Continuing the millionaire slumlord's press freedom-extinguishing ingratitude jihad against the media that's been feeding him ($2 billion worth) for the past eleven months, CNN has joined the Washington Post on the gallows platform:
[I]n a recent interview, Roger Stone made a very interesting comment while on XM Patriot’s Breitbart News. As pulled into a video by *sigh* Media Matters, Stone goes on to tell the host what Trump should do to outlets like CNN: "When Donald Trump is president, he should turn off their FCC license.” said Stone.
The response by NYMag.com of all places tells you why this is worrisome: "The context for this threat is that Trump previously denounced coverage in the Washington Post, implicitly threatening to go after the paper’s owner on antitrust and tax issues as retribution for the Post’s coverage. Now Stone is making in a completely undisguised fashion the threat Trump made in a barely disguised fashion.”
Here's more on the form that Trump's stamping out of press freedoms would take:
It would probably take the form of Trump using the powers of the federal government to intimidate his critics in the media — one of the key tools Vladimir Putin used to push Russia’s (far more fragile) democracy into outright despotism....
Obviously, one can debate Amazon’s antitrust practices (a case can be made it is a monopoly) or its tax levels. But Trump is making no pretense of evaluating these questions as public policies to be settled on their merits. His diatribe weaves in and out of Bezos’s finances and the Post’s coverage, and back again repeatedly, leaving no doubt that, in Trump’s mind, the two are one and the same.
Indeed, they are - to him. Which is one of the corrupt hallmarks - "the emperor and the empire are one" - of the instinctive authoritarian despot, and how Trump would be perhaps even more anti-Constitution than Barack Obama has been. And I really didn't think that was possible.
And that incipient dictator mentality is steadily corrupting the Republican Party that is, as depressingly expected, rapidly bowing the knee to him:
Trump is making nice with the leaders of his party now, and the Republican holdouts have been reduced to a stubborn handful. But the GOP leaders going along with Trump should be under no illusion about the likelihood that the candidate they support, if elected, would turn the United States into at least a quasi-authoritarian state. And the ease with which he has brought other Republicans to heel gives every indication that they would help him do it. [emphasis added]
Actually, it's more like Trump would turn the United States into an even more blatantly authoritarian state than Obama has, but no matter. This is the difference between adherence to a coherent, consistent set of philosophical principles that informs the wisdom and advisability of unreservedly backing a candidate of one's chosen party, and blind tribalist partisan loyalty to a candidate who is antithetical to everything for which your party has heretofore claimed to stand, and has proven himself to be corrupt, dishonest, dishonorable, and fundamentally untrustworthy, and without the character or emotional stability or self-control that are the prerequisites for national leadership in a constitutional republic.
This is why #NeverTrump exists: Some of us - and there are, admittedly, not many - simply refuse to forfeit our principles in support of a nominee that is not worthy of it, or the highest office in the land.
There are all kinds of reasons to vote against Hillary Clinton; there are absolutely no reasons to vote FOR Donald Trump. And the former does not outweigh the latter.
Remember that old saying, "I disagree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it"? That is the essence of the First Amendment. Has what now passes for the Right foolishly repudiated that as the Left has malevolently? Or is the former becoming the mirror image of the latter, just as the respective candidates whom they have nominated? Because the resemblance is becoming more pronounced by the day.
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