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About The daily Astorian. (Astoria, Or.) 1961-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 1, 2017)
OPINION 6A THE DAILY ASTORIAN • WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2017 Founded in 1873 DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager CARL EARL, Systems Manager JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager Water under the bridge Compiled by Bob Duke From the pages of Astoria’s daily newspapers 10 years ago this week — 2006 The Republican Fausts By DAVID BROOKS New York Times News Service M The Daily Astorian/File Photo Fire Chief Joe Dotson teaches three firefighter’s sons to fight fires at a Burn to Learn training fire. His favorite part of being fire chief has been training others and watching them be thrilled and successful. It’s the end of an era. The end of Seaside Fire Chief Joe Dotson’s 27 years of service to the fire department. He will no longer supervise fire- fighting and medical situations, teach fire skills or hand out awards and certifications. He won’t make firefighters in an ambulance stop at his house to get him a clean shirt, prance around in Lt. Susan Agalzoff’s tiny boots for a joke, announce over the radio “Can you dispatch the police, we need help to break in this guy’s car” or miss-hear alert tones and try to send firefighters on a Medix call. Dotson, 61, will retire next week. At the 2006 Seaside firefighters awards banquet Saturday, Dotson’s peo- ple “roasted” him with tales of his idiosyncrasies, but mentioned his good points too. “He’s a good man,” firefighter John Mercer said before the ban- quet. “He’s the kind of guy you go into a fire with and you feel good about it.” Dotson received a standing ovation, a watch, a brass-plated ax and one last salute from his firefighters. Eight of 14 dikes in Oregon listed as at-risk by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are located in Clatsop County. The levees are among 146 nationwide identified by the federal agency as posing an unacceptable risk of failing in a major flood. Oregon ranks second nationally for the number of at-risk dikes, behind 42 in California. Ten of the 14 in Oregon are in diking districts that have been dropped from a federal program “because their structures have degraded to a point that the Corps of Engineers can no longer guarantee they will provide any level of protection and the dik- ing district has not taken steps to remedy the situation,” said Matt Rabe, a Corps spokesman at its regional office in Portland. 50 years ago — 1966 Dr. Benetta Washington, chief of the women’s division of the Job Corps, appealed here Tuesday for support of officials and public of the city of Astoria to make the new women’s urban Job Corps Center at Tongue Point succeed. Highway Commission Chairman Glenn Jackson said Tues- day better road access from Olympia to Astoria would help increase the traffic count on the Astoria-Megler Bridge over the Columbia River. This, he told the State Highway Commission, would open up economic opportunity for the entire coast area. The commission discussed traffic count on the bridge which has been running about 575 a day since it opened last August. This is a little under early forecasts, but winter conditions were named as a factor. Astoria fishermen reported sighting 10 Soviet fishing vessels off the Oregon Coast this week. Dr. E.W. Harvey, administrator of the Oregon Otter Trawl commis- sion, told The Daily Astorian that commission members Eben Parker and Don Nichols reported the sightings Wednesday afternoon soon after they returned to port. Parker says six Russian craft were off the Columbia River mouth some- time Tuesday. He said there was one “five miles west by north” from the lightship. Portland General Electric Co. Thursday announced plans for a $130 million nuclear power station in Columbia County that will produce twice the power of Bonneville Dam. Two sites are being considered for the one million kilowatt station. One is south of Rainier between Prescott and Goble and the other north and east of Clatskanie at the former Bea- ver Army depot. 75 years ago — 1941 Plans for creation of a defense homes registration office, where central listing of all rooms, flats, apartments and houses for rent will be maintained day-by-day for convenience of the public, will be studied this week. A house-to-house canvas of every precinct in Astoria will be made in the week Feb. 2-9 by workers from the Clatsop Defense council headquarters. Four nurses from St. Mary’s hospital staff and one from Columbia hospital have been called into military service since Dec. 7 when Japanese airplanes and submarines teamed up in the attack on Pearl Harbor, spokesmen for the two institutions reported today. any Republican members of Congress have made a Faustian bargain with Donald Trump. They don’t partic- ularly admire him as a man, they don’t trust him as an administrator, they don’t agree with him on major issues, but they respect the grip he has on their voters, they hope he’ll sign their legislation and they certainly don’t want to be seen siding with the inflamed progressives or the hyper- ventilating media. Their position was at least com- prehensible: How many times in a lifetime does your party control all levers of power? When that happens you’re willing to tolerate a little Trumpian circus behavior in order to get things done. But if the last 10 days have made anything clear, it’s this: The Republican Fausts are in an unten- able position. The deal they’ve struck with the devil comes at too high a price. It really will cost them their soul. In the first place, the Trump administration is not a Republican administration; it is an ethnic nationalist administration. Trump insulted both parties equally in his