IN TALKING ABOUT THE DANGER of the undemocratic, unanswerable, life-time appointed Supreme Court grabbing and creating powers for itself, on its own, I said that it's difficult for me to imagine what it would be like if the Court had those powers taken from it and put back to what such courts in other countries do and what, apparently, the Court was originally imagined as being. Deeply ingrained habits of thought and a lack of alternative information are an obstacle to changing things, so is the pessimistic, sometimes cynical acceptance of the present evil because even if you can imagine something different you don't have faith in enough other people to imagine that they, presented with the dangers of our run amok Court could accept that change.
But this is about Tucker Carlson carrying Putin's polluted water into the minds of FOX viewers, very possibly preparing his dupes for the Putin use of biological weapons in his war on Ukraine, hoping to blame it on the Ukrainian government and the Biden administration. Tucker Carlson is Putin's Axis Sally, FOX is his #1 media asset in the United States and Republican-fascist oligarchs are all-in with him in that. Certainly including those on the courts (and not a few idiot "civil libertarians"), That's not in any way shocking, FOX and its allies in the media put Trump, Putin's most important asset in the White House, after all.
This is a direct product of the way the Supreme Court interpreted the First Amendment and, I'm going to say, the lazy and truncated process of the First Congress in writing the "Bill of Rights" with its absurd absolutist language that, expanded by post-WWII courts has enabled the biggest, most corrupt liars into doing to the American People what Putin does in Russia, controlling power through mass media magnified lies. It comes from idiots on that and other courts pretending that lying through mass media is NOT far more of a danger than unamplified lies heard by a limited number of hearers.
Either you really believe the obvious, that Putin's puppet, Trump nearly destroyed the fabric of America's deeply flawed electoral democratic process through lies AND YOU CARE ENOUGH ABOUT THAT TO MAKE SURE LIES CAN'T BE USED TO DO THAT AGAIN or you may as well admit that you are an asset in that effort.
I realized that a long time ago, that what got us here were the lies spread by the media when they weren't originating them, just as what got Russia where it was were the lies that they got fed to them through the mass media. Dictators, especially modern dictators gain and keep power through lies, democracy depends on The People knowing the truth.
THERE ARE SOME THINGS YOU CAN'T HAVE BOTH WAYS, no matter how cleverly you think you can manage things to get what you want.
- You cannot have both slavery and freedom, as the framers of the Constitution thought they could. Jefferson and Madison demonstrably chose to believe they could have freedom for white males but not for Black People. They, both of them intellectually sophisticated men were wrong, their personal selfishness and economic greed triumphed over their cleverness. Lincoln was right about that, I think his refusal to participate in slavery and his refusal to overlook it augmented his intelligence. Being right about something as real and important as human equality is one of the guaranteed symptoms of superior intelligence, one so often lacking in those of conventional intellectual status.
- You cannot have the benefits of the truth, among which the Gospel of John tells us is freedom, while permitting the massive and stupid lie that anyone has a right to lie. Yet our courts, staffed with people of such conventional intellectual status, tell us that there is not only a right to lie but because the like of Madison wrote the First Amendment so carelessly and so irresponsibly to imply nothing should be done about even the most dangerous of lies, SUCH AS ISSUE 24-7 FROM OUT MASS MEDIA, even as we have experienced close calls and dangers and disastrous results of that. For the comfortable, the wealthy, the safe due to their wealth, they don't really much care about even the most deadly results for other people. Especially Poor People, Black People, other People of Color, Women, LGBTQ, . . . As I surprised at least one person when I said it, it's no wonder that people as corrupt as Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett would issue rulings and concurrences stripping Black People and Women of their full person hood, white men have been doing that to other white men and Black People and Women for the entire history of the Supreme Court.
There is a seductive stupidity among those of such conventional superior intellect that permits them to imagine that they can engage in extremely dangerous behavior which can be expected to result in terrible consequences that leads them to believe they can control the danger and work it to their advantage. I think that is what a lot of clever Republicans thought they could do in managing the racist, violence prone fascist element that they welcomed within their party, providing the financial-Republicans, the money-men, with electoral victory while controlling them to minimize the violence and danger for themselves. They learned in some numbers that they aren't able to do that and they are not tempted to try again what, in Trump, became dangerous enough for their intelligence to overcome their selfishness.
Clearly William Barr who announced this week, even as he promotes a book trying to distance himself from his corrupt lawyering for Trump says that he would vote for him again in two years, is the poster boy of Republican-fascist intellectual degeneracy. It's not as if that wasn't apparent when he worked for previous Republican presidents, doing the lawyerly thing of coming up with schemes for letting them do clearly wrong and illegal things, coming up with lawyerly ways to let them get off for doing that. Our legal system does that all the time for the rich and powerful and to service it's own prejudices. I think that rot throughout the legal system gets a lot of its permission to do that from the corruption of the self-created imperial Supreme Court but that's a really long argument.
We, if we survive, have to make the choice. You cannot have a government that is both democratic and not egalitarian. You cannot have a government which is corrupt on behalf of one group of people and which does justice for everyone. You can know the truth and the truth will make you free - that truth including that you are to do to others as you would have them do unto you - or you can privilege lies with the lie that there is a right to lie and the results will be the loss of freedom and the evils of despotism.
There is no reason for us not to learn from the terrible history of the last two hundred fifty years, only idiots refuse to learn from the consequences of choices and actions - what makes history important to know - and our Constitutional system makes idiots of us all if we think we shouldn't change our course even with our experience of such dangers as Trump and the horrific example of Putin to teach us the hardest of lessons.
We can have egalitarian democracy or we can have FOX with Tucker Carlson carrying Putin's water along with a good number of Republican-fascists who our media have put into power. We can't have both.
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