The Limits of The Honor And Morality The Founders Imagined Were Violated A Long Time Ago and Is Anyone At FOX or Sinclair or The Nation in Putin's Pocket?

I have started writing this post two other ways but I think we are at a place in the United States where it is becoming obvious that our Constitution, our laws have serious flaws that have led to the possibility of fascism arising out of what was assumed to be American democracy.   Anything that relies on such things as a sense of honor, individually or collectively, civic morality, has gone out the window with the Trump regime, the tea-party - cabloid "news" environment that led us here, directly. The total absence of any sense of honor or morality on full display in the Trump regime was the creation of the mass media which was allowed to corrupt the American people, its Electoral College mechanism handed the loser of an election the power of the presidency, those and similar things are what gave us Donald Trump.

Now we have the spectacle of a president who, like the criminal, Richard Nixon, has lawyers who are floating the idea that he might pardon members of his family, members of his administration AND EVEN HIMSELF in order to prevent their prosecution and in the belief that he will be able to stop the investigation into their treason with the Putin regime and in other criminal matters.  Does anyone believe that Donald Trump's sense of honor or even shame will prevent him from trying to pardon him if he can't get his chosen Vice President, Mike Pence, to end his political career by pardoning them and him?

Our Constitution is extremely hard to amend, it was hard to start with, as thirteen states went to fifty and regional-political powers played the thing for the advantage of whatever class ran those states and regions made it almost impossible to make the needed changes in the sketchier parts of the thing. We are at a time in our history, in the development of our culture and politics when, among other things, it is obvious that presidential powers of pardon have to be limited to make it impossible for him to be pardoned for treasonous acts, treasonous in reality not by Constitutional definition, that he should have no power to pardon members of his administration and campaign who are guilty of corrupting the electoral process on behalf of enemies of democracy foreign or domestic.   Vice Presidents should not have the power to pardon their predecessors who chose them and to who they have ties and owe obligations.   If Donald Trump and the members of his campaign and administration knew that there was no way they were going to be pardoned for the crimes it becomes absolutely certain they committed, THE HIGHEST CRIMES AGAINST THE AMERICAN PEOPLE AND DEMOCRACY, they might not have done it.

If that isn't done, even if our damaged democracy survives, don't count on never seeing worse in your lifetime.  The timeline of American history runs through the Bush family putsch that gave George W. Bush the presidency by one of the most shameful acts by a Supreme Court and the state of Florida run by his brother, Jeb Bush to Trump.   In my lifetime we went from the criminality of the Nixon administration to the corruption of the massively criminal Reagan administration, to the two Bushes and, now, Trump.   The Republican Party is a party which is demonstrably in the hands of criminals, they have handed the Supreme Court to politically corrupt Justices who cannot be counted on to not rule in favor of their corruption.

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I don't know about anyone else, but the revelations of ties with the Putin criminal class by Mike Flynn, Paul Manafort, Donald Trump, etc. lead me to wonder what kind of financial and business relation that Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, other FOX figures, others owning and in charge of the right-wing media in the United States and their families have with Putin and his oligarchic crime buddies.   We now know that Putin pretty much bought himself a Presidency, how much less of a stretch of the imagination would it be to imagine him buying Rupert Murdoch or others in the right-wing and more overtly neo-fascist media.  I would love to see that investigated because I'm just about certain that there must be ties as disturbing as the ones Trump and his cronies and family have. And I wouldn't limit that to the officially right-wing media.   There were and are many alleged lefties and liberals who have soft-sold Putin advantaging lines, even in magazines you wouldn't expect it.  Even such former liberal heroes as Dennis Kucinich - now a FOX "liberal" - is peddling that line.  If the American media is in the pocket of Putin, we certainly have a right to know that, especially considering their power to create a Trump and put him into office on behalf of a foreign dictator.  If the Constitution doesn't hold that we do have that right, it's just another way in which it is a danger to a free people and their right to self-government on the basis of accurate and reliable knowledge and common morality and decency.