By Sherman Frederick/Properly Subversive
Here’s the gawd’s-honest truth: No American politician – not a single one – was qualified to manage a disease that escaped from a mysterious lab in China and caused a pandemic that killed millions of people worldwide.
Take Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak. Just two years into the job and fresh out of the Clark County Commission where he deftly navigated zoning and traffic issues, Gov. Sisolak had to make huge and scary calls for Nevadans.
He made bad calls.
Like a lot of Democrat governors, he was too quick to suspend basic freedoms. The most noticeable one was to shut down churches and places of worship. There was apparently no one in the Sisolak Administration with enough grounding in the Constitution to raise a red flag and say: “Wait a minute, should we do that?”
The Supreme Court quickly slapped the governor down, pointing out that he couldn’t hold places of worship to one standard and casinos to a lesser one. There is this thing called the First Amendment and it can’t be taken lightly, the court had to tell the governor. That’s a civics lesson Sisolak should have learned in 7th grade, not two years into his governorship.
Sisolak also led like a sheep in supporting the shut down of schools to in-person learning, bending to the will of teacher unions. As a result, Nevada kids – especially minority kids – now play catch-up on test scores. All of this was avoidable. He could have gone another way and bucked the prevailing wisdom of his party, which clearly put unions over children. Had he done so, Nevadans would have rewarded him with re-election on Nov. 9.
Instead, he’s suffered the embarrassment of being the first governor in a long time to lose a bid for a second term. And, it happened in a year in which Nevadans split their tickets between Donkeys and Elephants – a Republican governor, a Democratic Attorney General, etc.
The Senate race between incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto and Adam Laxalt was called for Cortez-Masto a day later.
In conceding, Sisolak put on his best face to shave the truth in an email to Nevadans:
“We’ve been through a lot these last four years, from a once-in-a-century pandemic to the stresses and strains of global inflation. I also am proud that we made the tough decisions during COVID that helped save an estimated 30,000 Nevada lives even if those decisions sometimes had tough political ramifications.”
That claim of saving 30,000 lives, of course, is made up by the same folks who thought closing places of worship but keeping casinos open was a good idea. The same guys who told us those homemade masks work and if we got vaccinated we wouldn’t get the disease. But look, I’m not going to pile on. Sisolak isn’t a horrible person. He was just a garden-variety local politician with little grounding in American principles. And when big tests came to his leadership, he failed.
That’s why he won’t be governor of Nevada next year.
ONE MORE THING
– Donald Trump tweeted that “Clark County has a corrupt voting system.” That’s not true, it’s just that in Las Vegas people count “eight, nine, ten,” then get thrown off by “Jack, Queen, King” and have to start all over. (H/T to a wag on Instagram.)
– Would a Biden/Fetterman ticket in 2024 be a no-brainer?
– Thanks to Daylight Shaving time my 5 o’clock shadow has become my 4 o-clock shadow.
And, that’ll do it, good readers. Until next week avoid soreheads, laugh a little and always question authority.
“Properly Subversive” is commentary written by Sherman R. Frederick, a Nevada Hall of Fame journalist and co-founder of Battle Born Media, a news organization dedicated to the preservation of community newspapers. You can reach him by email at shermfrederick@ gmail. com.