Yesterday's debate on holding William Barr in contempt of Congress for his refusal to honor the valid subpoenas issued by the House Judiciary Committee proved that the Republican-fascists in the Congress, the party which has control of the Executive, the Judicial and half of the Legislative branch, are, in fact, a fascist party, one in support of the worst president in American history. I would propose the media's once and former figure-head exception to that, Susan Collins as the pin-up girl of Trumpian fascism, but that's a small point, at this point.
Not even Trump's demonstrable collusion with the dictator of Russia to attack American democracy, working with and praising the leader of a crime syndicate that is one of the worst and most deadly in the world, a dedicated destroyer of democracy is enough to elicit the patriotism that such Republicans so frequently strike in poses, even as their actual words and actions show that to be a fraudulent gimmick. Not even his underling henchman, the overtly declared unitary-executive fascist William Barr destroying the prerogatives of the Congress is enough to shake the wall of Republican collaboration with him. Not to mention the collusion of Republican billionaires in the same effort.
Anyone who maintains a membership in the Republican Party as of today is a part of the congealing fascism under Trump, including Robert Mueller. By this stage in the development of fascism you can't claim that those who cling to a party affiliation out of tradition or sentimentality can be held to not be supportive with the actual majority of that party. And in 2019 America, that actual majority is close to 100%.
American democracy is in the crisis that some of us have been warning was coming for decades, back when idiots in the media were pooh-poohing the warnings.
The "free-press" have not worked as Jefferson thorized it would. Freed from the obligation to not lie, the free-press has lied for the enrichment of its owners, its sponsors, its managing staff, its "opinion journalists" and even its reporters - the only actual ones who can honestly be considered to do journalism. The reporters, with very few exceptions, have followed the trends of their professional culture which includes the assertion of the rights of the liars to lie on the mistaken belief that if they were stopped from lying then, someday, real reporters would be stopped from telling the truth. Now, in the media we have, today, it is the ability of real reporters to tell the truth that has been put in dire risk of suppression through the lies that their lying colleagues have told for decades, the lies told by every level of the media, from the New York Times down to the Murdoch filled sewers about Hillary Clinton over a quarter of a century the most telling and relevant specimen of that.
The third to two-fifths of Americans who are the totally debased and willing suckers of Donald Trump and his Republican-fascists are the product of that half-century regime of lies as brought to them by the media. Donald Trump, like Ronald Reagan before him, as a public figure is 100% the product of the media.
The theory that absolute freedom of the media to say anything has not produced a more perfect union, dedicated to the proposition that all People are created equal. That Jeffersonian media, in reality, in fact, has not been a bulwark against dictatorship and fascism, it is the engine that drove the United States farther into it.
We are farther into fascism than when the production code and government regulations of broadcast media were in place and vigorously enforced. Yesterday's spectacle in the Judiciary Committee as in the entire Republican-fascist party is not just demonstrably worse but entirely worse than it was during the legendary red-scares, the reaction to which informed the foolish reaction of declaring the media entirely free to lie any lie they wanted to.
In whatever aftermath that comes after this, if those legal rulings and the corruption inherent in the Constitution of the United States, the Electoral College, the anti-democratic constitution of the Senate, the idiocy of giving the far less democratically constituted Senate the sole power to confirm judges and others, are not fixed, they are just setting things up so those who have brought us to the frontier of facism under the prevailing state of the law in 2016 will do it again, learning how to do it better, the next time.
People, a country that doesn't learn from disaster AND WHO DO NOT CHANGE THINGS THAT BROUGHT THAT DISASTER will pay with that failure with a repetition of that disaster. When a democratic country fails to change and aboloish such obvious venues for introducing fascism into their country, when it piously maintains the traditions and forms and institutions so useful to the undermining of democracy, that were so useful to the fascists, when they idiotically hold that fascists have a right to a fair chance to pitch a democracy into fascism, they are not going to hold onto democracy. Such people have shown they value equality and democracy less than those things and such people will not be able to maintain democracy.
Our country, led in that direction by the secular left of the post-war period will either learn those lessons and make those changes or the fascism by our even stupider Mussolini, our more ridiculous and stupid maybe dictator will be a product of our own stupidity and our own ridiculousness. It certainly won't be a product of intelligence and realism informed by the hard lessons of history.
No comments:
Post a Comment