YOU CAN BE as certain as you could that Maureen Dowd would attack any Democratic Woman who rose to prominence, that the media has already started that kind of attack on Kamala Harris. That NYT piece of crap is an unreconstructed bitch of the kind that the fascism adjacent* Clare Booth Luce would have written. The media's asserted liberalism is largely like the Supreme Court's assumed rectitude, an easily refuted myth that is nearly universally believed on the basis of repeated repetition. It is believed in on the same basis that Trump's cult believes his lies, on the Big Lie basis. In a population so accustomed to taking in what it believes and mistakenly believes it knows, one so trained by entertainment, infotanement TV and gaudy hate-talk radio and the syphilitic social media, is set up to buy any lie, whether that is whatever unneeded, over-priced, cheapened down consumer product or which ever gangster politician to put into political power or on to the court.
The corruption of democracy into what it is under Republican-fascism is the paramount achievement of the American "free-press," the American media freed to lie for its own purposes with no requirement that it serve the needs of We The People, as a democracy. It is an achievement of media free to do that under the foolish assumptions of liberal democracy that democracy doesn't have prerequisite moral foundations, one of the most important of those being that The People have the right to accurate information upon which democracy depends. One which the rapidly dying art of honest reporting of fact used to serve though never as much as was needed and often in ways that refused to filter out lies and self-serving assumptions. That is best seen by how the media, even at its inadequate best, so often trafficked in the worst stereotypes, EXACTLY THE SAME STEREOTYPES AS, CERTAINLY, ARE ALREADY BEING USED AGAINST KAMALA HARRIS, RACISM AND SEXISM.
The other and, I insist primary foundation of democracy is egalitarianism, the moral foundation of democracy along with the need for People to know the truth. The major defect in 18th and 19th and too much of later liberal democracy was inequality, sexual, racial and economic inequality, though, at least when it came to defaming those wealthy and so powerful enough to hire a lawyer to defend themselves in court, there was that inhibition against lying in public and in the mass media. It is one of the great ironies of American history that it was even as the highest courts were inching towards equality during the 1950s through the early 70s, that they were kicking the other moral leg out from under democracy by allowing the media to lie with impunity, without regard to whether or not it did that in its own financial and, so political interest. And with the freedom to lie and turning "free speech-press" into an all consuming idol, the Warren Court set us up for what has brought us here, today. The First Congress did its part through the sloppy wording of the Bill of Rights, in a moral sin of omission, they didn't specify that there is an absolute right to tell the truth but that there is no such thing as a right to lie. They compounded that through misidentifying the privilege they gave to a corporate entity, the "press", to publish without the Congress restricting them as a "right" when corporate entities cannot possess rights, only natural beings can. There is no right for the press to do anything, giving them a privilege to publish without major government interference should never have been given without extracting an obligation to serve egalitarian democracy. Perhaps if democracy ever gets another chance after the implosion of the early 2000s, those doing it will do so on a sounder moral philosophical basis than Madison et all did in the 18th century.
The reason for those in terms of politics and governance, to serve the equality and democracy that were either explicitly stated or implied in the Declaration of Independence which had claimed that the just consent of the governed was the only basis of legitimate government, were entirely left out of the First Amendment which would become foundational law in one of the most important aspects of the law which would govern and, so, deform whatever democracy would develop under it. That is why the Rehnquist and the most corrupt of all Supreme Courts under John Roberts have used the First Amendment in its demolition of egalitarian democracy, going so far as to destroy a country of laws and not of Republican-fascist men, doing so on behalf of among the very worst of American Presidents, Donald Trump.
Our problems are many and they all stem from the defects in our Constitution and its administration under the power usurping Supreme Court. At least that is the source of our problems in relatively easily stated and fixed terms. The greater source of that is the moral corruption that was endemic in the population from before the Constitution and Bill of Rights were written, racism, sexism, inequality, greed and resentment, and its being inflamed through the media, through lying, propagandistic "news" such as FOX specializes in, for certain, and in the far, far more universally present and watched entertainment media. Donald Trump is a creation, first and foremost, of the entertainment divisions of our media, the feature sections in the New York Times and other moribund ink on paper sources, on infotanement "news" and hate-talk radio, but most potently in the lying, fictitious "reality TV show" that made his phony act of a great businessman (a gangster, in more honest terms) and sold that as what his fan base wanted in a political leader, the better to deliver on their basest desires of such white men to rule the world and put down People of Color and Women. Which is the same actual motive of the New York Times, certainly its opinion sections as well as in the kind of reportage that pushes the same biases.
Donald Trump is stupid enough to have briefly and occasionally called for the overturning of the Supreme Court's permission of the media to lie about politicians and celebrities, too stupid to understand that he is the biggest, fattest, stupidest beneficiary of the Sullivan decision. If that decision had never been made, Donald Trump, that fountain of lies, slander and libel, would have been sued into living rough on the streets decades ago. There would never have been a Nixon presidency, there would have never been a Trump regime. I think LBJ would have had a second term and, if he had done what President Biden did, gotten us out of a hopeless war started by earlier presidents, its likely his Great Society would have succeeded even against the media attacks on his attempt to make American democracy egalitarian and there would have been a long line of Democrats where there were Republicans in the history of the past fifty six years. There would have been no Rehnquist Court to ratfuck the election of a Republican president who lost the election in 2000 and there would have been no media lies about one in 2016, giving us another of those uniformly bad Electoral College produced regimes that lack the certification of legitimacy, winning the popular vote. All of that started with the Courts letting the media lie with impunity as that will continue as the media, from the allegedly most august organs of it, such as the New York Times, PBS and NPR to the dregs of it in the networks, hate talk radio and the social disease of online media and gossip manipulated by billionaires foreign as well as domestic under the Roberts Court distortion of the First Amendment.
* The fascist admiring Henry Luce would love the current American political scene as, in deed, it's clear most of the heads of America's "free press" does. Including the leadership of all of those mentioned here today and yesterday.
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