Politics.
Nothing has
changed in all the hundreds of years that law makers have stood before the
masses and projected themselves as “champions” of truth.
Americans went through about a 20 year period
of head in the sand ignorance, but we are returning to the days of the Lincoln – Douglas
debates; thank God.
This go around the
main issue isn’t slavery, or immigration, or race relations.
It’s getting the United States of America back into the
hands of the people voting and just like in the 1860’s Americans are wising
up. We are listening, but folks, let’s
actually listen this go around.
Politicians in general are currently viewed as self-serving
professional wallet-skinners and I am right there with this assessment. As my Nigerian-born friend George Eligiri
once told me about Nigerian politicians, “once they go back to make radical
changes in the system, they are instantly corrupted and join the problem.”
I think the cancerous environment of law-making is so
overwhelming; no one survives their initial intentions of making changes. No politician, regardless of what their political
flavor, can get anything accomplished without massive trade-offs or outright
finagling.
Yes. I said finagling
and we’ve seen this so abundantly that it is almost expected. Mrs. Clinton is a prime example. Her trail is so littered with dubious and
dishonest (either by commission or omission) finagling that she dismisses with
an almost flippant sarcasm; belligerently daring anyone to question her. The bigger the lie the more people will accept
it. On top of that, her erased email
server screams guilt. Her reaction is
pure contempt that her integrity is even questioned.
“The essential English leadership secret does not depend on
particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid
thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, it
should be a big lie, and one should stick to it. They keep up their lies, even
at the risk of looking ridiculous.”
In my April first column, titled:
“The dog catchers bacon”, I
talked about a fictitious character who drove around in the shadows, basically
identified only by his broad and friendly smile and the crispy bacon.
In the story, every hair on my head stood up
in warning, but I was drawn in by his smile and the wonderful fragrance of his gifts.
These two wonders caused me to drop my guard,
even though everything about the man was blatantly wrong.
In the parody, I somehow came to my senses before I gave up
my two prized possessions (read my rights and property or if this doesn’t make
sense, my two dogs). The sneaky thief
who almost beguiled me with false promises skedaddled in a cloud of smoke and I
was so confused, I couldn’t even file a police report. Thus I was manipulated for the whole process
to repeat itself, most likely in another guise.
That is exactly how our political pundits survive to stay in a position
of power.
The bigger their lie – Remember Richard Nixon’s “I am not a
crook”, or Hillary’s husband, “I did not have sexual relations with that
woman”? J Edgar Hoover stayed in power
for years by spying on everyone. No one
said a word when he was recognized at parties dressed as a woman – a very ugly
woman too. This was conservative America and
folks we tight-lipped as a clam. The
bigger the lie the more people will accept it.
Has our President fulfilled any of the promises and hope
that won him the vaunted Nobel Peace Prize?
He won it on hope and a promise.
In doing so, he devalued the prize exponentially, just like his crony Al
Gore did. The bigger the inconvenient
truth the more people will accept it.
Giving these guys a Nobel Peace Prize pretty much means
Ernest P. Worrell should be awarded one for bringing hope to children who feel
they cannot excel.
My dogcatcher story was so preposterous, it became credible
to some. 3 TV stations called me, the Baytown Sun, and even the
Baytown Police Department’s Lt. Eric Freed for a follow up. I was standing in Sedona, Arizona
when my phone rang April 1st after the story ran. “Is this Bert Marshall? This is ____ at Fox News in Pennsylvania, we want to do a follow-up on
the dog catcher story…”
I grinned and said, “Are you a journalist?” She said she was and I told her it was a
political satire piece for April Fools Day.
I heard her yell to someone, “Oh!
It’s an April Fools prank!” She
then hung up. My first thought was,
“Geeze, don’t journalist’s comprehend what they read any more?”
Nope, the bigger the lie the more people will accept it, so
get ready to hear about a year’s worth of verbal dodgeball while we try to
elect a pre-selected politician who actually cares about the people. Oh, the quote in paragraph 6 is by the
propaganda minister of the Third Reich, Joseph Goebbels and was paraphrasing
from Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”.
