THE "FREE PRESS" being the stupid, superficial whore that it is, if anything of the most disgusting display by an American president in the history of the country last night takes, it will be his wearing his obscene campaign ball cap to the Dignified Transfer ceremony instead of doing what any other president, even the worst in our history would have understood, you make at least a show of respect to the dead YOU GOT KILLED by taking your goddamned hat off.
But the American free press being the whore of Trumpian fascist oligarchy, even that most visual of lapses in mere respect for the military who Trump got killed will probably be gone by Sunday noon as his whores go out to do damage control during the most lie filled hours of the news week, those talk shows on the morning of what used to be considered the Lord's day.
I wonder if anyone else will notice what I did, that the lumpish asshole of a president we have, who couldn't be bothered to take his campaign cap off to make a show of honoring the fallen didn't have it on when the reporters were questioning him and his Secretary of Warcrimes, Kegsbreath. No doubt the vestiges of his mind were on his image at that point and the makeup person who, I'm sure, travels with him at our expense, had done his fake hair had made sure it looked as fake as it usually does.
But it was the obscene, fascist, war criminal evidence that spewed forth from him on Airforce One that is both the most significant thing about that entire atrocity of a media event. He literally confessed to some of the greatest war crimes, crimes against humanity, NAZI LEVEL CRIMES, and pooh-poohed their significance, even enthusing about doing more of it. And him and Kegsbreat going to watch the flag draped coffins for the cameras was the media event, not the Transfer. It would have been more dignified if they had stayed home. NOTHNG BUT IT BEING A MEDIA EVENT WOULD HAVE GOTTEN HIM AND HIS ALCOHOLIC OBERKOMMADO DER WEHRMACHT THERE.
Trump and Hegseth's open disregard for even the Americans who have and will die in their war, Trump's open disdain now and in the past might get a mention now and again. THE IRANIAN AND OTHERS WHO THEY MURDER IN THE THOUSANDS, WHOSE DEATHS THEY BRING ABOUT BY THEIR NAZI STYLE UNLIMITED WAR ON CIVILIAN INFRASTRUCTURE WILL NOT EVER BE CONSIDERED IN ANY CONSEQUENTIAL WAY BY THE AMERICAN MEDIA, AMERICAN LAW, AMERICAN POLITICS.
If I made a movie about this, I might subtitle it "or How I Learned To Hate The Free Press," though that leson started about five decades ago.
This is the third time and decisive test and failure of America's democractic order just during my lifetime, four if you count Korea. Vietnam-Southeast Asia, Iraq-and that region, and now Iran and the even wider war that has brought AND THE GODDAMNED UNITED STATES HAS LEARNED ABSOLUTELYI NOTHING THAT HAS KEPT US FROM DOING IT OVER AND OVER AGAIN, THE AMERICAN POLITICAL AND LEGAL SYSTEM WHICH IS NOTHING BUT THE PEOPLE WHO COMPRISE THOSE AT ANY GIVEN TIME, HAVE LEARNED NOTHING TO KEEP THIS FROM HAPPENING AND FROM STOPPING IT AS IT HAPPENS.
It was during the Biden administration, one of the rare instances when a Democrat has a chance and makes some progress on repairing the tatters of our liberal democratic system, listening to the promises of the civil liberties and public interest lawyers promising that the law, the norms and rules of our law, of our Constitution would save us, as those were openly failing to do that and as the legal system let off Donald Trump AS HE HAS GOTTEN OFF WITH HIS CRIMES HIS ENTIRE LIFE . . . It was during the Biden years that the remnant faith I had in the possibility of the American Constitution and its purported democracy died and rotted.
I will point out that as Johnson's great love, the Great Society was dealt a fatal blow by him getting entangled in Vietnam, Biden getting entangled in Israel's genocide in Gaza contributed greatly to the destruction of his clear intentions to revive the lot of the American People. Bush II suffered no such consequences for his Iraq crimes and Trump-Vance will suffer none for an even greater criminal campaign in Iran. Such is life under the U.S. Constitution and the First Amendment.
The lie you have heard and will hear from the liberalish lawyers on MS-Now and online is that what Trump has done and is doing in both his first and second terms is "unconstitutional" is proven to be a lie by simply facing the terrible truth that WHAT IS ALLOWED TO HAPPEN, WHAT IS NOT STOPPED AS WE LIVE UNDER THE CONSTITUTION, IS WHAT IS, IN FACT CONSTITUTIONAL. The crimes of Trump which are not stopped by the courts, by the Congress, are what is constituitonal under the United States Constitution as the crimes of all previous presidents not stopped, except, arguably, some of those by Nixon* are what is constitutional under the United States Constitution. That is the Real Constitution of the United States, not that high school civics class, university and law school bull shit, flag waving Hollywood-Broadway propaganda Constitution which has never existed. Certainly it was not the real Costitution before the 1860s as both slavery, the extension of slavery to the free states BY THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT IN THE DRED SCOTT DECISION. The last best hope of making the Constitution something better than what the slave-holders and corrupt lawyer-financiers from the North gave us in 1787, the Civil War Amendments were soon diminished and gutted by the Supreme Court and by the assenting Congress in which emancipation had increased the power of the slavers from 3/5ths stolen representation to 5/5ths and by the Electoral College staffed presidency.
