ACCORDING TO FOX TV VIEWERS: MAINSTREAM MEDIA IS ALL “FAKE NEWS”!

…This man wants to be the Dictator of the United States

 

President Trump is trying to undo the US Constitution

 

I really find it so dangerous that our president wants to undo what it took the founding fathers years to write the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution and 85 different Federalist Papers, (those mainly written by Alexander Hamilton).  This president wants to wipe out the foundation of our free society, and he does this using 140 characters at a time.

 

There is today a focused investigation being performed by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, who is closing in on Trump’s former campaign chairman, his former national security adviser and his own son Donald Trump Jr., who are becoming seriously implicated in the investigation.  Trump tweets daily, just to take the focus away from this effort, while he continues to show his respect for dictatorial leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the Philippines dictator, Rodrigo Duterte, the communist leader of China, Xi Jinping, and he even seems to envy the power of the young dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong Un.

 

If Trump had his way, he would have the same or even more power than these strong-arm dictators that seem to have no issues about killing off their political rivals.

 

It is frightening that due to the efforts of President Trump and of corporate leaders such as the former head of the Fox Network, Roger Ailes, and his boss, Rupert Murdoch, that the efforts of these three individuals has led many of their Fox TV viewers to assume that any information provided by the mainstream media, and not from Fox News, is all just  “Fake News”.

 

The foundation of our republic is the ready availability of good and accurate information for allowing all American voters to make fully informed decisions in the voting booths.  These three aforementioned  individuals, and their Fox cronies, have succeeded in converting normally reasonable individuals to become the basically political “walking dead” Americans, when it comes to their true understanding of what’s really going on in American politics.

 

As an example, recently on Fox News, their own news anchor, Shepard Smith, who is usually an honest news anchor, he chose to de-bunk the false issue about Hillary Clinton and the bogus link of her to the sale of a US uranium operation to Russia.  When Smith stated that the so called scandal was a “non-scandal”, he then received many tweets from Fox viewers that said he was wrong and should just leave Fox and go to work at either CNN or MSNBC.  As far as these viewers are concerned, CNN and MSNBC offer only “Fake News”.   That’s what President Trump keeps telling them.

 

President Trump had started this lie about CNN and MSNBC back during the 2016 campaign.  Whenever either of these networks reported that Trump had made a statement that was incorrect or was in fact a bare-faced lie, Trump would just say at his rallies that these networks were being dishonest and offering “Fake News”.  The media’s Fact Checkers would then come on and support these other network’s statements, but the Fox viewers would just reject the Fact Checkers as also being more “Fake News”.

 

To take the focus away from the special Russian investigation, Trump is now doubling-down on his assertions that his Attorney General should considering appointing a special counsel to investigate Clinton’s role in approving the purchase of uranium operation by Russia.  Yes, the same one that the Fox’s report had shown to be a non-issue.  And I guarantee you that the Fox viewers, and many of the voters in those bright Red Republican states will believe what Trump is alleging over anything offered up by the Washington Post or other main-stream media outlets.

 

Trump really blew it, and started all this when he fired the head of the FBI who was investigating the Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election.  That move by Trump, caused the need for the special counsel, Robert Mueller to be assigned to investigate Trump and his campaign’s involvement with the Russians. Then, when his appointee for Attorney General, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, lied in his confirmation hearing, and had to recuse himself from the Russian investigation, now Trump is pounding his own “beleaguered” attorney general, as recently as Nov. 3, by demanding that the Justice Department open a criminal investigation of his defeated opponent.

 

This is what is allowed and what happens in dictatorial banana republics, not in the United States of America….until now.

 

This is a decades echo of Richard Nixon’s attempts to deal with the Watergate investigations and the Saturday Night Massacre of Nixon’s firing the then special Watergate investigator.  In Sessions’ testimony to the House Judiciary Committee he had said: “the Department of Justice can never be used to retaliate politically against opponents, and that would be wrong.” But that seems to be precisely what is going on in order for him to appease the demands of his boss, the president.

 

What Trump is wanting to do is what all those authoritarian and tyrant leaders do. They use the instruments of state power, particularly that of their prosecutors, to come down upon their citizens with whom they disagree. It is what Putin did by using the Russian penal system to break the back of Sergei Magnitsky’s anti-corruption campaign and ultimately to end his life.

 

Our constitutional system of: limited power, checks and balances between its parts, and our individual rights, up to now has protected we citizens from such abuses of power. Trump is putting that system to some serious tests.

 

The first line of defense against this authoritarianism is an independent Justice Department committed to the rule of law. In 1940, Attorney General Robert Jackson, in a famous speech in the Great Hall of the Department of Justice warned that when “the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that [is where] the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group.”

 

Sessions needs to read that Robert Jackson speech, but I seriously wonder if he did read it, does Sessions have what it takes to stand up to his boss, the president.  His conduct to date in office does not give much support for that to happen.

 

If Sessions yields to pressure from the president, as I expect him to, it will be more dark days at the Department of Justice. 

 

The rule of law will have been weakened, and our country will be in serious further peril.

 

God help this great nation.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2017