Joe Conason wrote a scathing column about Anthony Kennedy and his crucial role in destroying what little semblance of American democracy was left standing before the Citizens United decision in 2010. He notes that Kennedy, before being installed as a judge by Ronald Reagan worked in his fathers crooked lobbying firm in Sacramento so there was never any reason to suspect he was ever anything like an honest "moderate conservative". Conason states the truth of it, thanks to Anthony Kennedy and the Citizens United decision, handing the American government over to billionaires, the worst of the Republican far right run the Senate and House and may well soon run the whole thing. Look at the Republican pack at the next debate, all of them trying to outdo the others to be pathologically unhinged so as to appeal to the Republican voters.
But while you're looking at that, note that the great American media, the "free press" will not be noting in any decisive way that these men and woman are dangerously evil people who are appealing to the mental illness of a decisive margin of the Republican electorate. Even if most Republicans are not as insane as their rabid tire biters, they are amoral to the extent that most of them will enable them in order to gain power, cut taxes for the rich, do things like poison entire cities such as Flint Michigan, and the myriad of other evils that the press has enabled on behalf of those same billionaires because they own the vast majority of the media.
That is what is commonly left out of the liberal-leftist analysis of the corruption that came from Citizens United, that the American media, the "free 'press" is hand in glove with the corrupt figures like Kennedy, enabling the politicians who install them in the judiciary, covering the corrupt brothel of the Supreme Court with a veil of sanctity and secular, civil mysticism placing them and their obvious corruption above question. The media has been the medium through which all of this corruption happens and, as I will never stop pointing out, it all began by the liberals of the Warren court giving the media a carte blanche for lying in the Sullivan Decision a half a century ago. The string of decisions permitting the media to lie has been used by them to attack liberals and liberal politicians, even moderates such as Hillary Clinton. It is the same New York Times on whose behalf the Sullivan Decision was issued which has been publishing lies about even someone as unradical as Hillary Clinton, lies which have enabled the worst of cabloid media to push lines which will become installed in the common widsom of the American people and may give us a President Trump or Cruz. There was a good reason that 1964 and 1965, with the passage of the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act is the high mark of liberalism in the United States, it is because it was also when it became possible for the media to lie on behalf of the wealthy without having to face any consequences. It's been on an accelerating downward slope ever since.
The idiotic, romantic view of the 1st Amendment that became common place in the 1950s and 60s among liberals is as much of the problem as the use conservatives made of that idiocy in the Rehnquist and Roberts courts. And for that we also have the media to thank, they, no doubt knowing the financial boon it would be to them to be able to lie for the highest bidder pushed that line of self-interest.
The largest venues of media, especially the electronic media in a market system will always serve the interests of billionaires because they have the most money and will own the media. They will never employ any reporters or commentators who endanger their money except for the odd eccentric who believes in such quaint notions as self-government by an accurately informed public. And its been my observation that even such eccentrics will, when push comes to shove, almost always go with their own self-interest.
I don't see much outside of the miraculous that is going to save us from having to go through a total disaster before we, in decisive numbers, get over the idea that a a myriad of lies is the price for someone being able to whisper one truth. Lies have to be made illegal, they have to be made actionable, they have to have the protection given them by liberals in 1964 removed from them or they will sink democracy as surely as Citizens United, the product of lies, will. Maybe the people who survive the calamity that our country is certainly headed for will come to realize that it all begins with lies.
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