About The times. (Gainesville, Ga.) 1972-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 9, 2018)
OPINION ®he £ttttcs gainesvilletimes.com Sunday, December 9, 2018 Shannon Casas Editor in Chief | 770-718-3417 | scasas@gainesvilletimes.com Submit a letter: letters@gainesvilletimes.com The First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. =^’mm mr msis-\ "Wow! Who knew helping support the community could be such a great bargain?" JIM POWELL I For The Times EDITORIAL ‘Almost overwhelming’ Inland port will have positive impact on region now, and for years to come There is a good chance that when economic historians of some future date write of the financial successes of this region of North Georgia, they will devote an entire chapter to the importance of the decision to locate an inland port near Gainesville. In fact, a few decades from now, that event could be worth a book of its own. Gov. Nathan Deal, speaking from the local airport on Monday, elabo rated on an earlier announcement that the Northeast Georgia Inland Port will be located in the Gateway Industrial Centre off Ga. 365. He noted that in addition to serving existing customers of the Port of Savannah, the facility will “serve as an economic development tool, drawing new investment from busi ness and industry to Hall and its sur rounding counties.” We expect that not only will the governor be proven right, but that the inland port may exceed all expectations when it comes to future economic growth. Hall County and the surround ing area is already blessed with an incredibly strong economic engine; the new port facility has the potential to be an added turbocharger. So what is an inland port? Simply put, it’s a direct railroad connection to the massive container port opera tion in Savannah, one that will allow containers filled with cargo to travel between Gainesville and Savan nah by rail rather than by truck, thus improving shipping and supply logistics for hundreds of different industries and manufacturers, with the added benefit of reducing truck traffic across the state. Once the containers reach the inland port, they are unloaded from railcars and trucks then disperse their cargo within the region. The 104-acre Gainesville terminal is expected to be completed in 2021. Once fully operational, it will be able to handle up to 150,000 containers per year, and with its proximity to transportation corridors such as 1-85 and 1-985 will be a boon to businesses throughout the region. The inland port for Gainesville will be the state’s second. A similar facil ity on 42 acres near Chatsworth went into operation earlier this year. Reducing the time it takes to get freight and raw materials to manu facturers and industries will allow them to be more efficient and save money; conversely, helping them to get finished products to the world via Savannah in a more cost effective manner will make them more com petitive domestically and interna tionally, improving the bottom line. In comments provided to the Georgia Port Authority, Georgia Poultry Federation President Mike Giles noted that the area’s poultry industry is sure to benefit from the new port. Savannah is the number one export facility for poultry prod ucts in the nation, and having a rail terminal in Gainesville with a direct link to Savannah is an “investment in the future connectivity between the Georgia poultry industry and our customers worldwide,” Giles said. The location of the port is already paying off. In conjunction with Mon day’s announcement, Auto Metal Direct said it would be building a $15 million distribution center in Gate way Industrial Centre. The company distributes auto body panels and trim for classic vehicles worldwide. Expect that announcement to be the first of many for new manufac turers and distributors planning to move to the area. Existing businesses are already looking forward to the terminal opening. Kubota is a major player in the local manufacturing community. In comments provided to the Port Authority, Kubota Vice President Phil Sutton said the company expects “several layers of potential cost sav ings with the new inland port,” spe cifically by reducing lead times and cutting down on the dependence on motor carriers. But the new terminal will do more than serve as an incentive for eco nomic development. By using Nor folk Southern rail lines to connect Savannah and Gainesville, it will eliminate the need for trucks mak ing the trip between Savannah and North Georgia, thus improving the flow of traffic throughout the state. The Port of Savannah is positioned to grow and become even more of a player on the international business stage. As it does, the connection to North Georgia will pay increased dividends for decades to come. The Port of Savannah, Norfolk Southern, economic development leaders at the state and local level, and certainly Gov. Deal are all to be commended for their efforts to strengthen the state’s business foun dation and make it more competi tive on an international basis with completion of the planned inland ports. With locations in Chatsworth and Gainesville, the 1-75 and 1-85 corridors north of Atlanta will have direct rail access to Savannah for transportation of thousands of cargo containers each year. Years from now we expect local leaders will look back at the decision to base the terminal here and real ize that doing so made an incredibly positive financial impact on all of North Georgia. Philip Wilheit, chairman of the Gainesville and Hall County develop ment Authority, may have summed it up better than anyone when he said, “It’s almost overwhelming to me what this port is going to mean to us.” Overwhelming indeed. Years from now we expect local leaders will look back at the decision to base the terminal here and realize that doing so made an incredibly positive