Saturday, February 27, 2016

Donald Trump Declares War Against The First Amendment

by JASmius



You Trumplicans have forfeited your ability to think and reason and retain only your corrosive, destructive anger and misinvested pride, but damn it all, I'm going to ask these questions anyway and I want you ALL to pay VERY close attention to every last syllable so that you can know the wisdom you're about to profanely ignore.

I know this sounds orgasmic to you....:

I think the media is among the most dishonest groups of people I’ve ever met. They’re terrible…

Agreed.

But one of the things I’m going to do, if I win, and I hope I do, and we’re certainly leading…is I’m going to open up our libel laws, so when they write purposefully negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money. We’re going to open up those libel laws. So that when the New York Times writes a hit piece, which is a total disgrace, or when Washington Post, which is there for other reason, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win lots of money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected. You see, with me, they’re not protected because I’m not like other people, but I’m not taking money, I’m not taking their money. So we’re going to open up those libel laws, folks. And we’re going to have people sue you, like you’ve never been sued before. [emphasis added]

You've no doubt all just jizzed yourselves so powerfully that you've blown your pants clean off of your lower torsos.  Sounds great, doesn't it?  Or as the Klingon proverb puts it, bortaS 'e' neHqu' toy' bIr nay' qar ("Revenge is a dish that is best served cold").  And you people are all about revenge, aren't you?  Tribalism - just like the Left, you're now following in their despicable footsteps, and becoming just like them.  Which is why you've abandoned conservatism and the Constitution.  Because they would just get in the way of where your passions want to take you.

But there are a great many things you're refusing to consider.  Like how that same media is your hero's biggest enabler and booster in his effort to hostiley take over the Republican Party; and how that same media will turn on him, and you, and the rest of us whom he, and you, have tarred with his con man garbage in a, well, "New York minute," and unleash a fury like none of us have ever witnessed, a weapon of mass media destruction that will not distinguish between "establishment" and Tea Partier and Trumplican, and pariah-ize ALL of us, and not only put Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton in the White House, but roll back all the rebuilding the Right has accomplished over the past seven years - only this time permanently.

Like how Trump won't just go after the New York Times and the Washington Post - or maybe won't go after them at all, but instead take down the Washington Times, Washington Free Beacon, New York Post, National Review, American Spectator, Weekly Standard, Breitbart, the Federalist, Hot Air, Rare, Reason, Town Hall, even Political Pistachio if he's feeling particularly petty, sites that still stand for the conservatism and constitutionalism that Trumplicans have betrayed and abandoned to chase after this authoritarian carnival barker.  That's the far greater likelihood, in fact, as the major media will find much less to which to object, and will, as they always have, find Trump far more entertaining, and therefore ratings-grabbing, than they would any real Republican, and the alternative media that retains its philosophical principles will be far more relentlessly critical of the notoriously thin-skinned real estate mogul.  You guys do the math.  Or are you looking forward to that as well?  Do you realize the unsavory company in which that puts you?

And then there's the First Amendment y'all are foresaking:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. [emphasis added]

Remember our outrage when Barack Obama jettisoned FOIA regulations for the Office of Administration, and grabbed the phone records of the Associated Press, and spied on Fox News correspondent James Rosen, and when California Senator Dianne Feinstein’s attempted to claim that journalists are only people who are paid to be a writer for a news entity, and when the Donk SuperCongress of 2009 threatened to reinstate the oxymoronically-dubbed "Fairness Doctrine," or when, in the last Congress, Senate Democrats brought to a floor vote a constitutional amendment to actually, openly, and formally repeal the First Amendment?  As bad as all those things were, this is worse.  You know why?  Because a President Trump isn't going to attempt to persuade Congress to this scheme, get somebody on Capitol Hill to introduce it as a bill (which only a Democrat would do), build public consensus, or otherwise work within the dry, boring, unentertaining constitutionally-established process.  He will - tada! - impose it by Executive Order....just like Barack Obama.

And you Trumpers can't wait, can ya?  Never realizing that if, at some point, if your hero's ambitions are fully realized, you come to your senses and see and recognize and even admit what he is and what he's done to you and us and the country, that he is everything we've been trying to tell you he is for the past eight months - a lying, corrupt, mob-esque, incipient fascist despot in the making, an American Putin, in essence - who does not, never did, and never will give a flying frak about you "little people" but is just flagrantly using you to obtain the power his ego craves, you, along with the rest of us, will no longer be allowed to express that justifiable anger and frustration and outrage, because you will not be permitted any outlet for it, whether in print or pixels or digital airtime.  The gag you think your hero is going to put on your enemies will be choking you.

"Be careful what you wish for....



....you may get it."

Distilled to its essence, what Trumplicans believe is that....the Constitution is NOT the solution.  That we have to become the enemy in order to defeat them.



It all sounds eerily like the Civil War to me, where, according to a prominent local author, "Progressivism" made its first significant inroads into derailing and ultimately destroying the American Republic.  Just as Donald Trump is doing to the Republican Party.

Exit quote from an eighteenth-century "GOPe":

[T]his institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. for here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.

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