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About The nugget. (Sisters, Or.) 1994-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 3, 2018)
2 Wednesday, October 3, 2018 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon O P I N I O N Consumed by lust By Jim Cornelius Editor in Chief 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 Unpublished items are not acknowledged or returned.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: We need your help. Today we found a dead fawn on our back patio (see story, page 18). He had been shot with a small pellet gun or something similar. He died an agonizing death. I had gone outside to pick up some leaves and there he was. It was incredibly sad to see such a beautiful ani- mal had come to such a senseless, violent end. Yes, I know deer can be pests some- times, but they are God’s creatures and deserve a chance at life. This was a young fawn, probably still with his mother. He had a tiny bullet hole but it had gone into his lungs and he had coughed up a lot of blood. It’s terrible to hear about, but some- one shot this deer in town. That was wrong. If anyone knows anything about this, please contact the sheriff’s office. It’s not the crime of the century but we don’t need or want this kind of thing going on in our peaceful town. I’m going to volunteer for the cleanup this weekend. I love this little town. It’s a great place to live and we need to come together to keep it that way. Please help to find this culprit and be good neighbors. I also want to thank the game warden and state trooper who came out to the house to investigate. They were both genuinely dis- turbed by this. They protect our resources and protect all of us. Virginia Patskowski See LETTERS on page 20 Sisters Weather Forecast Courtesy of the National Weather Service, Pendleton, Oregon Wednesday Friday Thursday Saturday Sunday Monday Mostly Sunny Partly Cloudy Rain AM Showers Mostly Sunny Partly Cloudy 65/38 59/32 53/38 54/32 60/34 57/33 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 in Chief: Jim Cornelius Production Manager: Leith Easterling Graphic Design: Jess Draper Community Marketing Partners: Vicki Curlett & Patti Jo Beal Classifieds & Circulation: Lisa May Proofreader: Pete Rathbun 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. ©2018 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, 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. Our Founding Fathers must be spinning in their graves at the spectacle of the confirmation hearings for Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Right? Actually, probably not. The framers of the Constitution understood all too well what fate would befall the Republic if fac- tionalism and the will to power gained sway. They were no better men than we. They were just as subject to the seduction of the deadly sins, just as capa- ble both of great nobility and disappointing venality. Their genius lay in recog- nizing their own fallibility and the imperfectability of man. They were not utopi- ans. They understood that the only means of protecting ourselves from ourselves is to put constraints on power. They did this by estab- lishing checks and balances within the federal govern- ment and between the fed- eral government and the states, and enshrining in the first 10 amendments to the Constitution indi- vidual rights that cannot be abridged. The framers understood that the desire for power to “do good” is as dangerous as the naked ambition to wield it for selfish or evil ends. The great mythmaker of the 20th century, J.R.R. Tolkien, built his opus “The Lord of the Rings” around the same premise: that the mechanism of absolute dominance — the One Ring — could not be wielded for “good,” that its insidious influence would inevitably corrupt its bearer, consuming them in love/lust for the object of power itself. The mythic tale that has captured the current zeitgeist is a grittier, more historically grounded tale — HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” based on George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire.” In Martin’s world, politics and the quest for power is a blood sport. “When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die.” Being too noble or too honorable wins nothing but a date with the headsman. The brutal, cynical myth holds sway today. Who, after all, is going to reject the temptation of power? The Kavanaugh confir- mation hinges on a decades- old allegation of sexual misconduct that can never be proven through any rec- ognizable form of due pro- cess. Who and what we believe about it is a creation of our ideological leanings, our personal experiences and our biases. But what this mad moment reveals in stark clarity is what drives a game of thrones: naked, consum- ing lust for power. The Republican major- ity was determined to ram through this nomination, even on the barest of parti- san margins. They were in a position to do so because, in 2013, Democrat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid stripped away protections of Senate minority preroga- tive by invoking the “nuclear option” and jettisoning the filibuster (which requires 60 votes instead of 51) in order to get his party’s nominees confirmed. Reid’s move excluded Supreme Court nominees, but it opened the door to expansion, and the Republicans walked through. Under the old rules, Kavanaugh, with a record as a partisan operative as well as an apparently fair and independent federal judge, might well never have been nominated, much less confirmed. In 2016, Republicans determinedly — in the case of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, gleefully — blocked even hearing President Obama’s nomina- tion of the obviously quali- fied Merrick Garland. In 2018, Sen. Diane Feinstein sat on Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation of high school sexual mis- conduct by Kavanaugh for weeks, before deploy- ing the accusation like a Claymore mine in the last ditch. Whatever the merits of Dr. Ford’s accusation, it has been used by the Democrat minority not in an effort to determine truth and to “advise and consent” — but as a tactic to derail through lurid political theater a con- firmation they could not oth- erwise stop. Winning power by any means necessary does not serve the long-term health of the Republic. The abrogation of con- straint on power and the erosion of due process have been incrementally wear- ing at our foundations for decades. All our institutions are now tottering. In this game of thrones, no matter who wins, the Republic dies. Opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer and are not necessarily shared by the Editor or The Nugget Newspaper.