Hearing the Republicans, Senator James Risch and Paul Ryan and Chris Christie and Trump's lawyer Marc Kasowitz, journalists talking about Trump's lies I suddenly realized that the reason the comedy show hosts and their writers, the best of them, the Samantha Bees, the Stephen Colberts, the Seth Meyers, are more serious than the "serious" people is because they cut through the lawyerly double-speak, the language that carries more plausible deniability lies than honest content which pervades the "serious" media and weighty public life and our political institutions.
Listen to the videos of the hearings and compare the way that liars like Susan Collins and many of her Republican colleagues asked questions to produce such bald faced lies to be repeated on FOX and by Republican mouthpieces and pundits on the other networks and compare those to the comedy that is based in cutting through their crap.
I think this is the kind of stuff that comes from too many lawyers trained in this kind of straining of credulity and how to use that to make a career in helping crooks and gangsters get crooked judges to do crooked stuff controlling our public lives. If it starts in the elite law schools is certainly worth thinking about, it's breathtaking how many of the people who do it come from those places. I think that kind of stuff has corrupted our country to an incredible degree. I think its origins lie in the past in things like the Dred Scott decision - turning people into commodities to be used by slave owners by denying their personhood - and the Supreme Court clerk who inserted the corporate personhood crap into a ruling - from where it has been used to destroy democracy as recently as the Citizens United decision. If that hadn't been done, while it would have been possible for our Constitutional system to produce some really bad presidents, it would almost certainly not have been able to produce a Trump.
While the comedians can call the crooks, gangsters and monumental liars on their nonsense, they don't have the power to prevent them from going right on doing their stuff and getting away with it, depending on the mutual dishonesty of their colleagues in government, on the courts and in the media to cover for them. It's almost shocking that they are allowed to get away with pointing out what a bunch of fucking liars and gangsters those folks are. Fortunately, people watch them and they make money for someone. Maybe even some of those people don't especially like the respectable, elite, rich gangsters and thugs either.
Update: I should have mentioned that if you wanted a great example you could compare Meyers and Bee and Colbert to NPR's Morning Edition this morning. Anyone who thinks Morning Edition and its staff weren't carrying water for the lying Trump and his Republican-pundit liars is lying to themselves. And that's not even to mention Maine Public Broadcasting's Morning Edition staff who were giving Susan Collins the royal treatment. They're disgusting.
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