Death Throes

You gotta wonder, don't you, who gets info from whom among the RWS™. Where do the lies start, what's their plan for dissemination? How is it that, first, a Justice of the Supreme Court affirms a falsehood, and then the lie is repeated on Fox "news?" Corollarally (is that a word?), you might also ask if Scalia was deliberately lying, or is he just ill-informed; i.e., stupid? Who put whom up to what? Because, in the end, it actually does matter.

I refer to the falsehoods about the so-called "Cornhusker kickback." He admits he hasn't read the bill; but he makes the claim. Yes, it did exist at one point, as a (pathetic) attempt to court Ben Nelson into voting for the ACA. Sadly, that's how politics works in this corner of the world, and it's only part of the story of why we got a gift to insurance companies instead of a rational solution to health care access in the US. Nevertheless, as was known within moments of the original proposition, the clause was removed from the legislation. And, by golly, it has stayed removed. It was gone when the law was passed, gone when Scalia brought it up, and it's still gone as Fox "news" continues to suggest to its sheep that it's the opposite of gone. As, in other words, Fox deliberately falsifies history.

Don't be surprised, though: it's their business plan. Their very successful business plan.

But there's the matter of a sitting Justice spreading the same bullshit. Maybe it got fed to him when he and Clarence politicked their way into a right-wing festivus of anti-healthers. Or maybe it was the other way around: maybe the tyrannical twosome brought the blueprint to the gathering. Whatever went on, and when, it's disturbing to witness the coordination of the spreading of a lie; a lie so easily falsified, a lie that's been pointed out over and over. A lie that Fox "news" has to know is a lie (I mean, you know, they're a news organization, right?), but which it deliberately keeps trumpeting.

However you spin it, it's corrupt. Not only is it a fundamental perversion of what little is left of our democracy; it speaks volumes about the low regard in which Fox holds its viewers. And why not? It never seems to matter how blatantly they lie: like spray from the sea, credulity abounds among their following.

Well, the fait is pretty much accompli. All that remains is the time it takes to hear a couple more death rattles, as the careful, patient, soulless efforts of the Murdochorovian plan have their final unfolding: pandering to the religiously vulnerable, the paranoid and the hate-filled; the taking over of media to spread continual falsehoods; corrupting education; spreading distrust of expertise and of knowledge itself; until there's a critical mass of uneducated, misinformed, terrified people, unwilling and, finally, no longer even able to see what's happening, only too happy to elect representatives who'll vote against their and their country's interest while claiming to do the opposite. Going to hell in a hannitybasket.

They have their nonstop propaganda network, the reins of (so far) one house of Congress, and the Supreme Court, and now it's only a matter of not much more time before the end is at hand. It could be as soon as November, 2012: only a month before the world is supposed to end, we will have done it to ourselves, blindly and blithely giving away our democracy to corporations and billionaires, blissfully turning the country over to those who'd suck it dry now, take what's left, live out their lives in luxury, and exit the ruins without a second thought.

Yeah, I'm having a bad day. But am I wrong?