The second salvage attempt in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act and Great Society legislation under Lyndon Johnson was, as well, gutted by Courts and the Congress and, in that suprme act of irony, the freeing of the American Free Press from consequences of the most extravagant lying, the ultimately stupid First Amendment regime of the Warren Court, it, as well, being exploited by the future fascists on the Court to give us the republic of lies that directly brought us to Trump.
Those who made "freedom" and, even more so, "liberty" the highest disideratum of republican and allegedly democratic government proved to be either lying or wrong, those on their own don't produce something better. What they've produced include the obscene fiction that there that there is what the civil liberties lawyers call a "right to lie" support what has brought us to the rule of the biggest liars in our history, Donald Trump being the all-time champion liar AND THE MAN WHO HAS PROFITED FROM THE FREEDOM TO LIE IN THE MASS MEDIA.
That is the horrific and real truth of what the United States has become under the Constitution as, I have every suspicion that the slave-holders and financier-lawyers who framed the Constitution wanted to a limited degree, they being stupid enough to believe once they'd rigged the thing that future generations of crooks, degenerates, and evil doers wouldn't enhance and amplify and learn to exploit and expand the corruptions they built into the thing FOR THEIR OWN BENEFIT.
I have said that equality is the only guarantee of legitimate government, government which has the consent of an informed majority, one which administers government and justice on the basis of total equality to everyone. But that's not the whole of it, legitimate govenace also must adhere to a number of moral absolutes, that the truth is better than lies is just one of those non-negotiable truths. That love is better than hate, THAT WE ARE MORALLY BOUND TO DO TO OTHERS AS WE WOULD HAVE DONE TO US, THAT WHAT WE DO TO THE LEAST AMONG US WE DO TO GOD.
I would certainly not call such a democracy a "Christian democracy" because the American and many of the European governments and cultures have made political "Christianity" an engine of evil in itself. Such "Christian democracy" has been unChristian though much of it was quite compatible with a translation of American liberal democracy. Though, as you can see, I think any government that is legitimate will have to include those explicitly Scriptural truths those are contained in other religious traditions, many of the most important of them shared with Judaism and Islam and other religions. Another lesson I take from the horrible truth of American history in my lifetime is that secularism, taken as a metaphysical requirement instead of a merely administrative policy in a pluralistic OR ANY OTHER COUNTRY has contibuted mightily to the ever greater failure of even America's liberal democratic system. Whatever in the way of common received disdain for something as declasse as Scriptural equality and economic justice - the kind of thing that regards love and equality as unfashionably icky - unless government AND LAW are administered under the radical equality and truth-requirng Scriptures, it will devolve as Americas liberal democracy has devolved into our indigenous fascist tradition held by he framers and founders, white supremaicst oligarchy.
I will confess that I have not spent much time studying the stated intentions of George Soros' "Open Society" effort to see how it deals with the issues above. As I read it is explicitly as "secular" effort, trying to sidestep what I am now convinced is an absolutely religious requirement to achieve even a legitimate government in line with how I defined it above. As I've pointed out before, Marylynne Robinson brilliantly posed the problem of what a secular expression of Jeffersons' assertion of rights in the Declaration of Independence would read like. I've issued that as a challenge to the secularists and materialists and atheists and agnostics. How do you claim on the basis of scientific method what Jefferson claimed on the basis of it being "self-evident":
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, . . . .
I don't see how that can be done on the basis of secularism or constitutions, or laws, or just setting aside the basis of it.
Getting back to the failure of Soros' "open society" which has embraced such luminaries as Viktor Orban and Scott Bessent, I take that as just another aspect of the failure of secular, 18th century style liberal democracy even as imagined by as idealistic of a secularist billionaire as Soros.
You know I could go on and on and on with examples, but time is short.
Don't mourn liberal democracy, it got us here. Work for moral, egalitarian democracy. That's the only chance we've got.
* I will point out again that most relevant and topical of truths, that when the House Committee was voting on adoption of the Articles of Impeachment against Nixon, the article proposed by Congressman Fr. Robert Drinan, concerning his most signifcant crimes in making war in Southeast Asia were voted down by the committee. THE MOST SIGNFICANT AND GREATEST CRIMES OF NIXON WERE NOT THOSE HE WAS TO BE TRIED ON BY THE SENATE DUE TO THAT FAILURE OF THE HOUSE TO ADOPT THAT ARTICLE. That is something that the history of the Real Constitution has to face as part of the terrible truth of what it is.
