To the local right: Don't talk peace if your actions cause discord

Civil dialogue depends on honesty, transparency and collegiality.

This story has been changed to report the correct dates for county board of health interviews.

Following the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, conservatives in the community are calling for peace and toned down political rhetoric.

“Division, fear and hate only win when we stop coming together,”   Longview Mayor Spencer Boudreau said  in a speech at the Longview Civic Center on July 14, according to a report by The Daily News. ”It’s up to us.”

I couldn’t agree more. Now, however, it’s time for the political right in this community to match actions with rhetoric.

Conservatives should not use the assassination attempt to shield themselves from criticism for actions that have been misguided  and driven by falsehoods, misunderstandings, ego, ideological extremism and cronyism.

To practice what they preach, their modus operandi needs to change.

For years, right-wing elements of this community have threatened and harassed public employees — especially in the county elections office. They have tried to intimidate political candidates believed to be even moderately left of center. 

Certainly some conservatives have been targets of hate as well, but in my experience the scale of abuse is lopsided in the other direction. Everyone is responsible, yes, but not equally, and calls for political Kumbaya should not obscure that.

Political debate has, of course, always been a rugged conflict, and rhetorical excesses are inevitable.  It goes with the territory. Those who can’t endure it should best get out. But political discourse, especially on a local level, should be guided by fair dealing, transparency, collegiality, honesty and — to the degree possible — by facts.

These commodities have been in short supply in the right-wing’s insistence on upending Longview city government.  (I’ll acknowledge that relations on the council have improved an increment lately.) But two conservative county commissioners — Arne Mortensen and Rick Dahl  — have recently politicized health decisions and attempted to stack the county health board with like-minded cronies without the required public process and with a disregard for facts and expert opinion. Fortunately, the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office called them out and ordered the process to start over.

The need for more honest and civil political discussion extends to other organizations, too. These include the monthly publication, The Watchdog of Cowlitz County, published by the conservative 4-C group. 

For example, its July issue evaluates nine candidates for county commissioner. No surprise, it trashes the only Democrat in the race, Amy Norquist.

Fine, the editors don’t like ”rational Democrats,” as Norquist calls herself — something the editors would have known had they bothered to interview her. They’re entitled to their opinion. But their objections are based on gross misstatements of fact and allegations of guilt by association. 

Norquist, a Longview native, used to raise money for Earthjustice (which she left in 2003) and the progressive magazine Mother Jones. But she had “zero” policy making role in either job. The Watchdog wrongly and incredibly claims “she is connected to the New York political hierarchy as well.” (She was on a committee to help reduce stormwater pollution.) 

She had no role in the demise of a proposed Longview coal terminal and Kalama methanol projects, both opposed by Earthjustice. The Watchdog implicates Norquist for the loss of hundreds of those potential jobs even though she left Earthjustice years before those projects were proposed.

This “story” is a shoddy political hack job masquerading as journalism, and it’s the type of trash that leads to howls and political discord.  If the editors don’t want to hear this, they should stop producing it.

(Full disclosure here: Norquist lives in my neighborhood. I think she is qualified, and so I have one of her campaign signs in my front yard. But I have stopped short of officially endorsed her in Lower Columbia Currents because I have not  interviewed most of the other commissioner candidates.)

(Note also that The Watchdog does not disclose that Steve Ferrell, its favored commissioner candidate, is the treasurer of 4-C. And it fails to challenge his terribly exaggerated assertion, which I documented recently, to have helped control the cost of the WPPSS nuclear fiasco more than 40 years ago.) 

So will the producers of The Watchdog clean up their act in the name of reducing political divisiveness? They can’t expect the opposition to stay silent in the face of attacks based on distortions and outright lies.

If political civility is to prevail locally, the next test may come when the county commissioners again appoint three new non-elected members to the Cowlitz County Board of Health later this month. Will they choose the best candidates or the ones with political expediency?

Interviews with the applicants are scheduled to take place starting at 8 a.m. Aug. 12 and 10 a.m. Aug. 20 in the Commissioner’s Hearing Room on the third floor of the County Administration Building in Kelso. The commissioners likely will make the appointments at the board of health meeting at 10 a.m. on Aug. 27.

Hard and honest debate is expected and needed in political discourse. But you shouldn’t talk peace if your actions cause discord.