Robert Gable, who died at 90 on Nov. 29, will be remembered by the Kentucky political world as the man who kept the state Republican Party in business from 1986 to 1993, while Sen. Mitch McConnell was on his way up and planning a mostly friendly takeover of the state GOP. Before that, Gable was state parks commissioner, a primary candidate for the Senate against former Gov. Louie Nunn, and his party’s nominee for governor. “Thank goodness he was there” as chairman, said McConnell Chief of Staff Terry Carmack, who succeeded Gable after a year as his executive director. “We had a platform from which we could launch when the political dynamic changed.” Most Kentuckians probably remember Bob Gable for one episode in his 1975 campaign. It’s a moment that helps illustrate the devolution of his party and American politics at large in the last few decades. Gable was running an almost hopeless race against Democratic Gov. Julian Carroll, who had moved up from lieutenant governor when Wendell Ford went to the Senate in December 1974. Carroll’s ascension and his deal with Ford about how to handle the transition temporarily unified the state Democratic Party, which had been factionalized for 40 years, and the party was on a roll nationally and in Kentucky because of Republicans’ Watergate scandal. Carroll agreed to debate Gable only once, in mid-October on KET, which had never hosted a debate. The moderator was Kentucky Press Association President Al Smith, who had started the “Comment on Kentucky” program the year before. When Carroll’s camp asked Smith if visual aids could be used, he said no, and also told Gable aide Larry Van Hoose. That may have given Gable and Van Hoose, both clever fellows with good senses of humor, an idea: If no visual aids, how about an auditory aid? It was a desk bell. Gable rang it during his opening statement, saying that it was “a truth bell” and that he would ring it whenever Caroll didn’t tell the truth. Smith told Gable to put the bell away because the rules didn’t provide for it, but Gable disobeyed. When Carroll said Gable had testified before Congress in favor of a dam on the Big South Fork of the Cumberland River, Gable rang the bell. Smith stared Gable in the eye and firmly told him to put the bell in his pocket, suggesting or strongly implying that the debate wouldn’t continue if he disobeyed again. I was there, working for Smith’s newspapers, and I wrote for them: “Gable, looking like a little boy with his hand caught in the cookie jar, put his bell away and it wasn’t heard again.” Though the bell remained quiet, its ring surely resonated in the minds of some viewers, casting doubt on the governor. Gable had made his point, and a place in history. “That’s gotta be in the top 10 political moments for a Republican in the last 50 years” in Kentucky, Carmack said. “He came up with a clever way to demonstrate that someone on the stage might not be telling the truth.” It all seems so quaint, almost half a century later. Gable’s party has been taken over by a man who relied on lies and other falsehoods to get elected president; then lied about his 2020 defeat, fomenting a deadly insurrection at the Capitol; and who now makes acceptance of those lies a litmus test for posts in his administration. Those seeking high Pentagon and intelligence jobs under Donald Trump are being asked “what they thought about the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and whether they believed the 2020 election was stolen,” reported The New York Times, which interviewed nine people involved, including six applicants. “The sense they got was that there was only one right answer to each question.” Those who gave the wrong answer weren’t hired. This all fits with Trump’s recently reiterated plan to pardon people convicted of Jan. 6 crimes and his outrageous statement that the House committee that investigated the insurrection should be jailed. His attempt to rewrite history with falsehoods is straight out of the playbook of fascist authoritarians. When Bob Gable rang the truth bell against a powerful governor headed for a near-coronation, he was sort of like the boy in the Hans Christian Andersen folktale who truthfully said the emperor had no clothes. Today, Trump dismisses those who would fact-check him as “enemies of the people,” and he subtly makes the case that everyone in politics is corrupt, so his lies are to be ignored if not accepted. He’s been doing it so long that Americans are inured to it. As a citizen, being inured to lying is to live with a lie.  Our truth bells must keep ringing. The post Gable’s death is a call for truth bells to ring appeared first on The Lexington Times.