[Rurudyne]

Actually, that is not true. If it were merely resisting a POTUS that would be nothing. Instead what is happening is a perfect storm of the accusations mattering for one bunch and hardly at all for another.

The double standard, while not new at all since at least a Democrat was willing to brag about it during Reagan’s tenure, comes when the party that effectively exercises it, protecting its own endlessly while ruthlessly conducting witch hunts, has become a criminal enterprise and also has a complicit, subservient media.

The Left is not simply just the people that the anticommunists of old were fighting to prevent, a collection of fellow travelers that understand the basic socialistic narrative and work to achieve that, but have been mightily influenced by Cultural Marxism till they have come to basically have a Cultural Suicide Fetish, with many having become so insane that they cannot understand why nations should have borders, never mind who uses what bathroom.

This is a consequence of the social nature of what the Left has become, for it to a significant degree no longer acts on the basis of ideals but of sentimental cultural clumpiness which defines the why for their hyper partisanship. A largely conformist affair it oozes in the direction of what the culture seems to be doing at the moment. Because it is ill defined that necessitates constant virtue signaling by those desperately afraid to be subjected to the shunning and doxxing of others.

Unlike birds whose song may be sometimes thought of as “I’m here, I’m here” the conformist Left is basically screeching out “I’m a good person, don’t hurt me” when they echo what they perceive to be the popular sentiment.

To the Left only the bad people, the deplorables, the people who merit destruction in society (though some are warming to simply killing us as defectives), don’t go along with the crowd. Everything that is not-we eventually becomes Hitler.

And they are easily manipulated by any who were able to get their -phobia word in early enough as well.

It’s democracy of morals and ethics drawn to its inevitable conclusion of mob rule, not one of dark masters pulling strings (at least not off the spiritual level), but of fear laden conformists each oppressing his neighbor and all easily used as Useful Idiots by whomever would rule over them or seek their harm ... as if Big Brother has been long, long dead but the masses keep living like he’s still there because thats all their infantilized and conformists minds can still accept as being real.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

If it were merely resisting a POTUS that would be nothing. Instead what is happening is a perfect storm of the accusations mattering for one bunch and hardly at all for another.

The double standard, while not new at all since at least a Democrat was willing to brag about it during Reagan’s tenure, comes when the party that effectively exercises it, protecting its own endlessly while ruthlessly conducting witch hunts, has become a criminal enterprise and also has a complicit, subservient media.

This.

I’ve been cogitating seriously on this issue for the past four decades. If not longer. My conclusions are:

1. The wire services, beginning with the advent of the AP only four years after Samuel Morse's 1844 demo of the Baltimore-Washington telegraph, created national journalism as we know it, and inherently homogenized it. As Adam Smith put it,

   People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

   . . . and the AP “wire” is nothing but a virtual meeting of major journalism outlets.

2. Under the aegis of the wire services, journalism promotes journalism - by a massive propaganda campaign to the effect that “journalism is objective.” But that is not only a sales pitch, it is a shot across the bow of anyone who claims to be a journalist but who dares question the objectivity of any journalist in good standing with the group as a whole. To be in good standing with establishment journalism is to never question any other journalist’s objectivity - and to participate in reading out of the profession anyone who violates that rule. Such person is “not a journalist, not objective.”

3. Commercial - not philosophical but commercial - rules such as “If it bleeds, it leads” cause journalism to seek and promote stories about bad news. In a word, journalism is negative - and journalists all know it.

4. The claim that journalism is objective, therefore, is equivalent to a claim that “negativity is objectivity.” And you show me someone who asserts that, and I’ll show you a cynic. Commercial journalism as we know it is cynical.

5. Blanket cynicism would be incoherent; if “A” and “B” be opposites, cynicism towards “A” is incompatible with cynicism towards “B.” In fact, cynicism towards “A” logically corresponds to naive faith in “B.” In that sense, ironically, cynicism is naive.

6. Per Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, society is a blessing and government a necessary (or worse) evil. Journalism is cynical towards society, and naive towards government. And that combination, I put it to you, is the true definition of “socialism.” The Democrat Party systematically goes along with journalism and, consequently, gets along with journalism very well indeed. It is little if any overstatement to say that while Republicans get libeled very often, Democrats never get libeled.

7. The famous New York Times v. Sullivan decision asserted that to vindicate the First Amendment it was necessary to essentially prohibit government officials from suing for libel. Sullivan was a unanimous ruling by the Warren Court, with enthusiastic concurrences. I have come to the view that it differs from the Rhenquist Court’s Morrison v. Olson decision only in that the Warren Court didn’t have a Justice Scalia. Scalia, new to the court at the time, filed a blistering lone dissent in the Morrison case - an opinion which is now considered the final word on the issue of the legitimacy of Special Counsel.

   The Warren Court erred, IMHO, in extrapolating a decision rejecting the weak specific case of Mr. Sullivan to the general issue while ignoring essentially everything I said above - which was already true in 1964, and has only gotten more obvious. All conservatives revere the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but there was a hidden flaw in the Warren Court’s interpretation of it. Because, as Scalia has said, the First Amendment did not create freedom of the press, and in fact did not change the law at all. Nobody who wanted the Bill of Rights wanted to change the law - they just wanted to prevent the law from being changed. Freedom of the press already existed, and the First Amendment protected that. But libel and pornography laws already existed too - and the First Amendment was crafted so as not to call them into question. And so was the Ninth Amendment.

   The First Amendment protects “the freedom . . . of the press,” not “freedom of the press” generally. The freedom of the press did not, then or now, include the right to libel someone without losing a lawsuit and paying damages. The Ninth Amendment, I put it to you, protects your right to redress if you are libeled even though that right is not articulated explicitly in the Constitution and “freedom . . . of the press” is.

   In sum, Sullivan institutes a regime where “the press” is given carte blanche. Naturally, the press would like it. But the true purpose of freedom of the press is to “let a hundred flowers bloom” - and a regime of law in which Democrats are entitled not only to their own opinions but to their own facts is not that.

   (Note that I said “Democrats don’t get libeled” even though Mr. Sullivan was a Democrat. But he was a southern Democrat - an extinct species now, and an easy target then. No conventional Democrat today would own him - rather, they would hang him, like David Duke, around the necks of the Republicans).