Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/756327
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, 728Main St., Red Bluff, CA 96080 Facebook: Leave comments at FACEBOOK.COM/ RBDAILYNEWS Twitter: Follow and send tweets to @REDBLUFFNEWS It's 3 a.m. and Donald Trump can't sleep. Restless, he tosses back and forth be- tween Egyptian cotton sheets. The sweat builds on his forehead. His teeth grind. A tinpot dictator in some far-flung land has made a joke about his hands. Theragebuilds. He reaches for the phone glow- ing silently on the night stand. In the darkness, Mela- nia reaches out to steady his (perfectly adequately sized, he thinks) hand. "Don't do it," she warns. "You'll regret it." But she's already too late. His deeply tanned face flushes crimson red with fury. The anger fills him un- til it's an unstoppable fire storm. He grabs the phone, swipes right, finds the app, and taps madly at the screen. Sweet release. But it's not enough. The tweets pour out of him as the demons find voice. An hour later, the bombs start to fall. If you're thinking that's just a fever dream, think again. The next Leader of the Free World, who has just weeks to fill his administra- tion and assemble a new gov- ernment, set Twitter alight once again on Sunday, to re- peat a widely debunked claim that millions of people "ille- gally" voted for Hillary Clin- ton and to mock a growing push for a recount in three battleground states. You'd think that Trump, who's facing a mutiny by cam- paign manager Kellyanne Conway and who is contend- ing with Apprentice-style jockeying for his Secretary of State pick, would have bet- ter things to do than to take to Twitter to excoriate the de- cision by Clinton's campaign to participate in a planned re- count in Wisconsin. "Hillary Clinton conceded the election when she called me just prior to the vic- tory speech and after the re- sults were in. Nothing will change," Trump tweeted, of the recount spearheaded by Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein. Trump's regurgitation of the fraud claim, proffered by such paranoia-traffickers as InfoWars, added another layer of uncertainty to the al- ready chaotic post-election environment. Whether the recount push will actually be successful and result in any material change in the election results seems remote at best. But Trump's most recent Twitter storm is also occa- sion for again taking up a question first raised during the campaign. If this is how he reacts to an even minor slight to his prestige and titanic ego, how will he react when he's seri- ously tested by crisis? What happens when some foreign leader, possessed of exactly the right amount of bravado and snark, actually provokes him or takes action against American interests abroad? Do we get Donald the Deal-Maker or The Incred- ible Trump, who turns big and green, smashing all in his path? An object lesson, then: No one in their right mind should mourn the passing of former Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, who died Friday at 90 after outlasting 11 U.S. presi- dents and repeated American attempts to drive him from power. He was a murderer and a despot, and the world is well quit of him. But there's a difference be- tween diplomatically not- ing someone's passing and grave-dancing, which is un- becoming from anyone, not least the leader of the world's greatest democracy. "Fidel Castro is dead!" he tweeted. Oh well. In a normal universe, for- eign policy is too delicate and nuanced to conduct in 140-character bursts. As we've been reminded time and again since Donald J. Trump sprung, fully formed from the head of some god with a warped sense of hu- mor, onto the American polit- ical landscape last June, these are not normal times. "If Cuba is unwilling to make a better deal for the Cu- ban people, the Cuban/Amer- ican people and the U.S. as a whole, I will terminate deal," Trump tweeted on Monday morning. The context-less Tweet ap- pears to be a reference to Trump's campaign-season vow to reverse the Obama ad- ministration's warming of re- lations between Cuba and the United States. In the wake of Castro's death, Trump released a statement saying his incom- ing administration would do "all it can" to improve the plight of Cuba and its people. Or, it might not. Who can tell? International relations are far too important a subject area to be conducted by some- one whose ego bruises at the drop of a hat. And that makes the search for a competent and credible Secretary of State deserving of something far better than the sideshow treatment that it's currently receiving. Unfortunately, it's just an- other day in Trumpland, where we are now required to check Twitter daily to find out if we've just insulted our way into an international incident. Anaward-winningpolitical journalist, Micek is the Opinion Editor and Political Columnist for PennLive/The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa. Readers may follow him on Twitter @ByJohnLMicek and e-mail him at jmicek@ pennlive.com. John Micek Tweeter in Chief Cartoonist's take One can easily assemble a host of little-covered but cru- cially relevant election items: 1) The mainstream news media re- fined the political art of propaganda promulgation as a virtual adjunct of the Hillary/Dem- ocrat campaign. They have turned on a dime to ad- vance the boutique and ironic assertion that "fake news" (marginally truthful things not advanced by the marginally truthful media elite) led vot- ers astray to vote for Donald Trump. 2) But for the votes of a sizable minority of supposedly Democrat base groups—women, minorities and union house- holds—Trump would likely have lost the states and votes that gave him his victory. 