HE WISDOM OF THE WISE is often pretty stupid in the end. That Scripture tells us something like that in a comparison of human wisdom to that of God proves that sometimes Scripture makes sense. Scripture also tells us that knowing the truth is what will free us and that is certainly far wiser than the First Amendment which doesn't specify the right to tell the truth doesn't mean there is a right to lie. Since lies spread in the mass media and, now, online are responsible for the peril democracy is in here and around the world, that is certainly wiser than the wisdom of liberal democratic theory, free speech absolutism which privileges lies and the media to lie despite the obvious danger of that. We will need to get over our fetish for the First Amendment as it is written AND AS IT HAS BEEN DISTORTED EVEN FARTHER BY LAWYERS AND JUDGES AND "JUSTICES" or democracy is going to die by the force of the privilege those give to those who lie.
That most august of newspapers, the New York Times boasted a while back that it was the first beneficary of the most unwise privilege given by the U.S. Supreme Court to lie with impunity, the Sullivan decision that had the practical effect of making lying about Democratic politicians immune so that Republicans would win elections the law of the land. Of course, as I pointed out yesterday, that was not what the Warren Court thought they were doing when they made the ruling though anyone who understood who owned the media, the rich, and the eventual decision of the rich to do what is in their own best financial interest, to put dishonest politicians who will enrich them even more into power to do that could have predicted the outcome of a permission to lie about politicians and other public figures would have. We ran that test, it produced Nixon in 1968, Reagan in 1980, Bush I in 1986, Bush II in 2000 and 2004 and Trump in 2016. AND THOSE "JUSTICES" THEY PUT ON THE COURT. As I will point out more, I suspect, Nixon lost in 1960, before the Sullivan Decision was issued, he won in 1968 and brought the American presidency to a level of criminality that had not previously been known. I could dwell on his many administrations domestic crimes (including those of Gorsuch's mother, who was convicted), though his and, through his crimes in Southeast Asia, Latin America, Ford's in East Timor, etc. Bush I and II in Iraq and the region, with literally millions dead are the most serious of those crimes. I will never forget that Congressman Fr. Robert Drinan proposed articles of impeachment against Nixon for his crimes extending from the Vietnam War only to have the congressional committee refuse to adopt them, but that topic is for another post. I don't, by the way, in any way withhold that same condemnation of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, the point some commentators have made that the immunity the Roberts thugs gave for official acts of the president are probably far more dangerous than the crimes they will commit outside of their official acts, though the Roberts thugs have erased any real line that would have separated the two in judicial make-believe.
Make-believe
Ronald Reagan was a product of Hollywood pretense, deception and con artistry. His, um, acting career was what led to his elevation to politics, used by and using all of the phony methods of the movie industry and the PR racket to get to the presidency and the lying media to keep him there. Trump was far more a creation of the alleged news media, the press and TV and radio in New York, before he went on to have a career in the most repulsively and dishonestly named effect of a culture saturated in ephemera, "reality TV" which is all TV and has nothing to do with reality. Everything about Trump's TV show, from presenting the vulgar con man as a brilliant businessman as dictator in TV sets that I'd bet most of its audience believed were the Trump company offices. The truth that Trump was never more than a con man who hired corrupt lawyers to rig his con games using every weakness and stupidity in the courts to cover up his criminality was certainly not told on TV in that show. We have the producers and directors and writers of Hollywood as much as the tabloid, cabloid press and hate talk radio for the Trump presidency, as with Reagan, the Trump presidency was a total product of the media, the free press to lie with impunity and present "reality" that was really nothing but lies. Yet, because of the stupidity of the First Congress who drafted the Bill of Rights to not specify that there is no right to lie with impunity as they both set up a vague "free speech" and an even more ill considered privilege they misnamed a "right" to the artificial entity, "the press" and the Warren Court going with that so that dirty books could be sold without being arrested (what a price we've paid for that devolution in culture) little will be done to prevent worse as the enemies of equality and democracy hone their skills in deception and conning, gulling and wowing an ever stupider media-trained public. And the "news" media, is all in on that instead of rigorous fact-checking before they publish. What a price we've paid for the scribblers, publishers, producers and babblers' convenience.
