Susan Collins is on her damage control tour, starting with the hours with the highest density of lying in the week, the church of mendacity and prevarication, the Sunday morning talk shows. And the media is cooperating with her effort to cover her shame with a clearly false counter-narrative at the expense of Christine Blasey Ford, Deborah Ramirez and Julie Swetnick, not to mention all of the women whose lives and bodies Susan Collins put into the hands of Brett Kavanaugh on behalf of the same Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell who played the set up men for her Susan the Sucker act over their attacks on the Affordable Care Act. Susan Collins is a shameless liar who is used to having the media carry her water and they probably will.
I would like to say I know it won't work but I know the power of lying in the American media and the determination of the billionaires who control it to bury the truth about what they've done. This is only the beginning of them trying to maintain control of all branches of the government by their minions and thugs and, if by chance the electoral branches fall to - or rather rise to democracy then they can maintain goverment by judicial fiat in their safely controlled Supreme Court. Mitch McConnell is, no doubt, anticipating the end of Ruth Bader Ginsberg's time so he can put a safely Republican-fascist sixth vote on the Court and unless the Senate goes to the Democrats, he'll do it.
That it is a racist, segregationist cabal of people like McConnell and Graham and the rest of the Senate who are going to press government by Supreme Court is, of course, ironic, though since Americans are kept in ignorance of an accurate knowledge of history by their underfunded, locally botched educations and the lying of Hollywood, TV and "historical" ficttion, most of them won't now the real depths of hypocrisy they are witnessing.
I said the other day that a real and clear view of the history of the Supreme Court isn't what the sickeningly sentimental and false narrative of pious sanctity shows, it shows that it has been, with the rarest of instances, a tool for racists, oppressors, crooks, oligarchs, the wealthy elite. The outrage at conservatives over the very brief years of the Warren Court was due to it, once in a while, not acting in accord with that almost uniform history of service to the wealthy and powerful. The fatal weakness of the American People, racism, having been one of their foremost tools of exercising and enhancing that wealth and power over the racists as well as the victims of racism, the Supreme Court rulings extending a small measure of equality was the major focus of that outrage and a means of harnessing that racism to further their ends.
The next time you hear Nina Totenberg gassing piously about the court you should remember that she and the others who wax eloquent about the Supreme Court are a part of the plan of the Mitch McConnell's as surely as those who wax eloquent about "the founders" and "originalism" and the whole litany of civic superstition that is the common received wisdom have been a part of it all along.
We have to overcome that and encourage people to imagine what it would be like to have a real democracy, real equality, real economic justice, a chance to live a dignified life having their children have a chance of a life of decency instead of one in line with the 80s boy pack film life that Kavanaugh and his posse lived for themselves and inflicted on those they victimized for fun. And that is going to be hard to overcome I wouldn't expect any help from the media, including Hollywood. I wouldn't expect it from the secular left either, to tell you the truth. They'll botch it like they always do. Probably on the basis of some asinine theory or ideological position.
The best hope is to appeal to peoples' own lives, Women, Black People, Latinos, members of other groups who have been victimized by things as they are. As the Roberts-Kavanaugh court starts destroying the modest advances in equality, rallying those groups most clearly harmed by them will be the best chance we have. But we can't do it if they are being suckered by the old lefty laziness of depending on the Courts.
As the Court reaches ever lower depths of depravity I think we are going to find that things like demanding that only a unanimous court can overturn duly adopted and signed laws is going to be a necessity for protecting and extending democracy. As I pointed out, if that were the case all of those provisions protecting our elections adopted after the full depravity of Republican attacks on it during the Nixon years would have been in place and it is a virtual certainty that the Republicans sitting on the Court now wouldn't be there. The Court rulings that permit the media to lie on behalf of billionaires and fascists and destroy the careers of liberal and progressive politicians wouldn't be there and the media would not be the lie machine it is. Who knows, maybe the hours that used to be associated with Christian piety wouldn't have turned into the hours with the highest density of lies in the week that it has under such Supreme Court rulings. Those have obviously done nothing to enhance democracy in the fifty-four years since they started, if they worked for that we and our democracy wouldn't be in the dire straights we are in.
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