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Sunday, January 21, 2018

Give The Man A Chance





Give The Man A Chance
By:  LeRoy Goldman
BlueRidgeNow Online
January 21, 2018





“Give the man a chance” is one of the most impactful lines uttered by Dr. Jack Ryan in the taut thriller “The Hunt for Red October” about a Soviet, first-strike nuclear submarine.
Ryan, the film’s protagonist, believes the captain of the Red October, Marko Ramius, intends to defect and hand the Red October over to the Americans.
Ryan attempts, but initially fails, to persuade the skipper of an American attack submarine, the Dallas, that Ramius intends to defect. Dallas’ skipper, Bart Mancuso, has been ordered to destroy the Red October.
Suffice to say, fate intervenes and Mancuso realizes Ryan may have it right. Ryan confronts him and says, “Give the man a chance.”
That’s what President Donald Trump deserves, and too frequently the press denies him that chance.
Let’s start where we all agree. The federal government is hopelessly broken. That has been the case for the better part of a quarter-century, and it makes no difference which political party rules the roost inside the Washington Beltway.
The underlying cause of Washington’s dysfunction resides not within the Beltway but here in the heartland of the nation. That’s where you find the growing legions of radicals of the left and right who share the same ideological fervor — take no prisoners.
Their fanaticism has turned compromise into a dirty word. To these radicals, compromise and surrender are synonyms. Thus, none of us should be surprised that Congress and the president apparently cannot agree on a 2018 budget, cannot agree on what to do about DACA and broader immigration reform, cannot agree on the necessity to raise the national debt limit, or any other issue of legislative significance.
It was in this hyper-partisan context that President Trump did something extraordinary in a meeting with congressional leaders on Jan. 9. Typically the press is invited into such a meeting for only a few minutes at the beginning. But not this time. The president allowed the press to remain and the cameras to roll for about an hour.
We got to see the back and forth on a complex and controversial subject, DACA and immigration. We saw a president who was clearly in charge of the meeting, who repeatedly emphasized that the issue could only be resolved by compromise, who said he was willing to support a substantive agreement on both DACA and broader immigration, and who said he was “prepared to take the heat” that would inevitably attend any such agreement, including his willingness to allow natural terrain be the wall where possible.
However, during the meeting, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., asked the president if he would support a “clean” DACA bill. To Feinstein and other Capitol Hill veterans, a “clean” bill meant one without any other provisions, such as enhanced border security that she and everybody else knew was essential to the president and the GOP.
Thus the ever wily Feinstein’s question was a ploy designed to see if she could entrap President Trump. He, not being familiar with the term “clean” bill, responded affirmatively — until it quickly became clear what Feinstein was up to. At that point, the president put the meeting back on its bipartisan trajectory.
But rather than the ensuing press coverage of the meeting being focused on the growing bipartisan accord the president had so carefully and skillfully tried to cultivate during the meeting, the press chose to hammer him for his vacillation and ignorance.
For example, Cristiano Lima writing in Politico stated, “Trump’s meeting with lawmakers was marked by shifting policy stances from the president … .”
In the Washington Post, Ed O’Keefe and David Nakamura wrote that “Trump appeared to contradict himself” and that “Trump seemed to indicate he would support a proposal from Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) for a ‘clean DACA bill’ … only to be quickly corrected by House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.)”.
And Ashley Parker and Philip Rucker in the Washington Post wrote that “he also muddled through the policy by seeming to endorse divergent positions … .”
Give me a break! Instead of the mainstream press reporting on what was a clearly successful, presidentially led effort, to find common ground and to take the heat on the contentious issues of DACA and immigration reform, the president was portrayed as ignorant.
This sort of shameful reporting does violence to the essentiality of a free press. It exposes the bias of selective reporting that is designed to cleverly shoehorn a predetermined conclusion into what necessarily should be an illumination of what actually transpired. That amounts to an assault on the press by the press.
It doesn’t give the man a chance, and that’s something we should all oppose, but don’t. Shame on us.

LeRoy Goldman is a Flat Rock resident. Reach him at tks12no12@gmail.com.


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