Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/588585
GregStevens,Publisher Chip Thompson, Editor EDITORIALBOARD How to have your say: Letters must be signed and provide the writer's home street address and home phone number. Anonymous letters, open letters to others, pen names and petition-style letters will not be allowed. Letters should be typed and no more than two double-spaced pages or 500words. When several letters address the same issue, a cross section will be published. Email: editor@ redbluffdailynews.com Fax: 530-527-9251 Mail to: P.O. Box 220, 545 Diamond Ave., Red Bluff, CA 96080 Facebook: Leave comments at FACEBOOK.COM/ RBDAILYNEWS Twitter: Follow and send tweets to @REDBLUFFNEWS It'seasiertoexplainhowthreewomenbe- came the first women to earn their Army Ranger tabs than why Congressman Steve Russell suspects they got preferential treat- ment. The women passed Rangers School because they stuck with it until they did. Thecongressmandoubts they passed honestly because he won't let go of his precon- ceptions about women in the military. Russell is clear that he thinks women should not be allowed into combat positions just because they are women. "There are some things they simply cannot do. I know I run the risk of being called a chau- vinist pig by saying that," he said, and he does. So perhaps it should not have been a surprise what came next. When Capt. Kris- ten Griest and 1st Lt. Shaye Haver graduated from Ranger School in late April, his of- fice sent a letter to Army Sec- retary John McHugh demand- ing a full accounting as to how the women successfully grad- uated. Russell's office also reached out to former Ranger instruc- tor Michael "Bubba" Moore. Before he made his Facebook profile private, Moore posted an image of a nametag. Under the "Hello, my name is" part it said, "Ranger and I'm here to f*** b****es and kill terror- ists." So he's nice. Moore put Russell's office in touch with People magazine, and sud- denly we had "Rangerghazi." The crux of their fever dream is that the women needed second and third chances to pass certain tests, opportunities, they incor- rectly claimed, that male Ranger applicants did not get. "Don't tell me that you didn't set these chicks up for success," said Moore. God forbid women should succeed. Col. David Fivecoat, commander of the Airborne and Ranger Training Brigade, said a third of the students get to "recycle" a phase of the training. He admitted that only about 15 students a year recycle every phase, but it does happen every year. What Russell and Moore complain about is what we should be bragging about. Women were given chances to succeed just like men. If they failed, they got new chances. So did the men. Many women failed and quit. So did many men in Ranger School. The ones who did not give up succeeded, and now they wear Ranger tabs on their uniforms regardless of gender. Grit and determina- tion to succeed are supposed to be good things. Many people aren't happy that the military is opening combat positions to women, but it shouldn't be any sur- prise that Russell, an Okla- homa Republican, is the one who thinks he smells a con- spiracy. When he ran for Con- gress after the invasion of Iraq, he angrily defended the intelligence that Saddam Hus- sein had weapons of mass de- struction. "The record is there. We found evidence of it even in Iraq. That's a big misconcep- tion. Oh, there was no WMD, there was no nuclear program. That is false... They were clearly on a path to develop destructive weapons," said Russell in a 2012 campaign in- terview. When asked for his source, Russell cited his "good buddy." This is, of course, balder- dash. As the head of the Bush administration's Iraq Sur- vey Group told Congress, "We were almost all wrong." Russell is a no-kidding Iraq war hero, a former state law- maker-turned congressman, and, as a matter of fact, an Army Ranger himself. But if he thinks the standards were lowered to allow women into his exclusive He Man Woman Haters Club, Army Maj. Gen. Scott Miller has an offer for him. Miller gave a speech at the Aug. 21 Ranger School grad- uation where he addressed "noisy and inaccurate" sus- picions that Griest and Ha- ver got off easy during the week-long Ranger Assessment Phase. "Ladies and gentlemen, the week has not changed. Standards remain the same," Miller said. "The five-mile run is still five miles. The 12-mile march is still 12 miles. The mountains of Dahlonega are still here, the swamps remain intact." But if that wasn't convinc- ing enough, Miller invited skeptics back to Fort Benning to "re-validate their tab." "To date, we've had zero takers," said Miller. What about it, Congress- man Russell, care to re-take the test, or are you scared of getting beaten by three girls? Sorry, three Rangers. JasonStanfordisaregular contributor to the Austin American-Statesman, a Democratic consultant and a Truman National Security Project partner. You can email him at stanford@oppresearch. com and follow him on Twitter @JasStanford. Jason Stanford Meet the GOP's newest conspiracy Cartoonist's take The Tea Party Patriots will have a timely guest speaker tonight at 6 PM at the West- side Grange on Walnut Street: Chief of the Te- hama Glen Fire Unit Christine Thompson. Gov. Brown has as- serted a con- nection between wildfires and global warming/climate change; the most knowledge- able scientists contacted by news media have disagreed. What does Thompson say? About the Israeli/Palestin- ian violence, I think back de- cades ago to recall that, in the midst of working 50 to 60 hour weeks, with nightly news running loops of attacks and counterattacks in the back- ground, I found it all tedious and irrelevant to my life. My limited attention span ob- served what appeared to be an intractable and mutually self- destructive "cycle of violence" (as our supposedly objective news media phrase it). Presidents from Carter through Bush, and all in be- tween, gathered the antag- onistic leaders together for peace initiatives ad infinitum (after a while, even ad nau- seam). I didn't see much point to devoting time, attention and emotional hope for yet an- other exercise in futility; it ap- peared that, as night follows day, events