OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, AUGUST 4, 2017
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
JEREMY FELDMAN, Circulation Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
OUR VIEW
E
ach week we recognize those people and organizations
in the community deserving of public praise for the good
things they do to make the North Coast a better place to
live, and also those who should be called out for their actions.
SHOUTOUTS
• Winners, participants and organizers of the recent 107th
Oregon Coast Invitational golf tournament at the Astoria Golf
& Country Club, which is one of oldest tournaments on the West
Coast. Riley Elmes successfully defended his Grand Champions
trophy, winning for the second consecutive year, while Lara
Tennant took top honors in the Women’s Division. Elmes son,
Matt, won the Junior Seniors Division. In the Seniors Division,
Bret Stevens posted the victory, while Larry Wobbrock topped
the leaderboard in the Super Seniors Division.
• John Underwood, a Bainbridge Island, Washington, resident
and also a homeowner in Cannon Beach, who donated $10,000 to
help launch the “Protect our Puffins” program this summer. The
effort, with the help of the Haystack Rock Awareness Program,
will include the sale of sweatshirts that say “Protect our Puffins” at
local businesses. The proceeds will fund informational brochures,
research and an event next summer to raise awareness for the puf-
fin bird population which has been in sharp decline in recent years,
including the colony at Haystack Rock. Researchers haven’t pin-
pointed the reason for the decline, but are working to determine its
cause.
• Christian Montbrand, a student in AmeriCorps’ Resource
Assistance for Rural Environment program, who spent a year in
Seaside helping the city develop tsunami education outreach and
also updating its parks master plan. Montbrand, who will seek a
graduate degree at the University of Oregon in the fall, was super-
vised by Public Works Director Dale McDowell and led a recent
open house on the parks master plan at the Seaside Library, shar-
ing a vision for the city’s parks and garnering feedback from about
40 attendees. McDowell said the findings will be included in rec-
ommendations for updates to the existing parks plan.
Rebecca Sprengeler
Hundreds of corgis and their owners gathered last weekend in
Cannon Beach for the fifth annual Oregon Corgi Beach Day. The
event started with just a few dozen corgis and their owners and
has ballooned in size in recent years.
• Jennifer Robinson, who organized the fifth annual Corgi
Beach Day in Cannon Beach last Saturday, which raised more
than $9,000 for the Oregon Humane Society. The event, which
has grown in participation and attendance each year, attracted
hundreds of the short-legged, smiley dogs with their owners and
friends, and the proceeds are used to help the Humane Society
finance day-to-day costs along with programs to alleviate over-
crowding in shelters and investigate animal cruelty and neglect
cases.
CALLOUTS
• Internal Revenue Service scammers who have been target-
ing residents throughout the North Coast during the past month
with waves of “robocalls” from people who claim to be IRS
or U.S. Treasury agents. The callers, or sometimes automated
recordings, tell the target that their tax records are wrong, or that
they owe back taxes or penalties with the goal of getting a wor-
ried recipient to provide bank account information or money.
The IRS annually lists the fake agent scam as one of the larg-
est it has to combat. According to the IRS, scammers have duped
more than 10,000 victims out of $54 million since 2013. Real fed-
eral agents rarely call without sending mail first, and do not call
demanding payment or ask for wire transfers or credit card num-
bers. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen says anyone receiving
such a call should “just hang up and don’t engage these people.”
The IRS also advises residents to report suspicious tax callers on
the “IRS Impersonation Scam Reporting” webpage, or by calling
800-366-4484.
Suggestions?
Do you have a Shoutout or Callout you think we should know about?
Let us know at news@dailyastorian.com and we’ll make sure to take a
look.
Feasting on false and fake
By CHARLES BLOW
New York Times News Service
D
onald Trump continues his
savage assault on truth, hon-
esty and candor.
In two weeks
time,
one
of
Trump’s lawyers
has been proven
a liar for repeat-
edly claiming that
Trump had not been
involved at all in the
drafting of the misleading statement
that his son Donald Jr. issued about
his now-infamous meeting with Rus-
sians in Trump Tower during the pres-
idential campaign.
As The Washington Post reported
Monday:
“Flying home from Germany on
July 8 aboard Air Force One, Trump
personally dictated a statement in
which Trump Jr. said that he and the
Russian lawyer had ‘primarily dis-
cussed a program about the adop-
tion of Russian children’ when they
met in June 2016, according to mul-
tiple people with knowledge of the
deliberations. The statement, issued
to The New York Times as it prepared
an article, emphasized that the subject
of the meeting was ‘not a campaign
issue at the time.’” Then Tuesday,
White House press secretary Sarah
Huckabee Sanders confirmed that the
elder Trump had played a role, say-
ing, “The president weighed in, as
any father would, based on the lim-
ited information that he had.”
