Monday, January 9, 2017

In the Regime of Free-Speech-Free-Press These Things Aren't Allowed To Be Thought Never Mind Said

The series of tweet attacks Donald Trump made against Meryl Streep again shows that our constitutional system has put the United States and so the world in the hands of an unbalanced, undisciplined, sociopathic little boy who never grew up and never had the capacity to mature. Donald Trump is like those incredibly rare individuals who can become adults without their bodies or minds ever developing past the stage of a baby, only it's his personality that never left the age of 2, the kind of 2-year-old who give other 2-year-olds a bad name.

The conditions set by the Constitution have always produced a range of quality in our presidents.  At their best they have given us an FDR, a Lincoln and I would include in that group an LBJ, the most liberal president we have ever had in terms of domestic policy.   But it has mostly produced lesser and even very bad presidents in far larger numbers.  The expansion in that range would seem to be mostly on the worst end of it in the past fifty-years, under the current interpretation of the Constitution.  In case you missed it, we have had more confirmation that on the worst side, that expansion began in 1968 with the election of Richard Nixon,  another who was a criminal eligible for impeachment as soon as he took the oath of office and he would compound that with criminality that murdered tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people.  Millions, if you admit that he was directly responsible for producing the killing fields under Pol Pot.

In addition to him, the current political milieu, largely the product of the media, has given us the senile Ronald Reagan, the callow illegitimacy of George W. Bush and, now, Donald Trump.   I have every confidence that Donald Trump will be a contender for the worst president which our system has, so far, generated.   The conditions that gave us a Trump were produced in 1964 at the height of liberal achievement through the confusion of 18th century libertarianism for American liberalism by our highly educated Supreme Court.  If you think that's something I can't seem to stop saying, it's because it is the key to what went wrong in every way.  But the potential for that to happen was built into the American Constitution from the day it was issued and the moment it was ratified.   

I have pointed out before that the American fascists and racists in legal societies on law faculties and in think tanks studied hard to find all of the exploitable weaknesses in the American Constitutional system and the laws in individual states.   The availability of computers aided them in exploiting every weakness in our system, especially those which our system also makes hard if not impossible to fix.  Things have gone so far that, in some cases, even the father of that effort, Richard Viguerie is sometimes uneasy about the results.  

Now we know that they weren't the only ones looking to exploit those inherent weaknesses, the Russian government under Vladimir Putin was, as well.  Given his past as an apparatchik of the old Soviet government, I wouldn't be surprised if they hadn't been studying that for at least as long as our domestic fascists and racists have been.  I will grant Putin that, he is far more wily and clever than our intellectual and writing class who won't even start to admit their part in producing this disaster.   And being as amoral as our domestic fascists, he realized his highest potential was with cultivating and promoting the same fascist class whose ascendancy was made possible by the utter stupidity of liberal intellectuals in the media and in the past.  It is no enormous shock that Putin would take advantage of the opportunities handed to him by us.  As I've pointed out in the past even someone as relatively stupid and brutal as Nikita Khrushchev understood the possibilities of exploiting the weaknesses intrinsic in our system, so much so that he bragged that we'd sell them the rope to hang us with.  

Our Constitution, our  revoltingly deified founders, our idiotic acceptance of the minor 18th century poetry of the First Amendment that makes it possible for people with law degrees from elite institutions to privilege lies over the truth, all of those were a set up of the American People which were obvious and exploitable by the worst among us and among foreign despots.  

Even Meryl Streep in her great and inspired speech, easily 95% of it about the best thing anyone has said about the rise of Trump, to date,  continued to make some of the same mistakes.   Of course when she talks about the media, the press, she doesn't distinguish between the media that tells the truth and the majority of it - including much of it based in Hollywood - that lies with impunity to give us the very Trump she attacked.  We aren't allowed to make that distinction, we aren't allowed to articulate their part in producing Trump or it's an attack on free-speech, free-press.  Only Trump is their creation, Trump is the one who they promoted with hours and hours of free air time and decades of lies told about Hillary Clinton.   If Meryl Streep had said it as well as making those connections, she wouldn't be the toast of liberals today, her speech would have been seen as self-contradictory or, in some way, problematic.  If she had pointed out that Trump is a product of the self-serving venality of those founders who framed the Constitution, of their distrust of the popular vote, even the limited one they allowed for, she would be slammed by them just as she is by Trump and his fascist followers.  

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