight, white, male coal miner who went back to community college to learn computers might react to that. Again, you wouldn’t be crazy for thinking the GOP is like a runaway fire at a soiled diaper reclamation center. And I’m sure I’ll have opportunities in the near future to expand on that. But the important point is that dysfunction isn’t zero- sum. Right now, the best argument Republicans have is “we’re not Democrats,” and the best argument Democrats have is “we’re not Republicans.” Like two punch-drunk pugilists lean- ing on each other in the 12th round, if one falls, the other may well fall, too. © 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.
