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BARROW NEWS-JOURNAL
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 25, 2017
Opinions
“Private opinion is weak, but public opinion is almost omnipotent. ”
~ Henry Ward Beecher ~
Our selective
political outrage
When assessing the political landscape in America
today — whether inside the beltway at our dinner
tables or on our social media newsfeeds — what per
meates it the most is selective outrage.
In other words: It’s all star-spangled awesome if we
do it, but hellfire if your side does.
Selective outrage ought to really be reserved for
things like sports and other relatively trivial matters. But
if this latest election cycle and the early days of the new
presidential administration prove anything, emotion,
often illogical, rules the day.
You can find countless exam
ples of this and won’t have to
watch too many minutes of the
news or read too many articles
before finding them.
Here are a few that come to
mind.
1. The election of Donald
Tmmp has proven exceptional
ly divisive. This is evidenced by
the joy of his supporters who
are hailing, as he put it, the
return of power to the hands of
the people, versus those who
have protested ever since his
victory.
The “not my president” cries and accusations of the
election being stolen have been met with calls to get
over it and accept the election results. Indeed, people
do need to accept that Donald Tmmp won the elec
tion, but that acceptance doesn’t eliminate the right
for people to exercise their constitutional rights and
speak out about the implications in either direction of
his victory.
Ironically though, Tmmp hasn’t been willing to
completely accept the election results, either. Most
recently he has been floating a suggestion that Hillary
Clinton won the popular vote by roughly 3 million
votes because between 3-5 million people voted ille
gally —with no evidence to substantiate this claim, an
alternative fact if you will.
2. In the not-too-distant past, the shoe was on the
other foot. In 2013, with a government shutdown loom
ing, then-President Barack Obama essentially told
Republicans he had won the election and for them to
deal with it.
“Go out there and win elections,” Obama said at the
time, three years after he told 2008 opponent Sen. John
McCain the election was over at a health care summit.
Chances are some of you believe one side is arro
gant while the other is just and patriotic in its defiance.
3. There is also the matter of executive orders, an
area in which President Tmmp has been fiercely at
work during his first week in office.
In the case of Obama’s presidency opponents
often saw them as arrogant executive overreach.
Defenders said he had no other choice to get things
done because an obstructionist Republican-controlled
Congress refused to work with him. The debate further
devolved into a head count of executive orders issued
by Obama versus the number issued by George W.
Bush.
Well, political operatives love the numbers game.
That’s why we had to be subjected to a count of the
number of vacation and golf days taken by Obama
versus the time Bush spent at his ranch.
If historical cycles repeat themselves and the
Democrats somehow gain control of one or both
houses of Congress during Tmmp’s tenure, the claims
of obstructionism will be back in full force. Right after
we debate whether Tmmp or Obama should be chid
ed and which one should be defended for skipping
intelligence briefings.
4. Beyond politics, things often get more personal as
“Saturday Night Live” writer Katie Rich proved. Rich, in
her infinite wisdom, thought it so clever to tweet out a
joke referencing Barron Tmmp, 10-year-old son of the
president, as the “first home-school shooter.”
Rich has been suspended indefinitely and issued an
apology for her statement, but the damage has been
done.
This isn’t without precedent, though. Digs at children
of presidents go back to Amy Carter, and Chelsea
Clinton, the Bush girls and the Obama daughters
weren’t spared, either. In the case of the Obama girls,
it was a GOP staffer too obtuse to convey her disdain
for the president without resorting to taking an unnec
essary shot at his family members.
5. And finally, that brings us to Madonna, who has
faced a wave of backlash for saying over the weekend
she has thought about blowing the White House up.
There is a debate to be had over the context of what
she said or whether if Mary Doe of Winder, Ga. would
be able to joke about such a thing in a public place and
not go to jail.
But again, the script of outrage was flipped when
Tmmp in August made this statement about what a
Clinton win would do for the future of the Second
Amendment: “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing
you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment
people — maybe there is, I don’t know.”
Some people construed that statement as a veiled
call for violence; and others considered that a total
distortion of what he actually said.
Obviously most of us should be capable of being
able to interpret statements and actions and draw our
own conclusions.
But when doing so, it doesn’t hurt to apply a sense of
ethics and consistency in our judgment.
Scott Thompson is editor of the Barrow News-
Journal. He can be reached at sthompson@bar-
rownewsjournal.com.
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Sonny Perdue will feel right at
home in Tmmp Administration
The new president has finished
filling the vacancies in his cabinet
by nominating Georgia’s own Sonny
Perdue as the secretary of agriculture.
Perdue, of course, is well known
here for the two terms he served as
governor. While his administra
tion didn’t produce much in the
way of significant policy initia
tives - unless you count a fish
ing center in Houston County
- Sonny was always good for a
laugh or two.
There was the time he held
a prayer session on the front
steps of the capital building in
hopes that prayer would bring
rain and break Georgia’s long
drought. Perdue evidently was
praying to the wrong deity - it
didn’t rain that day or for a lot
of days thereafter.
I don’t know how good a farmer
Sonny is, but he really knows how to
harvest tax credits.
During his first term as governor, a
friendly legislator slipped an amend
ment into a bill that quietly passed
in the closing days of the session
without much notice. That “midnight
amendment” bestowed upon Perdue a
$100,000 tax credit on some property
he had purchased. Sonny signed the
bill without informing the general pub
lic of his huge tax break.
The tax credit didn’t become public
knowledge until a year and a half
later, when Perdue was running for
reelection. My friend James Salzer
broke the story in the Atlanta Journal-
Constitution, and it was the kind of
scandal that often will get a politician
booted from office.
The voters reelected Perdue anyway.
