Republicans have learned Machiavellian ways

“People are fickle by nature ”¦ therefore, affairs should be managed in such a way that when they no longer believe, they can be made to believe by force.” — Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, 1513

What Would Jesus Do (WWJD)? In the past week-and-a-half, the country has been subjected to the Shirley Sherrod fiasco and now the WikiLeak exposé. True to the NeoCon agenda, a Right-Winger, Andrew Breitbart, aired a doctored video on the Internet as if it were a factual representation of a speech given by Sherrod.

Sherrod was publicly fired for being a racist, vilified by Fox News ”“ no surprise there since she’s black ”“ and publically apologized to by Tom Vilsack, the United States Secretary of Agriculture. Even President Obama called her.

Roger and Eloise Spooner, the family discussed in her speech, consider themselves and Sherrod friends and readily acknowledge that her help saved their farm from foreclosure almost 27 years ago.

This was not a tempest in a teapot or much ado about nothing. This was a planned attack on Shirley Sherrod, the Georgia State Director of Rural Development, by Republican operative Breitbart. The ultimate goal, of course, was to embarrass President Obama’s administration. In that sense, the attack was successful.

Tea Partiers and Republicans have spent the past year-and-three quarters being Birthers, the Party of No, and labeling Barack Obama as a socialist and a racist. Obama is neither. Sadly, this mantra is sticking to the Great Unwashed of this nation, the Tea Partiers. And keep in mind, Breitbart doesn’t work in a vacuum.

He has worked as an editor for the muckraking Drudge Report and a commentator for the Sun Yung Moon owned Right-Wing rag the Washington Times. What Breitbart did was the present-day equivalent of Machiavelli’s dictum of making the masses “believe by force.” Many, including the NAACP, were deceived into believing Breitbart’s clip.

Another non-surprise almost two weeks into this is that he has not apologized to Sherrod, who is planning a lawsuit. Perhaps she’ll go after Fox Fake News in the process. That Maine’s Senators Snowe and Collins have not gone on record denouncing Breitbart’s salacious smearing of another woman is appalling. Then again, Snowe and Collins are Republicans. In a just world, that should explain it all. Unfortunately, they are always portrayed as ”˜moderates’ when their records are Radical Right. Their latest misstep was to vote against a bill to aid small businesses.

Thirty-nine years ago last month, the New York Times published The Pentagon Papers. Daniel Ellsberg’s leak proved that Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson lied to everyone about the United States’ involvement in Southeast Asia, specifically Vietnam. The Papers shed even more light on the machinations of Richard Nixon and his lies regarding his “plan to end the war.” Furthermore, they documented the secret and illegal bombings of Cambodia by Nixon. The publication of The Pentagon Papers helped bring an end to Vietnam, but not in the manner intended by Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Like the French before us, we were driven out of that country.

The 91,000 WikiLeaks are either the most devastating breach of security since Vietnam or a new compiling of readily available data. Julian Assange, WikiLeak’s founder and prime leaker, suggests that much of what is revealed indicates that war crimes have been committed. Regrettably, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condolessa Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz et.al. will never be charged with their war crimes or their crimes against humanity.

Even Colin Powell should serve time for being Bush and Cheney’s shill with the doctored photos and sketches he presented to the United Nations as justification for invading Iraq. Remember, the only weapons of mass destruction Saddam possessed were the chemical and biological weapons that Donald Rumsfeld sold to Saddam Hussein in 1983 at the behest of Ronald Reagan. These were the same ones he used against the Kurds in 1991 after GHW Bush walked away from the people he incited to revolt; 300,000 Kurds died for Senior’s perfidy. Baby Bush, a failed oilman, needed to prove something to Daddy. What better way than to invade an “evildoer’s country” and kill more than a million of “them evildoers.”

Machiavelli provided the guidelines for dictators 500 years ago with “The Prince” and Republicans have learned the lesson well. Lying, deceiving, and instilling fear are Republican traits that god-fearing people should repudiate. After all, Jesus was the ultimate Liberal and, of course, a Democrat.

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