The Law Is An Ass

HERE I AGREE WITH attorney Dave Aronberg in my extreme dislike of Sarah Palin and everything she stands for - or rather sinks to - while I think he, like the conventional lawyer's POV, entirely misses the real significance of her second loss in her lawsuit against the New York Times.

First I'll give him his say:

 

I analyze this differently,   it's Sarah Palin getting bitten by a Supreme Court ruling and media practice that no side has benefited more from than her Republican-fascism and, especially Trumpism.    If the Sullivan decision had been a loss for the NYT and the instruction was that they pay a nominal fine and court costs and issue a retraction the entire sixty years of Republican-fascist ascendancy through media lies about Democrats would never have happened.  She and Trump and a series of the worst politicians in the subsequent decades would never have had political careers and the subsequent Rehnquist and Roberts Courts would likely never have been appointed to the Court.   In no area is the legal profession as this one exposed as being supremely superficial and wrong.

Most consequential to our situation today, if the Sullivan Decision had never been issued, the New York Times would not have so freely slandered Hillary Clinton, they would not have issued lies about her immediately before the 2016 election,  piling on with the Republican-fascist enabling and grotesquely sanctimonious James Comey to sway the election to objectively the worst president in American history, appointing the worst Supreme Court since at least the Taney Court of the 1850s.   

If the Sullivan Decision and the line of those decisions building on it,  Donald Trump would probably never have had a political career, he may have ended up sued into the flames of hell by those he slandered and libeled, including in a paid opinion piece published by the NYT as it published the original factually deficient ad that led to that decision. 

Lawyers are not, it turns out, deep thinkers.   Their ability to miss the ultimate consequences of their own profession's actions for the immediate benefits strikes me as more and more important.   It extends to the senior ranks of the profession in the judges and, especially the "justices."