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.
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