You don't have to tell me that my habit of thinking I'm going to jinx things by hoping for them or expressing confidence that they'll happen is a silly superstition, I know it. Doesn't mean I'm going to take chances that I'm wrong about that. Not about something as important as what I hope happens the second noon Eastern Standard Time starts and continues through a Biden, then a Harris administration, with good and capable Democrats in control of the Congress. It's too important to take a chance I'm wrong about the jinx thing.
I've been very critical of Biden at many points in his career, though I had thought he was a promising candidate for president when he was young and perhaps callow. I think a lot of the stuff he said and did that I as afraid of was the necessity of a Democrat navigating their way around the lies and attacks that the media would throw in their way to scuttle their attempts at gaining power to do the good that the oligarchs want to prevent. That has been something you can thank the Supreme Court and its freedom to lie they granted to the media, a totally uncivil liberty that the corporate media and the play left have used mostly to destroy the promising career of Democrats who could win elections and do good. That is a habit which I have every confidence that the corporate media and the pseudo-non-profit media such as NPR and PBS will take up almost immediately. I have no doubt that Republican-fascists are planning on sandbagging the Biden-Harris administration as they will Democrats in the Congress and on the State and local levels, even as the insurrection of January 6th fades in the memory and the gaping wounds that our second As Seen on TV president inflicted on the nation and on the world scab over.
You mark my word, until the media, and you have to include the disease of "social media" in that, until they are all made accountable for lies they tell and lies they allegedly passively carry, you can count on a Trump and far worse and not in some distant future. It took eight short years from the disaster of the Bush II regime, a regime I will remind you was inflicted on us through the Electoral College as worked by Jeb Bush, the sleazy Florida Secretary of State and some media work by a Bush family cousin on FOX, it took eight short years for the media to bring us with lies told about Hillary Clinton to Trump. It took two short years for them and the billionaire astro-turf "tea party" to kneecap the Obama administration, throwing control of the House to the odious John Boehner (then the even worse Paul Ryan) and the Senate to the vile Mitch McConnell.
The liberty, privilege, really, to lie that the Supreme Court gave to the mass media is a curse which secular materialism has cast on the United States, we will not have equality THE ONLY REAL AND SAFE GUARANTEE OF DEMOCRACY until that privilege to lie with impunity is removed and media is held responsible and punished for lies it actively tells and those it allegedly passively carries on the basis of "it's being said". The most recent campaign of the "it's being said" form of lies is in the Republicans excusing their attempt on January 6th at a larger, more vulgar form of the Brooks Bros. Putsch that brought in Bush II there is an unprecidented lack of confidence in the Presidential election of 2020. THAT THEY DON'T ADMIT THAT THEY ARE THE ONES WHO LIED A LARGE NUMBER OF REPUBLICANS INTO BELIEVING THAT THE ELECTION WAS CROOKED IS JUST A PART OF THE LIE THEY ARE SELLING, I have every confidence that the media will try to sell that lie for them.
The role that lies, especially lies created and sold through the same methods that advertising has perfected played in the disaster of the past four years should be fully recognized. Lies in the style of successful con-men, what Trump always has been, lies which you can see all night and all day on TV, hear on the radio, see on the internet are what got us Trump. Democracy has no chance as they get better at it.
I listened to Al Franken the other day talking with the two lawyers Joyce Vance and Prett Bhrara. At one point the politician and show business guy AND ALL TOO BRIEFLY GREAT SENATOR talked about the necessity of doing something about the flood of lies that washed in the sewage of Trump. He gets it, though I don't think in developed enough form. The two lawyers seemed to be horrified at the thought that something might, no, must be done to stop the lies that will bring us here again. That is something that is like a superstition in the legal profession, that because of a once novel interpretation of the woefully badly written Bill of Rights nothing is to be done even at the cost of democracy, even at the cost of basic decency and the distinction between the truth and lies. That superstition that started in people like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis and William O. Douglas is far stupider and far, far more dangerous than my harmless fear of jinxes. Free speech-press absolutism of even the degree that controls the thinking of our legal system is of demonstrable danger. All you have to do is listen to how they talk about the truth that lies got us to Trump and the insurrection of the 6th but then they can't comprehend that the way out of that is by stopping the media from lying.
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