Here in Georgia, we have a soft spot
for our scoundrels. Perdue now heads
to Washington, where the Senate will
presumably vote on his confirmation
and he will be sworn in as a member
of Donald Trump’s cabinet.
It is shaping up as one of the most
interesting cabinets in presidential his
tory.
Betsy DeVos, the nominee for edu
cation secretary, never attended a
public school and never sent any
of her children to public schools.
She believes there should be guns in
schools because of the ever-present
threat of grizzly bear attacks.
I am not making this up. When
DeVos was asked during her confirma
tion hearing if she believes guns have
“any place in and around schools,”
she cited the example of a school in
Wyoming: “I think probably there, I
would imagine there is probably a gun
in a school to protect from potential
grizzlies.”
This prompted the comedian James
Corden to comment: “She knows the
right to bear arms isn’t about actual
bears, right?”
The nominee for attorney general
is Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, a
senator from Alabama.
As the attorney general, Sessions
would be responsible for enforcing
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the nation’s civil rights laws. But in
1986, when Sessions was nominat
ed for a federal judgeship by Ronald
Reagan, the Senate rejected him after
hearing some of the racially charged
comments he had made as a U.S.
attorney.
Sessions called one
of his black assistants
“boy” on several occa
sions. He was quoted
as saying he thought
Ku Klux Klan mem
bers were “okay, until
he learned that they
smoked marijuana.” He
said a white attorney
who handled civil rights
cases was “a disgrace to
his race.”
This was not an
instance of overly sensitive Democrats
mistreating Sessions. He was turned
down by a Republican-controlled
Senate.
Then there’s Rick Perry, the former
governor of Texas who will head the
department of energy.
When Perry was first offered the
appointment several weeks ago, he
thought the job entailed being a global
ambassador for the oil and gas indus
try. He didn’t discover until later that
the Department of Energy is actually
a complex federal agency responsible
for the nation’s nuclear weapons pro
gram, nuclear reactor production, and
radioactive waste disposal
There is another Georgian, U.S. Rep.
Tom Price, who’s been nominated as
the secretary of health and human
services. The Wall Street Journal
reported that Price has been active
ly trading medical stocks while he
was working on health legislation in
Congress that could favorably affect
those stock prices.
This would normally be a huge con
flict of interest for an elected official,
but in today’s political atmosphere,
that’s merely considered to be sound
business judgment. Looking at the
folks he’ll be serving with, I think
Sonny Perdue will feel right at home
in the new administration.
Tom Crawford is editor of The
Georgia Report, an internet news ser
vice at gareport.com that reports on
state government and politics. He can
be reached at tcrawford@gareport.
com.
The Barrow News-Journal
Winder, Barrow County, Ga.
www.BarrowJournal.com
Mike Buffington
Scott Buffington
Co-Publisher
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Medical
cannabis
debate returns
The medical marijuana debate will
be back again this year in the Georgia
Legislature, but the efforts remain a long
shot.
Rep. Allen Peake has introduced leg
islation calling for a state constitutional
amendment that would allow medical
marijuana to be cultivated in the state
for medical use. If
approved, voters
would vote on the
idea in 2018.
But getting that
legislation out
of the General
Assembly will be
difficult. Medical
cannabis remains
a controversial
issue despite much
evidence that the
plant does have
medicinal proper
ties. State law enforcement leaders are
opposed to the idea, as are other key
state leaders including Gov. Nathan Deal
and state agriculture commissioner Gary
Black.
The issue is that while Georgians can
have up to 20 oz. of low THC cannabis
oil for medical use, there’s no way to
acquire that legally in-state. Georgians
have to transport it over state lines, a
move that violates federal law.
A number of state officials say the real
problem is federal regulations that put
cannabis as a Schedule 1 drug along
with heroin and other hard drugs. (The
story behind that is instructive. President
Nixon, as a payback to the hippies that
opposed him, had marijuana put as a
Schedule 1 drug. That hasn’t stopped
its use either for medical or recreational
purposes, but it has severely limited
legitimate medical research across the
country.)
Rep. Peake has also introduced legis
lation to expand the kinds of illnesses
medical cannabis can be used for. As
with his call for a constitutional amend
ment, this also faces an uphill battle in
the legislature.
I wrote about this issue extensively
last year. I’m sure a vast majority of
Georgians want to make medical can
nabis available, but the state’s political
leadership is far behind that curve. It’s
going to take time for that to change.
mike
buffington
kkk
I’m not sure what to make of the new
administration’s claim about “alternative
facts.”
I suppose that’s a first cousin to “fake
news” and “propaganda,” all of which
have become epidemic in this country
over the last year.
My take: Alternative facts = lies.
Facts are facts even when Big Brother
tells us we didn’t see what we saw.
ick-k
I’m not much of a marching protest
er. While it was impressive how many
people turned out Saturday for marches
protesting the new Trump administra
tion, I’m not sure that was a very strategic
move in the long run.
If this administration continues the
tone it’s started with, there’s going to be
plenty to protest over the coming years.
Sometimes it pays to keep your powder
dry and pick your fights.
Those marches may have been prema
ture. Wait and see what happens, then
fight the important actions not just the
rhetoric.
kkk
I’m struck at just how divided this
nation has become over the last year.
Extremists on all sides of the political
spectrum say and do things that are nuts
and self-defeating. Even the people you
might agree with are often embarrassing.
It was the same in the 1960s with divi
sions over the Vietnam War and the Civil
Rights movements. We forget those days
now, but the nation was extremely polar
ized about those issues, too. Innocent
people were attacked and killed protest
ing in both causes.
It’s perhaps instructive to remember
that older white conservatives were
wrong on both those issues.
History records that it was the young
rebels, the “agitators” and the protesters
who were in the right.
Conservative older whites support
ed the Vietnam war even when they
See Buffington on Page 5A