Wednesday, March 6, 2019 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
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Spring Forward
Jonah
Goldberg
Daylight saving will begin at
2 a.m. on Sunday, March 10
“Does that mean
we have more time to
dig out our homes
and cars?”
Letters to the Editor…
The Nugget welcomes contributions from its readers, which must include the writer9s 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 Unpublished items are not acknowledged or returned.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:
My wife and I have been part of running
Three Sisters Backcountry for the past decade.
We operate four ski huts stretched from Sisters
over toward Mt. Bachelor.
During this past storm we were trying to
keep our guests safe by maintaining access
and keeping roofs shoveled. This wasn9t an
easy task, just getting around was extremely
difficult.
We want to express a sincere thank-you
to all those who helped. Skiers and friends
shoveled tons of snow, snowmobilers helped
break trail, loggers plowed the road when it
was almost shut down, and the Forest Service
staff helped folks late into the evening hand-
shoveling out their cars.
Our rad community of Sisters extends up
into the mountains as well. We are truly grate-
ful. We hope you all are enjoying this magical
winter as much as we are!
Jonas & Anna Tarlen
Three Sisters Backcountry
s
s
s
To the Editor:
Being gay is not a <lifestyle,= <alternative=
or not. Period. Kids cannot be influenced to be
gay through <exploitation of a lifestyle (sic).=
Regarding the book <George= (again): did the
author of the opinion piece read the book or
just <additional pages=?
<Gender issues=? Most of those issues
emanate from people who don9t accept that
gay people are just that. People. People NOT
in need of redemption because of their sexual-
ity. The Bible says a lot about a lot and I con-
tinue to be amazed at Christians who pick and
See LETTERS on page 14
Sisters Weather Forecast
Courtesy of the National Weather Service, Pendleton, Oregon
Wednesday
Thursday
Rain/Snow Showers Partly Cloudy
37/19
36/17
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
Monday
Partly Cloudy
Mostly Cloudy
Partly Cloudy
Mostly Sunny
36/19
36/20
37/21
43/27
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A couple of years ago,
opponents of Donald Trump9s
presidential bid warned that a
Trump presidency would be
a crazy spectacle. Jeb Bush
famously said that Trump
was a chaos candidate who
would be a chaos president.
Some even conjured vari-
ous wild scenarios that might
unfold under a President
Trump. They said it might
look something like this:
As tensions flared in some
hotspot 4 the Middle East
or maybe along the India-
Pakistan border 4 or as the
president conducted perilous
negotiations with, say, North
Korea, he would be distracted
or bedeviled with some
sort of domestic scandal.
Well, I don9t know if any-
body predicted the specific
details of Wednesday9s cav-
alcade of crazy, but if they
did, they should collect their
door prize.
Michael Cohen, Trump9s
former <fixer= and vice
president of the Trump
Organization, owed his
career to the fact that he
would happily be his boss9s
pet snake. By his own admis-
sion, Cohen proudly did the
president9s <dirty deeds= (his
words), likening himself to
the Tom Hagen character in
<The Godfather.= He threat-
ened anyone who crossed
Trump, paid off inconvenient
women, and boasted with
a loser9s false courage how
he would take a bullet for
his boss. He celebrated, with
an alacrity rarely matched
by Stalin9s henchmen, his
employer9s near-superhuman
genius and empathy.
Then, on Wednesday, he
stopped by Congress before
he heads to prison, he shed
his old skin, the way snakes
can, and tried on a new
role of martyr and moralist.
It9s possible his professed
redemption is sincere. It cer-
tainly seemed like it at times.
But one needn9t be a cynic to
doubt it.
Regardless, Cohen9s tes-
timony seemed designed to
simultaneously enrage the
President in every way pos-
sible and to ingratiate him-
self with his left-wing critics.
Cohen impugned the presi-
dent9s character, his intelli-
gence, honesty and wealth.
He called Trump a draft-
dodging racist and grifter. If
I had to guess, his testimony
was framed in the best way
possible to compensate for
the fact that Cohen could not
corroborate the most extreme
versions of the Russia-
collusion theory, which is
a political Holy Grail for
Democrats and much of the
media.
Meanwhile, Trump was in
Hanoi, Vietnam to negotiate
with the murderous dictator
of North Korea, Kim Jong
Un.
The summit, like the first
one, was ill-considered. It
rested on the assumption that
Trump, the world9s greatest
dealmaker, could charm Kim
and the North Korean regime
out of its nuclear program.
The worry from foreign-pol-
icy experts across much of
the ideological spectrum was
that Trump would blunder
into a deal just for the sake of
being able to declare victory.
Rumored concessions leaked
out in the media as if through
an open faucet.
And then, it didn9t happen.
The summit was a failure on
its own terms, and ironically,
that made it a kind of vic-
tory for Trump. The political
tumult in Washington gave
Trump every personal incen-
tive to come up with any deal
he could in order to change
the subject and have some-
thing to boast about.
I have long argued that
the North Koreans can9t be
talked out of their nuclear
program because their
nuclear program is central to
the rationale for the regime9s
entire existence. It would
be like talking Hitler and
the Nazi regime out of their
desire for conquest and their
obsessions with the Jews;
it9s simply the nature of the
regime. You cannot reason a
leopard to abandon its spots.
It9s doubtful Trump fully
recognizes this yet, but that9s
irrelevant. He recognized
enough: Any deal he could
have gotten with Kim would
have been worse than doing
what he did 4 walk away
from the table. Whether
he came to this conclusion
on his own or was cajoled
into it by Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo and National
Security Adviser John Bolton
is irrelevant, too.
One can rightly bemoan
or lament the fact that the
Trump presidency made the
Cohen spectacle possible.
But that doesn9t change the
fact that the president defied
political temptation and did
the right thing.
© 2019 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.