As we should be mourning the Supreme Court's destruction of democracy in favor of a dictatorial presidency on Monday, the Declaration of Independence, casting off the British monarchy will be touted as if what just happened didn't happen and that it wasn't decisively the end of that effort to have the rule of laws and not of men. If there is a sober analysis of what happened, it should certainly include the place that lies and show-biz has played in it. What brought the six "justices" who crowned Trump as thug-king to power were the power of lies spread in the mass media, the "free press" that's a hell of a lot wider spread, faster and more effective in manipulating Peoples' minds than the ink on paper, one page printed at a time "press" that Jemney Madison and his colleagues imagined they were enabling. If there's one thing that those of us old enough to have experienced the invention of the internet and its rapid adoption should have learned it is that a change in conditions, what may have seemed a relatively safe permission to lie in 1800 has proved ever since to be extremely dangerous, first mostly to Native Americas, Black People, Women, especially those without money and so power, but now to everyone. Modern mass media changed everything as it ate up the conscious attention of most of us most of the time. The dictators of the first half of the 20th century, the fascist movement of the revived KKK, etc. early realized the power of even silent movies to spread lies and hate and racism and, certainly, the subjugation of Women. The willfully blind members of the upper escallon of the legal profession, the kinds who teach Constitutional Law at universities and publish academic abstractions in influential journals have their heads in the sand and their eyes and ears shut against the reality of how dangerous allowing them to lie is. But, then, considering that Monday's demolition job on democracy was a product of such lawyerly-lying as could invent and promote the unitary executive theory and keep jobs at places like Harvard Law and the other Ivies and their equivalents, no doubt what even the prissiest of the Roberts Court's six Republican-fascists rests her mind upon to do such evil, why would anyone expect members of the legal profession to be against lying when it gets them what they and their sponsors want?
As much as anything the death blow the Roberts Court gave to democracy was a product of the professional slipperiness of the legal profession in regard to the truth AND MODERN ACADEMIA'S EQUALLY SLIPPERY RELATIONSHIP WITH REAL LIFE AND THE TRUTH.
The hard truth is that if we want democracy, if we want responsible freedom to govern our lives and societies, we are going to have to make and force the choice for truth and the insistence on good will as a ground level requirement for us all. Libertarian liberty, free from responsibility freedom won't make you free, it will just unequally distribute the misery and the privilege. That's what our legal system does, for pay, with hourly billing. We're going to have to change that or we will never get out from under the dictatorship of the Supreme Court. More than a hundred ten years ago the radical lawyer and legal scholar Louis Boudin warned that the Marbury v Madison ruling and its extension from Dred Scott till then and on till now meant that the United States was such a country ruled by black-robed, establishment-conservative men (now some women), that the Constitution meant only what they said it did by anything from a simple majority to a nine-man consensus - that's hardly rule of law with the just consent of The People. There is no other Supreme Court in any modern democracy that has that power which the Supreme Court gave itself in 1803, he noted how dangerous it already was at the time of its first major use in the Dred Scott decision, he gave many ample examples of its corrupting and irrational consequences in rulings up to his day, it has become steadily worse. We now know that the Supreme Court is willing to up-end the very framers' intention to turn the presidency from an executive of a Congressional, representative democracy into a lawless despot. They have literally over-ruled the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution from the bench.
I hope that someday they'll take that atrocious building that houses that court and either tear it down or turn it into a museum of legal injustice because that's what it houses and symbolizes. I want a reformed Supreme Court housed in a modest office building with a mandate to protect and defend equality and democracy as well as a reformed Constitution. One that will reign in the corruptions of the legal racket, from the sleaziest of gangster lawyers up to the gangsters on law school faculties and in the judiciary. The Supreme Court is a lawless institution, by its own choices and the refusal of the Executive and Legislative branches to impinge on them even as the Court usurps the functions of both. Why would the Roberts Court not mind a despot, that's what the Supreme Court has been willing to be, especially during the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts, with the backing of legal scholars and theoreticians who are financed by billionaires and millionaires. The whole thing has to be purged of that nonsense, right now or far, far worse is coming.
This is one of those rants that I can't try to edit without adding to so I'll leave it to this.
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