Note, I have made a small edit to one sentence in what I wrote yesterday afternoon because Duncan's hind is doing what his kind of liar does, removing part of what was said from its context.
The sentence now ends:
. . . . THAT'S WHAT THE WORD MEANS IN YOUR USE OF IT.
the meaning of the sentence in context doesn't change, but, alas, it only means he'll just have to find another way to lie through decontextualization. He will. You can't protect yourself against people who have no morals among his cohort that doesn't' care about the truth. As I pointed out, yesterday, my little problem is that he's provided a venue through which to lie with impunity.
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Much as I am on the outs with The Nation, these days, the excellent Elie Mystal had a masterful piece there about that in the context of the scumbag Jonathan Turley, His first two sentences points out exactly the problem we face in refuting lies:
The House Judiciary Committee held something like a national teach-in on impeachment yesterday. Democrats still believe they can counter the Republican strategy of lying to their base with the somber recitation of facts.
That's the problem, Democrats have been somberly reciting facts to counter the florid, fecund lies of Republicans ever since the fucking Warren Court gave the media protection to lie with impunity in 1964, we have had fifty-five years of seeing what happens when lies are allowed free reign. My little problem with lies allowed is nothing compared to what the free-speech-free-press absolutism of the ACLU and the Warren Court - ever expanded by the subsequent Republican-fascist courts knowing its utility to their facism - has brought us to. Turley is the stinking dick shaped fungus that grows out of the rot that has resulted.
It is the greatness of Elie Mystal that he sees the rot in its fullest context of educational and media and political-judicial elites and their mutual back scratching.
Turley is a paid legal analyst for CBS News. He writes a column for The Hill. And he’s still a tenured professor at George Washington Law. That he was summoned to give such plainly conflicting testimony, and that he was willing to give it even as it directly contradicted his thoughts and writings about prior impeachments, perfectly exemplifies how legal elites and legacy media have failed to meet the challenge of the Donald Trump presidency.
It’s the same failure we saw during the Brett Kavanaugh nomination, where elite legal scholars lined up to defend the “character” of a man who lied repeatedly during prior congressional testimony, finally piping down—and only at that—once the attempted rape allegation came out. It’s the same failure we see every night on television when a news organization brings on a legal pundit to surface misinformation and faulty logic in the name of presenting both sides. We see it every time a career attorney at the Department of Justice stands up in open court and argues that kidnapped children being held in cages by Trump’s government don’t need toothbrushes.
There is simply no professional or societal downside for people like Turley to make these bad, intellectually dishonest arguments. Turley himself was a random environmental law wonk before he made himself famous during the Clinton impeachment years. He made the media rounds then, calling himself a “Democrat” who was willing to speak truth to power about the “serious” nature of Clinton’s misbehavior. Back then, Turley was lauded by people like Rush Limbaugh for demanding that Clinton’s own Secret Service agents be subpoenaed to testify about what they know.
The real left, the traditional American left founded in egalitarian democracy has to open its eyes to the consequences of allowing lies flowing out of the choice to abandon morality on the basis of the ill considered words of the First Congress where they took up the Bill of Rights pretty much because Madison had been forced into promising he'd take that up in order to get Virginia to adopt his Constitution. They didn't put much of an effort into it and wanted something so vague and general that they could manipulate to their own ends. As we are seeing now, it has the power to destroy democracy with "freedom". Economic elites are to be expected as a venue of corruption, that is a story as old as Genesis and Exodus, as Billie Holiday said, "So the Bible says, and it still is news."
I'd love to go into the thinking of David Bentley Hart about our fallacious ways of thinking of freedom. In the post-war context it turned into free to be entirely self indulgent instead of free to find out what was the right thing to do. But that will have to wait. In contemporary, post-war thinking, popularlized by Hollywood and hack writers, libertarian notions of freedom swamped any idea of moral obigation, especially an obligation to protect the truth, that is the "freedom" that you'll get from the Republicans, the neo-Nazis, the Jordan Peterson Incel boys raging at women, white supremacists, that "freedom" leads to fascism. We really should start noticing, especially, the danger of freedom to lie and the magnified danger of lies enabled and so empowered, Hart notes that such freedom could lead to hell.
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