In short, this whole line of defense
that White House had maintained
for weeks was a complete fairy tale,
another blatant lie from the perpetual
fountain of lies.
During a July 25 interview with
the Wall Street Journal editor-in-
chief Gerard Baker, Trump said of
his debased speech at the Boy Scouts’
Jamboree: “I got a call from the head
of the Boy Scouts saying it was the
greatest speech that was ever made
to them.” The only problem is that,
as Politico reported this week: “The
Boy Scouts of America, however,
apologized to its members after the
speech and then said Wednesday that
the organization was not aware of any
calls between its leaders and Trump.”
Monday, Trump said: “As you
know, the border was a tremendous
problem and they’re close to 80 per-
cent stoppage. Even the president of
Mexico called me — they said their
southern border, very few people are
coming because they know they’re
not going to get through our border,
which is the ultimate compliment.”
The problem: As ABC News
reports, “The Mexican government
says President Enrique Peña Nieto
did not call U.S. President Donald
Trump to compliment his immigra-
tion policies, as Trump had claimed”
and “An American official con-
firmed that no telephone conversation
recently occurred between Trump and
Peña Nieto.”
AP Photo/Susan Walsh
President Donald Trump walks up the steps of Air Force One at An-
drews Air Force Base, Md., Thursday. Trump was heading to West Vir-
ginia for a campaign-style rally in Huntington, W.Va.
But perhaps most disturbing and
despicable is an allegation in a law-
suit filed by Rod Wheeler, a private
detective who was hired by the fam-
ily of Seth Rich, an aide for the Dem-
ocratic National Committee who was
fatally shot last summer in Washing-
ton, to investigate his death.
The claim is that the White House
and a wealthy friend of Trump used
Fox News to manufacture and pro-
mote a fake news story — using this
dead man’s body, and ignoring his
family’s agony — to “shift the blame
from Russia and help put to bed spec-
ulation that President Trump colluded
with Russia in an attempt to influence
the outcome of the presidential elec-
tion.” Wheeler is also a Fox News
contributor.
The
presidency
is being used
as a tool of
degradation
rather than
uplift.
Fox published the article but was
forced to retract it. According to The
New York Times, “The retracted arti-
cle, citing law enforcement sources,
said Rich had shared thousands of
DNC emails with WikiLeaks — a
theory that would undercut the asser-
tions that Russia had interfered in the
election on behalf of Trump.”
If this is true, it is the lowest of
the low. It would implicate the White
House in a most callous lie and it
would further make laughable the
“News” in “Fox News.”
All politicians try to manage news
coverage and messages. They all try
to put the most positive spin on things.
They all are prone to hyperbole.
But this is another thing altogether.
It is separate, distinct and unique. We
have never seen an occupant of the
Oval Office who is actually allergic
to the truth. We have never had an
enemy of honesty.
I keep coming back to the lying
because I believe everything else
flows from it.
If Trump had been upfront and
candid about his and his cohorts’ deal-
ings with Russia, had not lied about
President Barack Obama supposedly
wiretapping phones in Trump Tower,
had released his tax returns and not
tried to make James Comey commit
to some sort of oath of allegiance,
maybe we wouldn’t need a special
counsel to investigate his campaign’s
Russia connections.
If Trump hadn’t lied about 3 mil-
lion people voting illegally, we
wouldn’t be diverting resources to a
ridiculous voter integrity commis-
sion. Maybe we could focus on the
real problems: voter suppression and
partisan gerrymandering. As Nate
Cohn pointed out Wednesday on the
Upshot: “Heading into the 2018 mid-
terms, data and conventional wis-
dom agree: Gerrymandering is a big
reason the GOP has a real chance to
retain control of the House, even if
the Democrats score a clear win” in
the overall popular vote.
If Trump had been honest in his
fake outreach to black voters during
the campaign — “What the hell do
you have to lose?” — the attack on
civil rights by this Justice Depart-
ment would make sense. The reversal
on private prisons, the review of con-
sent decrees, the return to the failed
drug policies of the ’90s would make
sense. If Trump had been honest, the
absolutely outrageous news reported
by The Times this week would make
sense:
“The Trump administration is pre-
paring to redirect resources of the
Justice Department’s civil rights divi-
sion toward investigating and suing
universities over affirmative action
admissions policies deemed to dis-
criminate against white applicants,
according to a document obtained by
The New York Times.”
The lies are the root of all this
evil. It not only impedes normal func-
tioning and normal processes, it has
destroyed a common basis on which
to operate. The presidency is being
used as a tool of degradation rather
than uplift.
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