August 3, 4

 I have had my fill of the dueling commentators on The Former Guy's latest legal woes. His side is bleating constantly about "freedom of speech" while the other side points out that his freedom of speech isn't the issue. It doesn't matter whether he believed he won an election stolen from him or whether he peddled a bushel of lies knowing they were lies. He is free to spew what ever venom he wants. However, the freedom of speech isn't absolute. As the old saying goes: you can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater. Nor can you defame someone as the E. Gene Carroll case showed. Just as our constitution mandates a free press but not a fair or truthful press, so it also mandates freedom of speech but not lies designed to harm someone else or steal from someone, or speech in pursuit of a crime. We'll see what the prosecution can prove.

04*********************************************************************

I got involved in other matters and didn't get much else done--as you can see from the scant post yesterday.

Bill Astore has a good piece today on the seductiveness of war. I remember a MASH episode. For those who are too young the TV series was set in a field hospital during the Korean War which was a bloody slog for damned little and ended where it all began after three years of carnage. An Air Force bomber pilot winds up at the hospital recovering from minor injuries crowing about how good the war is for him. He flies out of Japan to drop his bombs and flies back in time for dinner with his family. He might as well have been Stateside. The doctors give him a graphic tour where he sees the doctors/nurses operating on horrific wounds suffered by both American and Korean soldiers and Korean civilians. War isn't so nice and tidy after all.

Found this article on the Financial Times which says something very on target about "western populism." "Eastern populism" does have a program whether it is Russian (Putin), Indian (Modi), or Turkish (Erdogan). The leaders might actually lose part of their support if they don't deliver or espouse something their supporters don't like. But our Western "populists" can, in The Former Guy's words, shoot somebody (perhaps even multitudes of somebodies) and it would cost him a single supporter. They have no real principles, no programs, and only nebulous promises the can mean anything to anyone.

As I wrote above I am ignoring as much of the coverage of the latest indictment of TFG but, given the ubiquity of said coverage, I can't ignore it all. Every now and then a good analysis comes up like this one by Harold Meyerson on The American Prospect.

Just after I saw House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on the news bleating that every time new stories come out about Hunter Biden's alleged crimes I found an interesting cartoon showing a couple watching Fox News which repeated "Hunter Biden," "Hunter Biden," "Hunter Biden," ad nauseam. The woman asks her husband why it is, every time TFG gets bad news on the legal front, Fox News start beating the Hunter Biden drum. Good question.

Ah, I have so missed these irreverent old ladies since they moved to Twitter. I don't really use Twitter so didn't follow them there.