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Wednesday, October 3, 2018 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
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Consumed by lust
By Jim Cornelius
Editor in Chief
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:
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
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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.