It took the Hollywood meets Nuremberg horror of the Republican Convention to knock the Hillary Hater click-bait off of the "Most Read" sidebar list of Salon magazine, replaced by such horrified truths as that we could have an actual strong-man style fascist in a President Donald Trump as soon as the end of January. I haven't checked the other alleged and actual lefty publications to see what the past two nights of fascist psychosis coming from the Republican Convention have done to their "most read" side bars but the beginning of the week, when I checked, almost all of those I've been criticizing for pandering to the Hillary haters on the play-left were still doing so. And what they didn't have in the stories and columns they had in heaps of Hillary hating in their comment threads.
The "left, left," the socialist, Marxist, etc. "left" doesn't have a leadership holding public office in the United States, such people don't win elections in the United States. What it has in lieu of a real, elected leadership are a class of scribblers and academics who write up a left and that class of scribblers have been thoroughly discredited this year. They are augmented by and are the guest list of the few narrow and web-cast venues of that same left the Amy Goodmans and Cenk Uygars, Add in the odd documentary maker and that's what the left has as a "leadership". The writers who have realized, early and realistically how dangerous this election season has become and who have been published in the lefty venues have been weakened by the same venues publishing the most lavishly irresponsible and lunatic delusion which has enabled the weakening of the winner of the Democratic nomination process on the most unrealistic of all delusions, that either Bernie Sanders or the likes of Jill Stein had any chance of being elected over the Republican who would be the certain alternative. I have no doubt that as this campaign continues those same magazines and webazines and blab-shows will continue to sponsor the same level of insane irresponsibility that they have, those writers are either on their staff or they are buddies with the editors and publishers of those magazines. No less than FOX, the people who run the lefty media know that their existence depends on servicing their niche audience and they will provide it with what it wants, interestingly, when it comes to Hillary Clinton, they want the same thing. Unlike FOX, they don't want an oligarchic-fascist in the White House though they have certainly proven themselves able to be ruled by that segment of their audience who are insane enough to claim there is no difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
In this situation, I see some of the wisdom of democracy over the alternative, the elected leadership of the Democratic Party, with all its many warts and blemishes, is realistic about this situation whereas the unelected media-leaders of the "left-left" have failed the test of reality rather badly and over the course of the past fifty years. The extent to which elected leaders have had to deal with the petty misinformation of the "left-left" media, it has, generally, been a mixed bag. But it has often come with a real, political cost to those who have managed to do what the "left-left" doesn't do, gain more than the odd political office, here and there.
I have come to the conclusion that the media, in general, has lied the United States into the present center to insane right miasma we live in. The media, freed by the "left-left" program of impunity for the media when it lies has, over the past half-century, filled the collective American mind with lies favorable to the profits of that media, its owners and the other members of its class. There is no doubt that the very intellectual product of a media which has been given carte blanche to lie in the most seductive and entertaining ways has made an instance when Democrats hold effective leadership of the Presidency, the Congress and the Court a thing of the past, vanishing into the distant horizon behind us. We have not had that in any secure way since the very year after the Supreme Court made that tragic decision in 1964, at the behest of the allegedly liberal media.
The fact that the left, the "left-left" its play-left faction and the REAL LEFT which has a chance of getting elected has to face is that for the foreseeable future, Hillary Clinton is almost certainly the most liberal person who can be elected as president of the United States. Any other proposal is a delusion. Real leftists, like Elizabeth Warren and, like it or not, Bernie Sanders have come round to facing that reality. The lefty magazines, the webazines, the audience seeking broad and narrow casters of the "left-left" will not face that reality in a timely enough fashion for them to maintain their credibility with anyone who cares about reality. This is the year they have proven themselves to be unreliable even in the face of impending fascism. The real leadership of the real left are those who can manage to get elected with a majority of the votes even in the environment which the idiotic theories of the scribbling left have produced with the concurrence of the unelected elite of the Supreme Court. And even some of them have come to understand how dangerous this year is.
I think the past half-century of American politics has been a test of the idea of "free press-free speech" absolutism and it has failed, abysmally. It hasn't produced enhanced egalitarian democracy, it has produced an accelerating decline into fascism. It has turned out that whoever said, "You will know the truth and the truth will make you free" was wiser than those who came up with the idea that freedom was compatible with lies freely told. The fact is that "more speech" will not overcome a campaign of well-financed and media-magnified lies, certainly not a consistently and constantly repeated series of lies told in language and by people selected to make the selling of those lies easier.
You would have to be a writer or yackker with a bloated sense of your own power and ability to not have figured that out the first time the idea of "more speech" entered your self-aggrandizing fantasy. Unfortunately, lots of such fantasists go into writing and the media and academia. It's no wonder that a "left" which depends on them for its leadership is bound to go into a half-century and continuing wilderness journey that, unlike that which Moses led the Children of Israel on, hasn't proven to be an educational experience. The leaders of the "left-left" haven't had to bear the hard lessons of privation, they are safely middle to upper class. Is it any wonder that those members of the Democratic coalition who do live with those hard lessons have not gone with their choice this year?
Note: I was going to include anarchists in the lest of the "left-left" but it makes no sense for anarchists to hold a position on who gets elected or government or anything to do with elections or holding office. Anarchism is probably the supreme example of "left-left" insanity and refusal to face the reality that someone is going to exercise power whenever that is up for grabs. If that isn't determined democratically, the choice of an accurately informed and morally responsible electorate, it will be gangsters and criminals who do. After listening to him and reading some of his babbling, I think they have a lot more in common with the lunatic, anti-democratic, billionaire, Trump supporter, Peter Thiel than they would ever want someone to notice. I understand he was heavily influenced by René Girard's pseudo-scientific, soc-sci based academic nuttery and other such theory. His strong-man fascist libertarian insanity is anarchy without the egalitarian-moral gloss coat it so often wears.
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