The Two-faced, Baldly Hypocritical Call For The Supreme Court To Pretend That The Truth Cannot Be Discerned

I was never very impressed with the brilliance of Tom Keane as a minor politician, a member of the often rinky-dink Boston City Council, or as an op-ed scribbler for the Boston Globe.  Though I have to say even from the Boston City Council, a body that has managed to disgrace itself over the years,  becoming an "opinion journalist" is a few rungs down as far as I'm concerned.

He wrote yesterday about the issue of the Ohio law banning lying from political ads which I addressed last week.   Most of what he said was the same old libertarian BS which had a number of problems with reality.   Which might not be worth arguing about in a lot of cases but when it's a matter of subverting democracy with lies, of selling The People lies which will put people in office who will work against the common good, that makes it worth fighting against.

Rather cluelessly, especially for a "journalist" of any kind, Keane came up with a logical disconnect for both his profession and his assertion in this piece, a major problem for his premise.

He asked a question, which he answered

The real problems with Ohio’s law are these: Who knows what the truth is? And who gets to decide?.... 

The thrust of the First Amendment is that no one individual or government agency gets to decide the truth. If you think folks wrong, deceptive, or untruthful, speak up. Rebut them. Ultimately, speech competes against speech. If and when this case finally gets decided by the Supreme Court, Ohio will deservedly lose. The US Constitution protects lying because the alternative is worse.

Problem is, if what he claims is true, how would the Supreme Court decide this, or any other case, for that matter if IT DIDN'T MAKE A DETERMINATION AS TO WHAT IS TRUE IN THE MATTER?   

Though I think he's just being opportunistically disingenuous, hypocritical and cynical, perhaps he doesn't realize that he is talking out of both sides of his mouth but he both asserts that courts can't determine what is true while calling for the Supreme Court to make a finding of truth in this matter.   A judicial finding is either based in a determination of truth or it is an expression of whims and if it were impossible for any court to make a determination of truth, then no judicial decision could have that as a basis of its validity.   Keane can have it being impossible for governments or courts to determine truth, or he can have Supreme Court decisions he agrees with being valid but he can't have both.   

The assertion that the truth is not discernible, even with the rules of evidence in a court,  MADE BY A JOURNALIST IN A MAJOR NEWSPAPER, is symptomatic of the eutrophic decadence of our culture and why the news media is a stinking, shining dead fish in that brackish puddle.   

If courts and governments don't have the ability to determine truth then there is no reason to trust media corporations and the people they hire to do so, and, in fact, it would seem that the profession of journalism is ever more abandoning the pursuit of the truth, of facts, in order to uphold the standards of tabloids and the likes of P. J O’Rourke who he gives a nod to.

One of those opposed is satirist P.J. O’Rourke, who submitted a friend of the court brief that, in essence, maintained that lying is a hallowed part of American politics. O’Rourke opened his essay with a series of quotes: “I am not a crook,” “Read my lips: no new taxes,” “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” “Mission accomplished,” and, of course, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”

Funny stuff. Yet are these lies we really want to defend? Wouldn’t we all be better off if Richard Nixon had admitted Watergate, George H.W. Bush had acknowledged the need to raise revenues, Bill Clinton had confessed infidelity, George W. Bush had said Iraq would be an interminable slog, and Barack Obama had described health care reform’s cons as wells as pros? Certainly our cynicism would have dropped a notch.


Ohio’s effort to promote honesty is far-reaching. Suppose you call your opponent a “nut”? The state prohibits falsely claiming someone has a “record of treatment or confinement for mental disorder.”

Well, I strongly suspect that O'Rourke or Keane would be eager to trust a court with determining if someone stole their work and called it his own, making a profit on it - that use of the truth discernment of courts is quite popular with the scribbling class, even those who make claims such as those Keane has.  And I can assure you if someone told the kind of lies told about, most typically, Democratic politicians, such as Hilary Clinton, about O'Rourke and Keane - lies which incited hatred and possibly violence, which could harm their careers and damage their personal lives, they would be unwilling to just let those continue and spread without papers being filed in court to stop them. 

So, maybe we should run the experiment and declare that, from now on, all lies, the pettiest to the worst, told about free speech libertarians are not only entirely permissible but, under their own stated doctrines and dogmas, they are demanded as an exercise of a right to lie.   Tom Keane is a pedophile rapist and swindler of mentally diminished old people who kills small animals for pleasure.   He's probably the one who murdered Vince Foster, as well.   P. J O'Rourke is a dead unfunny scribbler who gets his rich owners to bribe people to pretend he is funny as he is merely cynically stupid, sort of like how so many of his fellow right wingers get "best sellers" on the NYT list.  Oh, wait, that would be the truth, wouldn't it?  Though, if no one is able to discern the truth in a court of law, who's he to claim it isn't with lesser standards of evidence? 

I hereby and from now on declare that it is open season on free speech - free press, libertarians and anyone from now on should feel free to tell the most outrageous lies about them, even those which damage their careers, their personal lives and what used to be considered sacred honor, back in the quaint days when things like the truth, what sacred honor was reliably based in, were believed to be real and important.