3) Late deciding voters (choosing the week, especially the weekend, before Election Day) swung dramatically for Trump. If the election had been held entirely on November 8, Trump's share of the popular vote would have been a clear majority even with the millions of Hillary votes in reliably left- wing California. His win would have resembled Reagan's win over Carter. As it was, the non- CA 49-states binary vote was Trump 50.8%, Clinton 49.2%. 4) When I crunched the vote data at electionatlas.org, Trump's 2.5-million national vote deficit is dwarfed by the margin for Hillary in, not just California, but in Los Ange- les County and the San Fran- cisco Bay Area counties. Of the roughly 7 million votes in LA/ SF counties, Clinton got about 5 million to Trump's 1.5-mil- lion; that means advocates for popular vote winners getting the presidency really want LA and San Francisco area voters to have more sway than the en- tire rest of the country. Sorry, this writer will stick with the Electoral College our Founders created in their wisdom to pre- vent just that outsized sway for large population centers. 5) It became irrefutable af- ter the Project Veritas videos and Wikileaks revelations that Democrat operatives and con- nected activists organized and illegally manufactured the vi- olence that news media igno- rantly attributed to Trump supporters in a slavish attempt to advance a violent right-wing narrative. Headlines challenge lib- eral accepted wisdom: "White House denies that Russia hacked election for Donald Trump win," "Democrats, not Trump, Racialize Our Poli- tics," "Democrat Party Opera- tive Robert Creamer Used Ter- ror to Wage War on Honesty," "The snarling contempt behind the media's 'fake news' hyste- ria," "Illegal immigrants pose as families, tell tales of woe to gain entry to U.S." "The Krem- lin didn't sink Hillary, Obama did," "Teachers union leaders devastated that so many mem- bers voted Trump," "5 Ways Trump's victory is Obama's leg- acy." Ideological corruption and hypocrisy has reared its ugly head among some Democrats and many leftists who have latched onto the Don Quixote- like fool's errand of recounting selected states. What is their (Jill Stein/Hillary Clinton's) hope? Denying Trump enough electors to…oh, that's right, throw it to the House of Rep- resentatives which will take about 5 minutes to confirm Trump as President. Liberals won't see it this way but there is an established pat- tern of Democrats challenging elections that produce a Re- publican president. Al Gore in- famously withdrew his phoned- in concession to George Bush— with news media complicity as they pronounced Florida for Gore, depriving Bush of nearly 10,000 Central Time Zone Flor- ida Republican votes. Hill- ary has hypocritically asserted that Gore "won" that election despite those shenanigans. Democrat supporters of John Kerry persisted in propagating myths about voting machine errors in Ohio and elsewhere. Stein and Clinton et al now pin their theory on similar myths. I don't doubt the machines can be hacked, that votes can be changed; so far, we lack any proof. Every one of the above items could be expanded to a col- umn-length analysis; some may get that treatment yet. The following, however, re- quires my attention: Within seconds of the an- nouncement of the well-de- served death of Cuban ty- rant Fidel Castro, I cheered and danced as the Cuban- Americans were doing in Mi- ami. That despotic brutalizer and persecutor of Cubans of African descent, homosexu- als, women, escapees-in-flimsy boats and citizens desirous of nothing more than politi- cal, personal and economic lib- erty—Castro would have been even more deserving of public trial for human rights atroci- ties than the German Nazi war criminals. It occurred to me that this subject was among those I wrote about in my first year. Sure enough, my archive had the April 20, 2005 column. Fol- lowing are my comments: "Speaking of dictators, can you believe how tough the press and the Hollywood set are on that old softie, Fidel Castro? Perhaps that's because they aren't—Castro truly oc- cupies a nearly revered place among the media and enter- tainment elites. It seems he's treated practically like royalty any time he visits the bluest of the blue enclaves, like New York City… "As author Humberto Fon- tova documents in his new book, 'Fidel: Hollywood's Favor- ite Tyrant', Castro has impris- oned more people, as a percent- age of the population, than ei- ther Hitler or Stalin. The next time you see one of those Che Guevara T-shirts, usually worn by some young idealistic kid taken with the 'romance of rev- olution', who could rattle off the supposed 'evils' of President Bush and capitalism, remem- ber something. Che Guevara preached the cold-blooded mur- der of anyone who stood in the way of the imposition of com- munism. He practiced what he preached in the thousands of Cubans that he sent to firing squads for just that reason." Leftists like Barack Obama, Canada's PM Justin Trudeau, Green Party's Jill Stein and other socialist-sympathiz- ing fools have proven the soft- headed acceptance of the ba- nality of evil in that despot, Fi- del Castro. They're not likely to ever realize the error of their ways. 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 Election hijinks and despotism As we've been reminded time and again since Donald J. Trump sprung, fully formed from the head of some god with a warped sense of humor, onto the American political landscape last June, these are not normal times. Sounding off A look at what readers are saying in comments on our website and on social media. Mr. Hansen always stood up for classified workers. Great guy. Gayle Bagshaw Carpenter: On the retirement of Jack Hansen a er 55years in education This was so much fun I can't wait for next year. Jennifer Gagliano: On the first ever Red Bluff Turkey Trot fun run held Thursday Don Polson OPINION » redbluffdailynews.com Tuesday, November 29, 2016 » MORE AT FACEBOOK.COM/RBDAILYNEWS AND TWITTER.COM/REDBLUFFNEWS A6