APART FROM him falling for the Israeli apartheid regime's genocide in Gaza, I think Joe Biden has had the most potentially positive administration since LBJ if not FDR. And it's clear that it is about to largely if not all go for nothing as the Trump regime takes over. Only not for nothing, for far worse than that. I don't think in any period since the Lincoln presidency gave way to that of Andrew Johnson have we come close to the drastic contrast that we saw when Biden took office from Trump to its return to Trump, has that transfer of power been more pronounced. Any country which could go from Trump to Biden and back to Trump is a dangerously sick country, probably in the throes of a fatal illness.
The speech President Biden made from the White House yesterday told some truths I wish he'd told decades ago, though if he'd told them then he probably would have had a short instead of one of the longest careers in government. He laid out the role that lying in the media, the mass media, the even more enveloping and suffocating social media lies that sandbagged his phenomenally accomplished administration, everything from FOX Lies and down to the goddamned New York Times, NPR and, I will say it, Stephen Colbert style entertainment painting one of our most competent presidents as a senile, doddering incompetent, whipping up lie after lie, spreading and normalizing those - the specialty of the great grey whore of NYC and the minor one of NPR - and many other lies on top of those lies.
But telling that truth gets you uncomfortably close to the idiocy of the Bill of Rights a forbidden topic, my violation of which led to me adopting the name of Thought Criminal as I was told that was going too far. Telling the truth about the Warren Court, the Burger Court, Rehnquist and Roberts' Courts, the part that the hollowly hallowed ACLU has played in the empowerment and weaponization of lies, especially those targeting Democratic politicians who attempted to give us democracy, real democracy, egalitarian democracy, starting as soon as the Warren Court issued the first of those deadly rulings in 1964, the lies in the media that both sank LBJ's administration, the chances of Hubert Humphrey in the next presidential election, the elevation of the previous champion of criminality in the presidency, Nixon, and the entire half-century of the undoing of American democracy which has paralleled the emergence and financial flourishing of the freest press and media in human history. The old-style ACLU style assurances that allowing the most flagrant of lies to flourish would be effectively countered by "more speech" has been given the test of time and time has failed it absolutely, conclusively, to the point of being among the most certain of disconfirmations possible in the philosophy of law and governance.
One thing about the profession of lying, lawyering and its elite branches in judging and "justicing" is that once an avenue of opportunistic lying has been taken, especially in terms of the U.S. Constitution, that that avenue can't be merely closed off by a future ruling but it will have to be shut off at the source, in this case the First Amendment, and that is a forbidden topic of conversation. The fact is that that is as true for the First Amendment as it is for the Second one, the one which Republican-fascists in power and on the Court has used to arm the fifth column which we certainly have reason to fear will open up on our fellow citizens whenever the oligarchs and their tools in government tell them to. The sacred language of "Jemmy" Madison and the other amateurs, slave-holders, financiers and crooks of the First Congress set in stone will have to be changed to explicitly un-privilege lies and firmly abolish the "right to lie" that the Court has invented as certainly as it invented presidential immunity. The problem lies in the vague, inferior late 18th century poesy of the Constitution. Frankly, with what I've learned about the corruption of the slave-holder-financier founders, every defect in that document is rightly suspected as being lawyerly loophole setting to empower them, so much of the language of that document being used that way by later generations of lawyers, judges and "justices" none more blatantly than under John Marshall and more infamously by the Taney and gilded-age courts as well as the later Rehnquist and, perhaps worst of all, the Roberts Court
With all deference to Joe Biden who has earned my respect in the past four years, he's a little late to this realization though he's still years ahead of almost everyone in the tiny fraction comprising the honest media and the likely even smaller percentages of those in the legal and political world. As Eisenhower only came to articulate the dangers of the beginning of our oligarchic rule in the military-industrial complex in his last speech, the trained lawyer, Joe Biden has only fully articulated the problem in his last speech. I have a deep and respectful appreciation for the necessity of a good politician to not go too far and become an ex-politician through losing their next election. I have less respect for those who work in the media because the stakes of them losing their paying jobs is far less consequential for the American People, other People around the world and the world in general. I don't have anything at stake in telling you that truth, a truth I was warned against telling when I posted one of my early pieces on this topic at Echidne's old blog. What are they going to do to me? Fire me from an unpaid writing hobby?
Until the language of the First Amendment is changed to make it clear that:
a. Lies are not covered by "free speech-press,"
b. There is no such a thing as a "right to lie,
c. That 'the press" [and other corporate entities] do not have rights, what the fools in the First Congress misnamed those are privileges and that that privilege comes only with an obligation to tell the truth to inform us so we can cast an informed vote for our representatives and for ballot measures,
the First Amendment will continue to be the vehicle to power of lie-empowered oligarchy as certainly as it kept in power the white supremacists in the South and elsewhere and thwarted the struggle for equality and real democracy.
Of course, all of that heavy lift will be for nothing unless the Supreme Court is reigned in, starting with term limits and ethics as President Biden finally endorsed but, more important still, have their usurped Marbury v. Madison powers definitively stripped from them. The Voting Rights Act which the Rehnquist and Roberts, white supremacist Courts have abolished will have to be restored. It was only with that law and the Civil Rights Act that America started to weakly live out its promises, as MLK jr. mentioned in that speech which will be desecrated by Republican-fascists, white supremacists and others, next week, that is if Trump's elevation doesn't totally drown out that yearly disgrace to his legacy. The Supreme Court, it's 'liberal" manifestation in the Warren Court as they stupidly set this catastrophe off with their "free speech-press" ruling and the conservative then fascist dominated ones accelerated as they weaponized those "liberal" rulings, is the penultimate source of this. That Court has to be harnessed, not to fealty to "The Constitution" but to equality and democracy. I'd put those in place to what they're supposed to uphold, protect and defend instead of that document. And I wouldn't give you a pint of piss for democracy without equality. As we can see in the white-power states, in the Israeli apartheid government, in every dictatorship where there are elections in which an oppressive majority lords it over minorities, democracy without equality is, if anything, as dangerous as outright oligarchy.
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