On this most sacred of national holidays, after our nation has apparently given up the rule of law for something else altogether, I have to ask, what the fuck?
Glenn Greenwald pens the kind of essay that does the President's commutation the justice it sorely deserves, and which is sorely lacking in the kind of coverage it has received in the media.
The reason people like me get pissed about the woeful state of media coverage is that it is supposed to represent the first draft of history, and so often it is either glaringly inaccurate, hopelessly incomplete, and yet usually it supposes that it knows best. We don't want media coverage to be more liberal, just to do its fucking job and speak truth to power. Afflict the comfortable, comfort the afflicted, and all that.
We have been asking questions for the past six years like: "Who are we as a nation? Why do we allow our leaders to literally get away with murder? Why are the deaths of several hundred thousand Iraqis and several thousand US troops not newsworthy? Who gives a shit about Paris Hilton, and why does she get more coverage than these issues?"
These questions get no public airing, other than what we type to each other on our websites that no one reads. Sometimes we see these absurdities, and we curse them. With foul language, no less. Sometimes, that is all you can do.
To the official timekeepers in Washington however, dirty language is more objectionable than the crimes which elicited the curses.
Here's the problem:
You can vote Republicans out of office, and some things may change. You can vote Democrats out of office, and other things may happen (which we've seen over the past six years). What we can't do is vote out of office the completely vapid, morally vacant and utterly useless press corps which holds up this entire rotting system and defends it from any kind of challenge. We can't vote out Tim Russert, or Fox News, or any of the rest of them who enable this sad process to degrade our nation any further.
Happy 4th of July.
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