Pesky ol' First Amendment

Steve Sack gets the last word on this, or, at least, the last word here.

As I suspected, the pages now are full of Roy Moore on his horse and Trump being upset. I'm pleased to see the hoopla, because I think the real significance of the election was that it will encourage people to get off the fence and into the voting booth, and that's a very good, necessary thing.  But it seems there are only two or three variations on it, and I don't expect to see much that knocks me over. 

And cartoons suggesting that now Trump is done are off-target. Let's see what happens when he backs someone who people don't despise. Meanwhile, a drumbeat of "Trump's done" encourages people to think they don't need to get out there after all.

Not, of course, that I'm taking sides.

Because, as Clay Bennett notes, that would not be responsible journalism.

I wish some news outlet would find out how many people Mueller has working this thing so we'd know how much impact kicking one guy off the team has. The rightwing seems to think the guy was pretty much the keystone in the entire thing, and I'm betting that's not the case.

I'd also like to see some recusals from Republican committee members who have expressed opinions about the investigation. What I saw of Rod Rosenstein's testimony made me admire his cool. I'd have never been able to take the sneering insults without getting right back up in their grills, which of course would be counterproductive.

Old legal principle: If the facts are against you, attack the witness.

 

And, if the facts are with you, keep your witnesses out of isolated service elevators.

 

Fads

Signe Wilkinson comments on causality, though I'm not sure the parallel is completely accurate: ISIS inspires but rarely provides the weaponry, the NRA provides the weaponry but doesn't actively inspire. 

Still, when someone goes off the edge, they can find ways of trying to make their mark on the world, if only on their way out of it.

And ISIS is pleased to take credit when some poor, mentally ill Muslim kid acts out, while the NRA is quick to explain that, when a nutcase grabs a gun and starts shooting, the fault is not theirs, because more people should have been armed and shooting back.

So the other day, they held a contest: A Muslim screwball attempted to blow up the New York City subway and messed it up so that he only burned himself with a bomb that didn't work, while, out in New Mexico, a non-Muslim screwball took a gun into a school and killed two kids before he killed himself.

And the Muslim won, because who gives a shit about kids way out in New Mexico? You have to get at least a double-digit body count if you want coverage for something that happens in the boondocks.

Besides, you get a lot more calls from our leaders to stop letting Arabs come here -- even if the guy wasn't an Arab and wasn't from any of the countries on Trump's hate list and wasn't radical until after he got here -- than you ever will for sensible restrictions on firearms.

Anyway, and on a related note, the guy not even managing to blow himself up reminded me, first of all, of this silly fellow who tried to burn the flag back when that was a thing, and then of another guy who bragged to us about how he had burned down the ROTC building on his campus when that was a thing, only when I looked for coverage several years later I found a one-paragraph news item stating that someone had tossed some flammable liquids into the building and they didn't explode and there was minimal damage.

So now these days, being a radical warrior for ISIS is a thing and shooting up a school is a thing and so mentally ill people grab onto them, because going out in a blaze of glory has always been a thing.

There is an adjective for people who seek to become famous by committing outrageous crimes: herostratic.

It comes from Herostratus, a Greek arsonist who was condemned to both death and obscurity: The Greeks not only killed him, but then passed a law forbidding anyone to mention his name in order to frustrate his attempt at notoriety.

The execution part was successful, the anonymity part, obviously, was not.

So there's not much point in trying to stifle the free press or trying to dictate responsibility.

Still, "Crazy Guy Burns Himself And Ties Up Rush Hour" seems like better journalism than "OMG! OMG! The Scary Terrorists Are On Our Doorstep!"

Sigh.

As Jefferson said, we need a free press, but we also need to make sure people are able to read and understand the news. 

So there's more than one way to skin that cat, but we'll talk about Betsy DeVos another day.

 

Meanwhile, press freedom got a boost from that ol' maverick John McCain, who publicized a report on press freedom from the Committee to Protect Journalists and called upon Dear Leader to STFU and stop teaching other tryants how to justify waging a war on truth.

Others have opined that it would be nice if McCain had also voted against the fake tax reform package, but that mostly goes to show that no good deed goes unpunished.

 

Meanwhile, here's the current count and it has been a truly crappy year for truth.

There was a time when we could sit back in our lovely, isolated country and watch terrorists blow things up in other countries and watch corrupt governments enrich themselves in other countries and watch secret police spy on citizens in other countries and, yes, watch governments suppress press freedom in other countries.

And we could shake our heads and feel smug, because we knew it could never happen here.

 

Art Spiegelman channels Frank Zappa

Comments

[Kevin]

"There is an adjective for people who seek to become famous by committing outrageous crimes: herostratic.

It comes from Herostratus, a Greek arsonist who was condemned to both death and obscurity: The Greeks not only killed him, but then passed a law forbidding anyone to mention his name in order to frustrate his attempt at notoriety."

Off hand I'd say that law didn't work if we are still talking about him today.

[Paul Berge]

...unless it turns out that "Herostratus" is ancient Greek for "John Doe."

[Kip W]

I'm 100% with the newspaper writer (lost, alas, to my memory, but don't say it's ironic, okay?) who headlined his piece on the death of John Lennon something like A-HOLE MURDERS LENNON, and explained in the article that he wasn't going to gratify the little creep's desire to be in the headlines by mentioning his name, then or ever.

Is that art spiegelman the cartoonist? I even saw him speak one time, but if he's not wearing his trademark vest, I totally can't tell.