By Mark Crispin Miller
Attacking everything Trump says as wholly false, just because Trump said it, is just as mindless as Trump's own knee-jerk attacks on everything his critics say.
And since Trump, now and then, surprisingly refutes some Big Lie that no other president—or any other major player in the political establishment (the press included)—has ever dared to question publicly, reflexively dismissing everything he says is not just mindless, but dangerous.
It's dangerous, because those Big Lies that Trump now and then contests in his erratic way have done more harm, by far, than Trump's wild, flagrant and, for the most part, trivial lies could ever do.
That is certainly the case with Trump's (recent) jaw-dropping pushback in the face of Bill O'Reilly's ritual assertion that Putin (just like Stalin) "is a killer": "There are a lot of killers. You think our country's so innocent?"
Well, yeah. Duh. No kidding. Though there is, of course, NO reason to assume that the thin-skinned, revenge-obsessed and Mob-connected Trump has any moral qualms about the state employing "killers" to whack inconvenient persons, there also are NO grounds to doubt Trump's cheeky implication that the US government itself has quite "a lot of killers" on the payroll, and not just on the battlefield abroad, and has had for a very long time.
Anybody who's read much at all about our history since World War 2 knows full well that the dark side of "our" government has (to quote LBJ) "been running a damn Murder, Inc." all over the world—the USA included, despite the old canard that they don't do that here. That they unquestionably do—and that a comprehensive list of their domestic hits would put the dreaded Putin in the deepest shade—is clear enough to anyone who knows even a little bit (as Bill O'Reilly does) about the epic carnival of murder that BEGAN with the assassination of John Kennedy, followed by the hits on Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X; a carnival including the related murders of innumerable witnesses, accomplices and inconvenient journalists and investigators.
Beyond those four "iconic" murders, and the awesome list of further killings consequent upon them (from J.D. Tippit, Lee Oswald, David Ferrie, Jack Ruby, Dorothy Kilgallen and Mary Pinchot Meyer to Johnny Roselli, Sam Giancana, George de Mohrenschildt, Roger Craig and William Sullivan: just to name a few related to JFK's murder alone), the tally of more recent deaths premature, convenient and anomalous enough to be considered probable assassinations by the state (as they would be for sure, if they went down that way in Russia), includes, in no particular order, Michael Hastings, William Colby, Danny Casolaro, Philip Marshall, Athan Gibbs, Ray Lemme, Seth Rich, Gary DeVore, Barry Jennings, Vince Foster (yes), Mike Connell, Gary Caradori, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, Paul Wellstone and maybe (the evidence suggests it) Antonin Scalia, just to name a few.
Only in America, where one succeeds in journalism not just by refusing to investigate such stories, but by learning to stay perfectly UNCONSCIOUS of them, could the press decry Trump's common-sense remark as somehow scandalous.
And that is dangerous indeed; because we'll never overcome the looming dangers to American democracy unless we know exactly what they are, and that Trump/Pence is only one of them.
No comments:
Post a Comment