AMONG THE THINGS I've grown entirely tired of there is none that is more tired than the pseudo-legalistic pose of "even-handed" treatment of entirely different and opposite things
Republican-fascists destroying egalitarian democracy - The Democratic Party,
anti-democratic ideologies, fascism, white supremacy (the same in the American context), Republican-fascism, Nazism, Marxism - egalitarian democracy
Violent insurrection against the legitimate electoral order - making the elected President, President according to law,
Lies - the truth,
Rampant evil - any level of morality,
The list could go on and on.
The idiocy of refusing to make those kinds of distinctions is based in the "enlightenment" idea that nature is going to take care of everything in the end so People can safely pretend that they don't know the difference and that such distinctions are impossible to make on the level of mathematical certainty so we shouldn't bother - I maintain that that is the reason the idiots, Madison and others in the First Congress who scribbled the poesy of the First and other Bill of Rights Amendments were so inspecific as to leave corrupt judges and "justices" the ability to put blatant lies and hate speech on the same legal footing as the obvious truth and moral speech, the legal corruption that has gotten us where we are now. Something they started doing in little and big ways almost from the start of judge-craft under the Constitution.
No where is that more obviously the case than in the courts* but "journalism" the "free press" is matching them and, in many cases, surpassing them in their "even-handed" treatment of obvious malignancy and anywhere from probable to certain benevolence. I made the mistake of listening to NPR a bit during my recess and it was among the things about it that reminded me why I stopped giving to them two decades ago. But that irresponsible non-feasant malfeasance is typical of the American media.
The media in the United States is not a dependable friend of democracy, it has been the most effective tool of the anti-democratic forces on the right and the calculated enablers of the anti-democratic "left" who are always ready to be the tool of the fascists. But it's not only those who are corrupt and clueless, it's pretty much the foremost stand of the media that it's institutional prerogatives are never to sacrificed in the mere service of the truth, the public good, equality and, in the end, democracy. In that they share the general habits of the legal industry, the lawyers, the prosecutors, the judges and the "justices" who go by or can credibly be labeled as "institutionalists,"
I grew to despise that term during the Trump years as we were, over and over again, reassured by the media and their talking heads that this one or that one of Trump's goons were "institutionalists" who would never go past a certain point and so endanger the repute or alleged soundness of the institution to which they were attached. I remember Comey being called that even as that hypocritical Republican boy-scout violated DoJ policy and threw the election to Trump in the last weeks of the campaign, I remember Rod Rosenstein being called that even as he appointed another famous fixture of the Department of "justice" the man of granite with feet of putty, Robert Mueller to conduct his investigation that never amounted to much even as even people I still have some respect for assured us he would not let it become the toy of his good buddy William Barr as he took over and Rosenstein did his stuffed dummy with the glass eyes acts as Barr lied about and suppressed Mueller's long waited for report. And Mueller didn't do much more than that when he reluctantly appeared before the Congress to not much report on his report.
I further learned to despise it during the term of Merrick Garland when it has continued to be used. I'm just about at the point of deciding that the case on that has been thrown and the jury will never come back on it.
In an honest, egalitarian democracy, there would be no "institutionalists" because they would hold as absolute bedrock that those institutions have no higher purpose than to serve egalitarian democracy, that the laws have no higher purpose than that and the service to the common good. Without that the DoJ is no better under Garland than it was under the worst AGs, Sessions, Barr, Wittacker, John Mitchell, . . . you have to go way back before you can find any Democratic AGs who are as malignant as they are, though the media, especially the DC based Washington Press Whores will never acknowledge that fact.
* A first draft of this went far into the "free speech" "justicing" that led to pitched legal battles over such matters as requirements for strippers to wear pasties and g-strings and that such bull shit was judged to be important "First Amendment" molehills such as idiot 1960s-> style "liberals" would stand and die on. For those who object to me doubting the wisdom of the Warren Court and its stupidest rulings, of which there were quite a few. Maybe I'll do more reading up on the speech of strip-joints and write what I started but it was so stupid I was wondering if the pain meds they had me on were doing the typing. I have to wonder if those old white men sometimes wondered if they were in incipient dementia as they wrote and read that crap though the civil-libertarians who spouted it were just shameless paid-sills for it, no pasties or g-strings to hide their shamelessness.
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