" Who has a right to say what is true and what's a lie."
WE DO. We have a responsibility to say that. Who else do you think will?
You have to be as dishonest as a lying-lawyer or a "free speech-press" "journalist" to pretend we don't depend on that discernment every waking hour of every day. Though these days we allow our journalists to lie with abandon and especially for the billionaires and millionaires. They're no more reliable than the sleaziest of lawyers. Yet they wonder why people don't trust or respect them.
The goddamned supreme Court and lower courts and lawyers are in the business of pretending that we can't possibly tell when someone is telling enormous and obvious lies because they can come up with hypothticals on the stupid and dishonest level of "Are we, then, to tell the Nazis where the Jews are hiding?"
Anyone that morally depraved or stupid as to ask that question has no business being considered seriously in discussing such issues. If you think the answer could possibly be "yes" you have removed yourself from any suspicion that your thinking needs to be considered.
And such is the state of the American law.
All while supporting the "free speech right" of our indigenous fascists and Nazis, especially those in the "private sector" to risk the lives of their targets here and now with their "free speech-press" permission and encouragement of them. I recently asked if it would have been wrong for the Weimar liberal democrats to have forcefully suppressed the Nazi's "free speech-press" and those who supported them. By the time that was done BY LAWYERS AND JUDGES AND "JUSTICES" IN UNPRECEDENTED AND CONTROVERSIAL TRIBUNALS,* TENS OF MILLIONS DIED AND IT TOOK THE COMBINED MILITARIES OF MANY COUNTRIES TO DO IT. And subsequent lawyers and judges and "justices" "journalists, academic scribblers have been undoing that work ever since.
And more generally, who else do you think does make the judgement between lies that can be discerned to be lies and truths that can be discerned to be true? Even those most practiced of professional liars and pretenders of the impossibility make such judgments, sometimes even honestly making them. That is when it suits them. Especially when the one who they punish for lying is poor or of modest means - the rich they're far more likely to pretend they can't tell that about, those who can hire lawyers like a Trump to string out the issue in court after court. And the Supreme Court "justices" pretend they can't when they choose to pretend they don't do that ALL THE TIME WHILE ON THE BENCH. And while lying in their decisions, as I wrote about here recently. No doubt there will be more on that later.
* I was far too young to vote in 1960, but if I could have I would have been extremely reluctant to vote for the Harvard trained John F Kennedy who had written the stupid "profile in courage" in which Robert Taft was praised for his opposition to the Nuremberg trials on the basis that the Nazis had made their mass murders legal in the places they governed and invaded.
And it's not the only outrageously stupid and offensive thing Kennedy said in that book he is notoriously accused of having had ghost-written. I am not convinced that is entirely true and haven't seen conclusive evidence that it is true and for my purpose, that is beside the point, he owned it by putting his name on it, so I won't get into THAT again. He appealed to white racists whose votes he would be asking for a few years later such as in this Profiles in Courage lie.
Every so often I hear from the descendants of Adelbert Ames, a Union general during the Civil War and then the governor of Mississippi during Reconstruction, objecting to a paragraph about him in John F. Kennedy’s book “Profiles in Courage,” from 1956. “No state suffered more from carpetbag rule than Mississippi,” Kennedy wrote, about Ames’s governorship. Corruption was rampant. Taxes rose by a factor of fourteen. “Vast areas of northern Mississippi lay in ruins.” None of this is true, and the Ames family has been lobbying the Kennedy family to change the offending paragraph pretty much continuously for more than sixty years—including an in-person discussion with J.F.K., in 1963, conducted in the White House by Ames’s great-grandson George Plimpton, the writer and editor of The Paris Review. Nothing has worked. But maybe now, at this moment of a great national reconsideration of our history and our monuments, especially on racial grounds, it might be different?
I’m getting these entreaties, most recently a couple of weeks ago, because I wrote a book about the bloody overthrow of Reconstruction by white terrorists in Mississippi in 1875. Ames is a leading character, presented far more positively than he is in “Profiles in Courage.” Since what happened during the Reconstruction period has never been very firmly fixed in American memory, some explanation is probably required. What was Ames doing in “Profiles in Courage” in the first place, and why was he—a white politician elected by an overwhelmingly Black constituency—offered up by Kennedy as a villain?
“Profiles in Courage” was published when Kennedy was thirty-eight years old. He was the junior senator from Massachusetts, in the early stages of planning his campaign for President in 1960. The main body of the book is eight profiles of United States senators whom Kennedy considered to have been extraordinarily courageous, starting chronologically with John Quincy Adams, in the early nineteenth century, and ending with Robert A. Taft, in the mid-twentieth century. It’s irresistible to think about the book in the light of Kennedy’s political ambitions. Thanks to his heroic and well-publicized exploits as a Navy officer in the South Pacific during the Second World War, courage was already identified as one of Kennedy’s salient qualities, and the framing device for the book underscored that. The courageous subjects were distributed pragmatically, considering that Kennedy was a regional politician preparing to go national. Two were from the Northeast, two from the South, and four from the Midwest. Three were Republicans. They stood for a broad range of political causes.
How can anyone expect those whose stock and trade rests on the Kennedy mystique think they feel pressured to correct such a lie when lying is considered by the media, by lawyers, judges and the Supreme Court to be the focus of a "right?"
The accusation was and remains that it was the lawyer Ted Sorensen who actually researched and wrote the book, though despite his Kennedy and later Harvard connections, he was not from the Ivy League law-liar training schools but the University of Nebraska.
It's a rare lawyer with an association to Harvard Law School who I'd trust, even if they aren't trained there. Other than Elizabeth Warren, right now, I can't think off hand of another one with that kind of CV I do trust to that extent. Though I'm sure there might be a handful of them, I might be inclined to trust. I can't think of any except Ketanji Brown Jackson though her Trump v Anderson vote on the court makes me question her judgement. Along with every other current member of the Court.
