Civil Commotion

The Trump campaign continues to attempt to suppress journalism.

• 2020-Feb-26: Trump Campaign Sues New York Times Over 2019 Opinion Article

• 2020-Mar-03: Trump campaign sues Washington Post over opinion pieces, after suing NY Times

• 2020-Mar-07: Trump campaign files 3rd lawsuit against a news organization [CNN]

Nobody should feel any confusion about this: The suits have no merit; they are an effort to suppress vigorous journalism as the presidential campaign season gets underway. The journos won’t be intimidated, but those companies’ business offices might be as the costs mount.

Longtime readers will recall that I predicted this:

Last, Trump has signaled plainly that he intends to neuter the media, that reporting which doesn’t flatter him will be punished. When scowls don’t work, my guess is that his tool of choice will be economic attrition via the courts — a long train of legally feeble but costly SLAPPs. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN were targeted in that way. We all know that newspapers, especially, are hurting, and so the expectation would be that the lesser news outlets would quickly fall into line.

Ha-ha. If The Donald thinks that journos are in it for the money, he is in for a big surprise. As Richard Nixon was surprised, say, when he thought that a court order could arrest publication of the Pentagon Papers — and woke-up to find them published in hundreds of newspapers all across the country.

It is not a coincidence that the Trump campaign has sued three of the most prominent news outlets in scarcely more than a week, and at this particular time. The aim is to intimidate them.

I claim no especial gift of prescience, by the way. I have read widely in history, though, and cartoon authoritarians like Trump are a commonplace — and so is a somnolent, uninformed public. The country is under attack from within, from a corrupt executive and his self-serving enablers, and we are going to lose this country to totalitarianism if we won’t defend it.

Warren’s policies were way to the left, her earlier debacles (like the DNA test) revealed terrible political judgment, and her classic persona as a know-it-all Harvard professor with a plan for everything was almost identical to that of every earnest Democratic candidate who has lost in the last few decades.

Andrew Sullivan

It’s true, but actually irrelevant, that Warren is well left-of-center; after all, every presidential initiative has to pass through the filter of committees ad nauseum, the House of Representatives, and the Senate. Have we forgotten, in the Trump era, that the president doesn’t merely issue decrees? That there is a lengthy legislative process before an idea becomes a law, and that the process inevitably waters-down radicalism toward the mean acceptable to a majority?

Where Warren shines is where it counts most — in brains and character.

This is what you get when the country is run by sycophantic “acting” amateurs rather than professionals.

Everybody who has actually read the Mueller Report knows that Attorney General William Barr lied to the country about its contents. Certainly, the report does not exonerate Trump of wrongdoing; to the contrary, it documents misbehaviors vastly worse than those for which Richard Nixon was removed from office. But: by pronouncing Trump cleared, and then withholding publication for a couple of weeks, Barr seized the public relations and news-cycle initiatives … and the country moved-on to marveling at new Trump indecencies.

What do you know? A federal judge has something he wants to say about that.

A federal judge in Washington sharply criticized Attorney General William P. Barr on Thursday for a “lack of candor,” questioning the truthfulness of the nation’s top law enforcement official in his handling of last year’s report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton, overseeing a lawsuit brought by EPIC, a watchdog group, and BuzzFeed News, said he saw serious discrepancies between Barr’s public statements about Mueller’s findings and the public, partially redacted version of that report detailing the special counsel’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

[ … ]

In his 23-page opinion, Walton said he had “grave concerns about the objectivity of the process” that led up to the public release of the Mueller report. “The Court cannot reconcile certain public representations made by Attorney General Barr with the findings in the Mueller Report,” he wrote. “These circumstances generally, and Attorney General Barr’s lack of candor specifically, call into question Attorney General Barr’s credibility.”

It’s not every day that a federal judge calls the Attorney General a liar, and does it in public. As best I can recall, in fact, the last time that happened is when John Mitchell, Nixon’s Attorney General, was sent to prison.

We are seeing, right in front of our eyes, the genius of our Constitutional design fulfilled: The Senate has been cowed but the judiciary, with its lifetime appointments, still exhibits some backbone. Whether or not that’s enough to save the country from the corrupt pack of sleazy grifters so beloved by the Deplorable One-third remains to be seen, but at least the game isn’t already over.

As soon as absolute truth is supposed to be contained in the sayings of a certain man, there is a body of experts to interpret his sayings, and these experts infallibly acquire power, since they hold the key to truth. Like any other privileged caste, they use their power for their own advantage. They are, however, in one respect worse than any other privileged caste, since it is their business to expound an unchanging truth, revealed once for all in utter perfection, so that they become necessarily opponents of all intellectual and moral progress.

Bertrand Russell
Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization

And that, in a nutshell, is the reason that all educated, forward-looking people must inevitably find themselves in opposition to religion: It inevitably, unavoidably, becomes the enemy of “intellectual and moral progress.”