would return to the status quo of bloodshed. However, intractable, knee- jerk, defenders of the Palestin- ians (who are often intracta- ble knee-jerk blamers, bashers and haters of Israel) have, to this observer, inexorably lost the moral standing to have their arguments given respect. They offer disingenuous ra- tionalizations rooted in Bib- lical antiquity, and one-sided interpretations of the numer- ous armed wars launched against the relatively tiny Jewish nation of Israel. They even—in the worst tradition of Nazi propagandists—shame- fully twist the rabid genocidal words, ideologies and actions of the Islamic and Palestinian leaders into overblown rhet- oric from a helpless and be- sieged people. I think the so-called intifa- das—wars on Israel by another euphemism—as well as the re- action of Muslims in general (and Palestinians in particu- lar) to the Islamist terrorist attacks on 9/11, crystallized my perspective. The pattern of news media coverage revealed to me that supposedly objective and fair reporting was a rarity. Report- ers, editors and entire news organizations treated terror- ist and Palestinian attacks— whether with guns, suicide bombs, or rockets, via tun- nels, from schools, and now by knives and vehicles—as equal to Israeli reactions. In "Media Reportage Serves to Support Palestinian Terror- ism," Meira Svirsky of Clarion- project.org writes: "Wars are not fought exclusively on the battle field. They are fought and supported by ideas and ideology…none of these ideas has a chance of competing in our fast-paced marketplace for attention except the ones cho- sen to be significant by the most important arbiters of the battlefield: the media." When journalists go beyond the normal sorting of salient points and checked facts, and "consciously choose to distort the facts, or skew the facts in a way that distorts them, (they've entered) the realm of propaganda. When propa- ganda bandied about as jour- nalism is used to support ter- rorists, journalists become the terrorists' 'willing execution- ers'—complicit in bloodshed and murder." The current bloodshed, and its cause, could not be more evident and plain to see: Pal- estinian Authority sources in general, and PA's head, Mah- moud Abbas, have a history of lying—to Palestinians and to the world. For whatever biased and jaded reasons, news me- dia insist on not identifying those lies as such. Have your sources made it clear that there has not been any seizing of Palestinian land (a phony charge), and that Israelis have only added residences to ex- isting settlements to accom- modate their growing popu- lation? Have your sources likewise made it clear that those same PA mouthpieces have spread bald lies about Israeli intru- sions to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem—changes never proposed, stated or engaged in by Israel? Or have your news reports insisted on comparing the number of dead Palestin- ians to dead Israelis, as if doz- ens of youthful knife-wielding attackers of innocent Israeli civilians is just one side of a scorecard against the number of Israelis successfully assassi- nated by said Palestinian ter- rorists? Spare me the cater- wauling of a mother bemoan- ing that her 13- or 15-year-old neighbors can't possibly be terrorists (rightfully slain by armed Israelis). Look up "The One-State So- lution," by Andrew C. McCar- thy, who properly states, "Pal- estinian terrorism and Israeli self-defense are not the same thing. The next intifada is on, and the Obama administra- tion, as one would expect, is on the wrong side…The ulti- mate cause of the rampage is the Palestinian determination to eradicate Israel's existence as a Jewish state by a two- track campaign of internal vi- olence and international polit- ical pressure." Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee un- loaded on President Obama for calling strikes on Israelis "random violence," and casti- gated Obama's words as "an attempt to stir up more trou- ble in the Middle East, spe- cifically within Israel." Mat- thew Continetti called it "The Obama Intifada," and mar- veled that Obama and Kerry can refer to Abbas as "some- body who has committed to nonviolence—a 'moderate Muslim peacemaker.'" McCarthy: "The ugly reality is that Islamists and the rad- ical pan-Arab left are in com- petition to prove who is the most anti-Semitic." In "Pal- estinian Reasoning: Yield to Our Crazy Religious Intoler- ance or We'll Kill You," writer David French provides an ex- cellent summation of Obama/ media appeasement and com- plicity with Islamic violence. (Articles posted at DonPolson. blogspot.com) Don Polson has called Red Bluff home since 1988. He can be reached by e-mail at donplsn@ yahoo.com. The way I see it Appeasement, complicity with attacks Many women failed and quit. So did many men in Ranger School. The ones who did not give up succeeded, and now they wear Ranger tabs on their uniforms regardless of gender. Grit and determination to succeed are supposed to be good things. Don Polson StateandNational Assemblyman James Galla- gher, 2060 Talbert Drive, Ste. 110, Chico 95928, 530 895-4217, http:// ad03.asmrc.org/ Senator Jim Nielsen, 2634 For- est Ave., Ste. 110, Chico 95928, 530 879-7424, senator.nielsen@senate. ca.gov Governor Jerry Brown, State Capital Building, Sacramento 95814, 916 445-2841, fax 916 558- 3160, governor@governor.ca.gov U.S. Representative Doug La- Malfa, 507 Cannon House Office Building, Washington D.C. 20515, 202 225-3076 U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, One Post St., Ste. 2450, San Fran- cisco 94104, 415 393-0707, fax 415 393-0710 U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer, 1700 Montgomery St., San Fran- cisco 94111, 510 286-8537, fax 202 224-0454 Local Tehama County Supervisors, 527-4655 District 1, Steve Chamblin, Ext. 3015 District 2, Candy Carlson, Ext. 3014 District 3, Dennis Garton, Ext. 3017 District 4, Bob Williams, Ext. 3018 District 5, Burt Bundy, Ext. 3016 Red Bluff City Manager, Rich- ard Crabtree, 527-2605, Ext. 3061 Corning City Manager, John Brewer, 824-7033 Your officials OPINION » redbluffdailynews.com Tuesday, October 20, 2015 » MORE AT FACEBOOK.COM/RBDAILYNEWS AND TWITTER.COM/REDBLUFFNEWS A6