Turley, the as-seen-on-TV Constitutional expert, promoter of the idiotic pseudo-scientific bull shit "neuro-law" says nothing, mis-citing history and to clinch his argument, depending, not on real history but on costume drama, A Man for All Seasons. He quoted the made up Thomas More from a make-believe confrontation, the kind of set-up job that hagiographic bull-shit costume dramas always turn to. I am so tired of hearing people quote that fictitious speech. When the movie of the play was done, Pauline Kael pretty much got the measure of the movie, not More, who in reality was a far, far more complex, far far more variable person who was hardly uniformly admirable. He had no problem serving Henry VIII who by the time of their confrontation was already a pretty blood-thirsty tyrant who got steadily worse as Trump certainly will if he is not removed from office.
Bolt’s presentation of More’s martyrdom is so totally one-sided that we don’t even get to understand that side—as we might if it were challenged and engaged in conflict. Though the principle for which he is beheaded (his belief that the Pope represents divine law so that he is saving his soul in taking the Catholic position against Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn) seems doubtful at best, it is given as beyond question in this film that a man should follow the dictates of his conscience. (The Afrikaners willing to die for apartheid—and they find their justifications in divine law also—could probably make as good a case.) This More is simply right and he’s smart and good and just about omniscient (he even knows his Judas); his great opponent, Henry VIII, is vain and childish, and everyone else is weak, stupid, cowardly, or corrupt. More is the only man of honor in the movie, and he’s got all the good lines.
"Vain and childish and everyone else us weak, stupid, cowardly or corrupt."
Kael couldn't have come up with a better description of the Republicans in the Executive and the Congress (who called Turley as their witness), perhaps on the Supreme Court, rendering the as-seen-on-TV Turley's use of that threadbare speech grotesquely ironic.
The reason that that particular part of the screen-play is reached for was also identified by the often keen-sighted Kael.
Bolt’s More is the kind of hero we used to read about in the biographies of great men written for twelve-year-olds: the one against the many. Perhaps people think A Man for All Seasons is so great because unlike the usual movie which is aimed at 12-year-olds, it’s aimed at 12-year-old intellectuals and idealists. And if they’ve grown into compromising and unprincipled people, they can hail A Man for all Seasons as a masterpiece: heroism so remote, so totally the property of a supra-human figure, absolves them of human weakness. It becomes romantic.
Turley will, I predict, for the rest of his time on camera - I would guess that he, as "little Dersh" is greatly motivated by getting his puss on TV - play to that kind of 12-year-old mindset. His cynicism is identical to that of Dershowitz or Giuliani and the rest of Trump's TV lawyers.
Impeachment is not merely a legal thing, it is in service, in this case to protecting our political system. How bad is Turley's political judgement? He might not have supported Trump in 2016 but he did support the lunatic libertarian Gary Johnson. Johnson might not have committed crimes but he would have been a different kind of disaster.
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