“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”
— Alice in Wonderland
God save us from the rise of the eggheads now that the U.S. Supreme Court stands infested by Dumptyites.
Following publication of Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked opinion raping Roe v. Wade, Pulitzer honoree Linda Greenhouse kernelized the only cogent reason for assassination of a precedent which most of the little legal lightweights had told the U.S. Senate that they considered settled law.
“They did it because they could,” Greenhouse lamented, echoing sentiments which have warmed the Humpty cockles of the rocky hearts of dictators since time immemorial.
In last Sunday’s fake news New York Times, the best commentator in the country, Maureen Dowd, concluded her killer screed stating “Even though I’ve been writing since Bush v. Gore (2000) that the court is full of hacks and the bloom is off the robes, it is still disorienting to see the murk of this Supreme Court.”
Actually, it goes back much further. Control of Black Robe Land by today’s corrupt and self-absorbed majority was fore-ordained more than half a century ago. Just after I invaded these parts from Gomorrah South in 1971, I remember the chill that went down my spine at the announcement that Nevada Republican Party operatives had started a young conservatives club at UNR.
It started paying off just a few years later when a small-government advocate was elected president by promising to clean up the muck of murky Washington. He advocated eroding FDR’s big government welfare state and opposed busing to end school segregation while preaching family values, moral righteousness and religion.
It must have been Ronald Reagan, right? After all, Ronnie the Vague told a Moral Majority gathering that “I know you can’t endorse me but I can endorse you.”
If you guessed that it was the B-movie actor who won the White House playing a perversion of his idol Franklin Roosevelt, you’d be wrong. It was Reagan’s predecessor Jimmy Carter, a master campaigner with slim presidential qualifications, the worst of which was his lack of Washington experience. So he made his thin credentials the centerpiece of his campaign, touting the virtues of being an outsider. Like so many before him, he was hoist from his own petard when Reagan campaigned against him by saying the same thing. “Drain the swamp” still works for dinosaurs posing as alligator hunters.
Fast-forward almost half a century and Dumptyite wolves not only inhabit the henhouse, they’re selling the eggs. Cock-a-doodle-do.
“Americans do not want democracy, they want theocracy,” a French observer noted a few decades back.
The formerly sacrosanct and prestigious Supreme Court is now the appointed-for-life government of the United States. Remember all those moonhowler complaints about an “activist court” and “judge-made law”?
No? Understandable because moonhowler-installed judges are now doing just that.
They have been handsomely rewarded with lucrative deals both aboveboard and under the table. There is no effective remedy. They won and can do whatever they damn well please.
Four decades ago, former Tribunite and legendary talk show icon Travus T. Hipp warned of “softshoe fascism” loose in the land.
Fascism is typified by an authoritarian government which does the bidding of narrow, wealthy, privately-owned interests. As with all dictatorships spawned not by guns but by gushy words enchanting the gullible among the great unwashed, once in power they pull the ladder up behind them.
Said ladder stands on the shredded social safety net of a besieged electorate increasingly unable to elect leaders reflecting their needs — if they are allowed to vote at all.
Corrupt Clarence and his fellow dwarves now have before them a Roe-ing of the 1984 unanimous decision in Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council. Repeal or revision would resemble Alito’s rape of Roe or Neal Gorsuch’s evisceration of the Environmental Protection Agency. (“Poison Annie’s Revenge Executed” Barbwire 7-7-2022; “Happy Co-Dependence Day” 7-3-2005)
I was criticized by the left and right when I asserted that nominee Gorsuch would work to destroy the EPA from which his Mommy Dearest had resigned under a cloud of incompetence, corruption and illegality.
Sometimes I hate it when I’m right. I hope I am proven wrong about the miasma of near-hopelessness enveloping the formerly United States of America.
MEA CULPA DEPT. When I’m wrong, I eat the barbecued crow. A few weeks ago, I praised Reno Gazette-Journal higherups for appointing veteran journalist Peggy Santoro as the second woman executive editor of the paper after Barbara Henry in 1982. Pardon my brain fade. Santoro is the fourth. Like Ms. Henry, Ms. Santoro rose thru the ranks as did Tonia Cunning who became the second. More recently came Kelly Scott, the only one of the four imported from elsewhere into the top job. No matter the numbers game, the principal news dissemination source in northern Nevada has very noticeably improved under Ms. Santoro’s leadership.
Stay safe, get vaxxed and pray for those cruelly afflicted by the cruelly small minds on this small planet.
Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno.
Andrew Quarantino Barbano is a 54-year Nevadan and editor of NevadaLabor.com and SenJoeNeal.org/ Barbwire by Barbano has originated in the Tribune since 1988. E-mail barbano@frontpage.reno.nv.us
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