financial impact on all of North Georgia. Ocasio-Cortez is borrowing from Trump s playbook One of the most comforting talking points in politics is to claim that your political opponents are irrationally obsessed. I’m sure this is as old as time, but I first noticed it in the late 1990s. Many of Bill Clinton’s most ardent sup porters responded to every new criticism by claiming the president’s enemies were twisted by hate for the man. During the George W. Bush administration, thanks in part to a phrase coined by my late friend Charles JONAH GOLDBERG Krauthammer, conserva- goldbergcolumn@ tives deflected criticism _ of the president by claim ing his foes suffered from “Bush derangement syndrome.” The term caught on, and Obama supporters hurled charges of “Obama derangement syn drome” (along with charges of “racism” — a secu lar term for a kind of derangement) at Obama’s opposition. Today, it’s not hard to find people claiming that Donald Trump’s adversaries are obsessed, deranged, or conspiracy-obsessed witch hunters. A search of Twitter finds an infinitely long stream of references to “Trump derangement syndrome.” Now, here’s the thing: Sometimes it’s true. Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump all had — and have — their haters. And some people do lose their bearings and immediately leap to the most out landish interpretation of the facts (or rumors dis guised as facts). The paranoid style is a bipartisan phenomenon in American life. But sometimes the people making the “derange ment syndrome” or “hater” charge are the ones who refuse to see the facts, taking comfort in the fallacy that the motives, real or imagined, of a critic automatically disqualify the criticism. Anyway, you get the point. What interests me is how this psychological phe nomenon has become professionalized, particu larly in the digital age. As Emory University political scientists Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster have docu mented, we live in a moment of extreme negative partisanship: Millions of Americans are driven more by the dislike of the other party than by attachment to their own. In this kind of climate, being hated by the right people is the best way to get not just a big follow ing but an intensely loyal one. I’ve written about this before, but I think it’s worth revisiting in the context of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the “it girl” (sorry, “it person”) of the left these days. The head of the DNC not long ago referred to her as “the future of the Democratic Party.” She’s received fawning, glowing-to-the-point-of-incan- descent coverage from the mainstream media and outsized critical attention from Fox News and other right-leaning outlets. AOC, as many call her, is attractive, young, His panic and almost eloquent in her passion for some ill-defined notion of socialism or social democracy. She also says many untrue and silly things. Just this week she suggested in a tweet that the Pentagon misplaced some $21 trillion in funding that could have paid for most of a $32 trillion “Medicare for All” scheme. A Defense Department spokesman told the Washington Post’s Fact Checker column: “DoD hasn’t received $21 trillion in (nominal) appropriated funding across the entirety of Ameri can history.” In recent months, she said unemployment was low because so many people are working two jobs (that’s not how it works), that the “upper-middle class doesn’t exist anymore” (it does), and that we’d save money on funeral expenses if we had “Medicare for All.” If you point out the absurdity of these things, the almost instantaneous defense is that her critics are obsessed with an incoming-freshman congress- woman. In some cases, they’re right. The fixation some conservatives have with her clothes is over the top (though I did love one wag’s phrase, “Nei- man Marxist”). But what her defenders leave out is their own obsession with the woman. In other words, AOC is quite brilliantly playing a lot of people for suckers. She already has more Twitter followers than the other 60 incoming fresh man Democrats combined. Ocasio-Cortez, wittingly or not, has appropriated a technique mastered by President Trump. Trump prefers positive attention, but he’ll take negative attention over no attention every time, in part because he knows his supporters will intensify their dedication to him in response to allegedly unfair attacks. AOC is doing the same thing. By forcing partisans to take sides, she generates con troversy. Controversy attracts media attention. Media attention generates even more controversy. And so on. As with Trump, sometimes she clearly knows what she’s doing, and other times she simply dis plays her ignorance. But at this stage, it doesn’t matter. The more right-wing partisans attack her, the more left-wing partisans rally to her. The more left-wingers rally to her, the more justified the right feels in paying attention to her. I suspect this will be new model for years to come. Jonah Goldberg is an editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. (the (Times Founded Jan. 26,1947 345 Green St., Gainesville, GA 30501 gainesvilletimes.com EDITORIAL BOARD General Manager Norman Baggs Editor in Chief Shannon Casas To submit letters: Send by email to letters@ gainesvilletimes.com or use the contact form at gainesvilletimes.com. Include name, hometown and phone number; letters never appear anonymously. Letters are limited to one per writer in a month’s time on topics of public interest and may be edited for content and length (limit 500 words). Letters may be rejected from readers with no ties to Northeast Georgia or that address personal, business or legal disputes. Submitted items may be published in print, electronic or other forms. Letters and commentary express the opinions of the authors and not of The Times.
