THE MEDIA HANDLING of the news that the best president in living memory, Joe Biden has an aggressive and metastasized form of prostate cancer has been entirely in keeping with the media handling of Democratic politicians as opposed to Republican politicians, also going back to at least 1966 or so. Any Democrat or would-be liberal or lefty who hasn't noticed that Democrats are ALWAYS in for worse treatment by the media than Republicans in that fifty-nine years or so is either a media professional who has a vested interest in lying about that - and almost all of them are - or they are extremely stupid.
The fact is that the media is only even a friend of equality and democracy when they have some requirement to favor the truth over opportunistic lies. That comes as close as a taught lesson from experience as could be had from an honest appraisal of the history of the American media, freed by Supreme Court rulings to lie with impunity. That is freed to lie when it comes to Democratic politicians who might not favor the interests of the millionaires and billionaires who own and run and appear on camera in the media as opposed to the Republicans who are devoted to the servicing of millionaires and billionaires. This is yet another example of that one law for the lion and the ox meaning oppression as mentioned here Saturday, one law for the liars and the truth-tellers leads to oppression as can be seen in the descent of American politics into fascism over exactly that same fifty-nine years after the Sullivan Decision.
Jake Tapper is, no doubt, gleeful in the marketing opportunity he and his co-writer have had in applying the double standard that is fully compatible with the First Amendment, one-law fits all, as it has turned out. No doubt about it. I heard the allegedly liberal NPR giving him that kind of opportunity this morning as they used his line that not only Joe Biden's administration but the entire Democratic Party allegedly kept Joe Biden's health problems and alleged mental decline a secret. They do that AS NO PART OF THE MEDIA THAT REALLY COUNTS, THE NETWORKS, THE CABLOIDS, THE GUTTER LEVEL PODCASTERS, ETC. DON'T DO THE SAME FOR THE ENTIRELY CLEAR MENTAL DEBILITY OF TRUMP.
Joe Biden's administration LED BY HIM, PUT TOGETHER BY HIM, had the best performance of any president since Franklin Roosevelt did with a similar situation handed to him by three Republican presidents. His economic policies were the envy of democracies that didn't bounce back anywhere near as much from the economic chaos that had come in the years before he took office. He had the most competent presidency since LBJ's and, unlike the tragedy of LBJ getting suckered farther into Vietnam by the Harvard boys, Joe Biden bravely took the hit by sticking to the deadline that Trump I set for the U.S. exiting from the interminable war in Afghanistan. He was, indeed, THE MOST COMPETENT PRESIDENT OF MY LIFETIME and that goes back into the Truman years. Yet the media has painted him as a senile and incompetent old man. Apparently George Clooney's disappointment that Joe Biden, during a very difficult presidency forgot his face figures heavily into this. As good an actor as Clooney might be, and he's good but he's not great, and as handsome as he continues to be, I'd rather have a president who remembered the People and issues that were a vital part of his job than even a celebrated Hollywood actor. Actors who are disappointed that a President, who has to meet regularly with heads of state, politicians, advisors, popes, heads of state, etc. might not recall who they are (do we know that Joe Biden watched his movies?) are not the best measure of the competence of an American president.
I will contrast the media handling of Ronald Reagan who frequently forgot who members of his cabinet were and who as sympathetic a head of government as Margaret Thatcher noted had nothing much in his head, who believed he was in on the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp, as he sat in Hollywood, the incompetent and stupid Bush II and now Trump who is clearly and publicly both stupid and demented and who wrecked America's health-care, economy and infrastructure once and who is doing it again, and who well may top Hoover in tanking the economy decisively.
Anyone who buys into the relatively young Thomas Jefferson's absurd notion that journalism is a reliable bulwark against oppression after two hundred and fifty years of the evidence that unless they are punished for lying, they will always serve wealth and the most malicious of purposes, is either a liar or they are more demented than anyone has accused Joe Biden of being. I would put Jake Tapper in the liar category, someone who serviced the rise of Trump II by his refusal to fact check him during the "debate" that he co-anchored with the equally putrid Dana Bash. And I would put NPR, the New York Times and virtually every other large player in the American media in that category.
There is a potential for the media to serve egalitarian democracy but not so long as it is owned by the millionaires and billionaires and especially not as long as it has legal protection to lie with impunity for the interests of its owners and operators. The legal mechanisms to hold them to account and to break up the very real control of those with millions and billions would be far different from what we have now and, LIKE ANY MAN MADE LEGAL SYSTEM, would have flaws and dangers embedded in them. For anyone who prefers the current system with its known dangers which are deadly to egalitarian democracy and a decent life for all than to try to learn from the disasterous history of America after the Sullivan Decision, you have already given up on equality, democracy and decency, how much worse does it have to get before you face the obvious truth? A Third Reich, Italian fascist or Imperial Japan in ruins? A post-nuclear nightmare? I will remind you of the Musk-Trump regime playing with the "fail safe" system that protects us from our own nuclear arsenal - I wonder if George Clooney will admit that it was safer under Biden than with what he, foolishly, helped bring us back to. I can't rate our alleged journalism's danger to democracy as opposed to the role that Hollywood has played in it - Trump as a politician is a product of Hollywood as was Reagan - but "liberal Hollywood" is about as reliable for being a problem for it. But, then, entertainment is a matter of make-believe, just as our journalism is, now that they have also had public interest requirements removed from them, as well as not lying.
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