The seer of Troy warned against letting that towering wooden horse through the city’s gates. Alas, no one listened to Princess Cassandra.
America today stands at the precipice of becoming an electoral autocracy, a dictatorship masquerading as a democracy.
Modern Cassandras have warned and warned again. The evidence abounds from local Nevada governments all the way up to the lifestyles of the rich and infamous.
Miss Priscilla Goodbody is alive and well right here in River City. Tonight Show legend Johnny Carson hung that handle on TV network censors. (Barbwire 7-12-2023) Mr. Carson is dead but Priscilla and her minions live forever.
Last week, local moonhowlers persuaded three Republican Washoe County commissioners not to re-appoint a longtime library board member, falsely accusing the panel of promulgating pornography to children. The pitchforkers were so benighted that they did not know that board members don’t order books.
Same thing happened a few years back when the former Douglas County library director came under fire for daring to mention Black Lives Matter. Priscilla’s partisans in Nevada’s wealthy Confederate Alabaster Bastion almost caused a riot, supported by the county sheriff hisself. (Links with this column at NevadaLabor.com/)
Like Afghanistan’s Taliban, American moonhowlers wax wealthy among the dumb and dumber. Who needs schools or libraries when you can easily invent your own alternative facts?
Decades ago, my old ad agency boss, a car salesman by trade, advised “TV spots won’t work if you’re not telling people what they want to hear.”
Selling cars or candidates, it all works the same. A legendary auto salesman once gave me the secret of sales success: “Get ‘em in here, mislead ‘em, and get ‘em outta here.”
Instance in point…
DOWN THE TUBES. Newbie Sen. Tommy Tuberville is a Republican and football coach. Those are apparently the only qualifications necessary to get elected to the U.S. Senate from Alabama. Tommy Touchdown is the perfect pol for the Trump era.
This guy couldn’t name the three branches of government but he won a lotta games at Auburn, so he oughtta be a senator, right?
Coaches exploit opponent weaknesses to win. Tuberville has used the cockamamie single-senator veto rule to cripple the U.S. military by blocking almost 300 top-level promotions.
He may be undermining national security, but he foreshadows a Trump second term. In the last few days, both the fake news New York Times and that fortress of liberalism, The Economist magazine, have published major pieces about the growing Trump shadow government.
The Economist reported on the Texas-based America First Policy Institute. The Times printed more than a full page about Trump’s Project 25, seeded by the seedy Heritage Foundation.
Both are developing policies, lists of loyalists and transition plans so that Czar Donaldov can bulldoze democracy in his golf cart come 2025.
Grand design: transfer most government power to the president. Congress and the courts may as well not show up for work.
Trump would eliminate civil service rules so everybody owes his or her job to the bleached blonde boss who can axe them at whim. Shades of
Khaddafi’s Libya. Think of “The Apprentice” TV show on a national scale with wholesale firings nationally and worldwide. Who needs the EPA anyway?
Trump’s idol, Czar Vladimir Putin, provides an abject lesson about what happens to dictators who surround themselves with yes-men and ass-kissers.
Russia, China, Hungary, Belarus, India, Turkey and others have elections that don’t matter.
The specter of electoral autocracy has already risen over the American horizon.
NO LABELS, NO SHAME. “No Labels” is a clever right-wing front cloaked in the dark money aura of bringing Americans together with a third-party choice for president next year.
Translation: Do unto President Biden what Ross Perot did to Bush the Elder and as Ralph Nader did to Al Gore. (And for that matter, what Teddy Roosevelt did to his protege William Howard Taft which resulted in the election of overt racist Woodrow Wilson who also opposed women getting the right to vote).
President Bush the Lesser’s personal hatchetman (and former Sparks schoolboy) Karl Rove was as ruthless as he was soul-less: Go right at the opponent’s main strength and destroy him. John Kerry was a war hero, so smear his military record as false and his medals as undeserved. It worked.
Us old campaign managers recognize a shuck and jive when we see it.
Wanna torpedo Biden? Pull a Rove rave by undercutting him with his strongest base of support, African Americans. Joining one of Fox News boss Rupert Murdoch’s kids at “No Labels” is no less that Ben Chavis, former national president of the NAACP. With Chavis as wingman for that kamikaze squadron, Biden can crash and burn.
The poster boys leading this week’s national rollout were Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, former Republican Utah Governor and Ambassador to China John Huntsman, a onetime Republican candidate for president; and ex-senator and ex-Democrat Joe Lieberman of Travelers Insurance — oops, I mean Connecticut.
Karl Rove destroyed John McCain’s presidential ambitions by smearing McCain in the South Carolina primary by distributing flyers on church parking lots which accused McCain of having (gasp!) a black baby. Rove’s buddy Bush the Lesser went on to “win” the presidency. (Believe it or else, Coach Tuber Tommy actually said that Al Gore was the president-elect in 2000.)
In 2020, Biden was going down the tubervilles to Bernie Sanders until powerful S. Carolina Rep. James Clyburn saved him by rallying Palmetto State African Americans to his side.
Were I advising today’s billionaire GOP puppeteers, I would tell them to do exactly what was announced this week: Break Biden by cracking his Black base and Trump wins again.
This is a cancer on the body politic, so let’s call it like it is: COVID ‘24, against which true democracy is the only vaccine.
The game’s afoot. Priscilla and Cassandra have prognosticated: Play or perish.
Stay safe, get vaxxed and pray for those cruelly afflicted by the cruelly small minds on this small planet, especially victims of our perpetual wars.
Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno.
Andrew Quarantino Barbáno is a 54-year Nevadan and editor of NevadaLabor.com and MississippiWestNV.org/ Barbwire by Barbano has originated in the Tribune since 1988. E-mail barbano@frontpage.reno.nv.us
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