Inaugural Address. The Bannonites are utterly crushing the Republican regulars when it comes to actual policymaking. The administration has swung sharply anti-trade. Trump’s eco- nomic instincts are corporatist, not free market. If Barack Obama tried to lead from behind, Trump’s foreign policy involves actively running away from global engage- ment. Outspoken critics of Paul Ryan are being given White House jobs, and at the same time, if Reince Priebus has a pulse it is not externally evident. Second, even if Trump’s ideol- ogy were not noxious, his incom- petence is a threat to all around him. To say that it is amateur hour at the White House is to slander amateurs. The recent executive orders were drafted and signed without any normal agency review or even semicoherent legal advice, filled with elemental errors that any nursery school student would have caught. It seems that the Trump admin- istration is less a government than a small clique of bloggers and tweeters who are incommunicado with the people who actually help them get things done. Things will get really hairy when the world’s problems are incoming. Third, it’s becoming increas- ingly clear that the aroma of AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite House Speaker Paul Ryan leaves a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., Tuesday following a GOP strategy session. The Wisconsin Republican gave a strong defense of President Donald Trump’s refugee and immigration ban to caucus members and said he backs the order, which has created chaos and confusion worldwide. bigotry infuses the whole opera- tion, and anybody who aligns too closely will end up sharing in the stench. The administration could have simply tightened up the refugee review process and capped the ref- ugee intake at 50,000, but instead went out of its way to insult Islam. The administration could have simply tightened up immigration procedures, but Trump went out of his way to pick a fight with all of Mexico. The deal they’ve struck with the devil comes at too high a price. It really will cost them their soul. Other Republicans have gone far out of their way to make sure the war on terrorism is not a war on Islam or on Arabs, but Trump has gone out of his way to ensure the opposite. The racial club is always there. Fourth, it is hard to think of any administration in recent memory, on any level, whose identity is so tainted by cruelty. The Trump administration is often harsh and never kind. It is quick to inflict suffering on the 8-year-old Syrian girl who’s been bombed and strafed and lost her dad. Its deportation vows mean that in the years ahead, the TV screens will be filled with weeping families being pulled apart. None of these traits will improve with time. As former Bush administration official Eliot Cohen wrote in The Atlantic, “Precisely because the problem is one of temperament and character, it will not get better. It will get worse, as power intoxicates Trump and those around him. It will probably end in calamity — substantial domestic protest and violence, a breakdown of international economic rela- tionships, the collapse of major alliances, or perhaps one or more new wars (even with China) on top of the ones we already have. It will not be surprising in the slightest if his term ends not in four or in eight years, but sooner, with impeach- ment or removal under the 25th Amendment.” The danger signs are there in profusion. Sooner or later, the Republican Fausts will face a binary choice. As they did under Nixon, Republican leaders will have to either oppose Trump and risk his tweets, or sidle along with him and live with his stain. Trump exceeded expectations with his Cabinet picks, but his first 10 days in office have made clear this is not a normal administration. It is a problem that demands a response. It is a callous, bumbling group that demands either personal loyalty or the ax. Already one sees John McCain and Lindsey Graham forming a bit of a Republican opposition. The other honorable senators will have to choose: Collins, Alexander, Portman, Corker, Cotton, Sasse and so on and so on. With most administrations you can agree sometimes and disagree other times. But this one is a dan- ger to the party and the nation in its existential nature. And so sooner or later all will have to choose what side they are on, and live forever after with the choice. LETTERS WELCOME Letters should be exclusive to The Daily Astorian. We do not publish open letters or third-party letters. Letters should be fewer than 350 words and must include the writer’s name, address and phone numbers. You will be contacted to confirm authorship. All letters are subject to editing for space, grammar and, on occa- sion, factual accuracy and verbal verification of authorship. Only two letters per writer are printed each month. Letters written in response to other letter writers should address the issue at hand and, rather than mentioning the writer by name, should refer to the headline and date the letter was published. Dis- course should be civil and people should be referred to in a respectful manner. Letters referring to news stories should also mention the headline and date of publication. The Daily Astorian welcomes short “in gratitude” notes from readers for publication. They should keep to a 200-word maxi- mum and writers are asked to avoid simply listing event sponsors. They must be signed, include the writ- er’s address, phone number and are subject to condensation and editing for style, grammar, etc. Submissions may be sent in any of these ways: E-mail to editor@dailyastorian. com; Online form at www.dailyasto- rian.com; Delivered to the Astorian offices at 949 Exchange St. and 1555 N. Roosevelt in Seaside. Or by mail to Letters to the Editor, P.O. Box 210, Astoria, OR 97103
