CSotD: Three If By Election
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I guess 250 years is pretty good, but it does seem a shame the country couldn’t have survived a little longer. The error in Horsey’s cartoon, I fear, is that the lamps are going out all over America, which is a riff on a different war, but we’ve had plenty.
I hope this isn’t the last one, but I do wonder if people are listening to the warnings.
Two observations: One is that while we celebrate the Minutemen and others who flocked to the cause, the majority did not. The majority never does.
The other is that we seem to remember Tories being tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail, but of course the same thing happened to Patriots if they lived in Loyalist communities, and not only is boiling tar far from funny but the conflicts between Tories and Patriots also included lynchings. It was far from the merriment portrayed since.
We could use a rewrite of our history books, because German starts out well, making the point that the Founders expected voters to use some basic judgment and avoid electing felons and would-be dictators.
But the restrictions on voting were placed there by state legislators, not by the Founders. There is nothing in the Constitution about owning land, and it’s also true that women and African-Americans were allowed to vote in several states in the early days of the nation.
The amendments on voting were “yes you can” corrections, because, until Prohibition, all amendments expanded freedom.
But we’re now entering a time when it seems flipped, that some states are trying to preserve freedom while the federal government seems intent on shutting it down.
Again, we have to wonder if anyone is listening?
And we have to wonder what people are listening to, because Walters echoes the administration’s view that all migrants are terrorists and gang members and that those who insist on due process and fair trials are in favor of murder.
The numbers are clear: Only a small number of migrants commit crime, but you wouldn’t know that to hear the excuses for denying due process, and you’ll even hear lies about specific migrants, not just from rightwing media but directly from Pam Bondi.
To hear them tell it, MS-13 has hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of members living in the United States, and they murder people regularly.
It’s not just nonsense. It’s toxic propaganda.
As Crowe puts it, due process is the victim of a lynching, an ironic image because due process is how we avoid lynchings.
But as Bondi says, and her chorus repeats, we don’t need to give migrants due process, because we know they are all gang members, terrorists and murderers.
Though if that were true, there’d be no problem in fulfilling the requirements of the law and putting them on trial. After all, the J6 rioters were caught on camera committing crimes, but they all got fair trials before they were convicted and jailed.
But it’s easy to find people who claim the J6 rioters never got due process. That’s how propaganda works.
The legacy media, as Sorensen says, has been cautious to the point of cowardice in pushing back against popular misconceptions. President Trump gave an interview to Time magazine that, as Dan Froomkin points out, was a steady barrage of absolute lies, but the interviewer did not correct him or challenge his warped view of reality.
I wouldn’t follow Froomkin’s advice to challenge each barefaced lie as it comes, because it turns the interview into a personal confrontation, but this is a case in which presenting “both sides” has validity, if your coverage states facts to refute each statement, not as an opposing viewpoint but as a correction.
Done right, you don’t have to use the word “lie” to make it obvious.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Brandon-Croft uses gentle but firm sarcasm and provides an example of a tattooed person who might be judged a terrorist, depending on who was doing the judging, while Molina uses his palette to demonstrate the difference between innocence and guilt in the eyes of the administration.
Both point out the absurdity in the judgments being made, and, once again, the question comes up of why the Department of Justice is unwilling to hold trials and follow the law in determining guilt and innocence.
After all, accusations of racism and bigotry are being made. The Trump administration could quell them easily enough by simply following the directions of the court and the words of the Constitution and the plain process that began with Magna Carta in 1250 and has been enshrined in both common law and written statutes ever since.
You don’t need to have gone to law school to know this, and nothing you will learn in law school would make you doubt the principles.
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
It is possible that a lack of exposure to people who do not look like you could lead to you thinking of yourself as the default and them as inferior, perhaps slightly less human but certainly less capable and less deserving.
Which in turn might make you think that hiring a Black woman with more experience and education than a White male applicant is an example of prejudice, or that anyone trying to have some racial and gender balance is lowering the overall quality of their organization.
Which in turn is precisely why it is important to encourage diversity.
When people speak of “hiring by merit” and mean “not hiring women or minorities,” they are revealing what they mean by merit, and it is neither logical nor attractive.
It may not be fair to suggest that Trump wants to do away with Justice entirely.
He just expects Justice to do the job of reinforcing his policies and to STFU about any legal technicalities that might stand in his way.
This is not hypocrisy. Whatever else Dear Leader may lie about, he honestly and sincerely believes that “justice” means he gets his way. And he leads a loyalist horde that believe he’s right.
Paul Revere cried a warning 250 years ago. Is anybody listening today?
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