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American Mass Media and Punditry Remain a Dishonest, Militaristic Embarrassment

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When it comes to U.S. presidents, experience has taught me to always assume the worst. Irrespective of what the winning candidate said on the campaign trail, a few things things tend to happen once they’re sworn into office. To name a few, we almost always end up with a further expansion of the imperial presidency, more pointless wars, growth in the surveillance state and continued unaccountable pillaging by Wall Street. The worst trends and elements of society tend to grow no matter who sits in the oval office.

As such, I’m genuinely heartened by those rare occasions when a U.S. president tries to reduce geopolitical tensions and prioritize peace. This isn’t to say such attempts will work out perfectly, or work at all, but in a world in which a hammer-focused American foreign policy tends to see every situation as a nail, attempts at peace should at the very least be supported by those who claim to care about such things.

Nevertheless, here in America we’ve encouraged and rewarded a peculiar class of people who tend to cluster within specialized niches of the imperial economy, namely the mass media and think tanks often funded by military contractors and foreign dictatorships. While these types always cheer U.S. overseas belligerence, nothing gets them clutching their pearls more fiercely than Donald Trump doing something reasonable.

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The Election Never Ended

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The U.S. election never ended. By that I mean the relentless public battle for power and status, as opposed to confronting what actually ails the nation, has continued, unabated since November 8th.

Despite a clear cut and decisive win for Donald Trump, Americans have been incessantly bombarded by reckless calls for an electoral coup from figures like the certifiably disturbed former sports host Keith Olbermann, to the formerly respectable professor of law, Harvard’s Lawrence Lessig, who has in my view totally torched his credibility as a result of his participation in this stunt.

Since I never considered the elector coup a real threat, I haven’t written anything about it on these pages (though I’ve tweeted plenty on it). Nevertheless, the fact that people seen as thoughtful and serious about the state of the Republic even entertained such a disastrous ploy is a terrifying thing to contemplate. Even former advisor to President Obama, David Axelrod recognizes the extraordinary irresponsibility of such a tactic. The Hill reports:

Democratic strategist David Axelrod on Monday said an Electoral College revolt against President-elect Donald Trump would be “destructive” for the country.

“Look, Alexander Hamilton conceived of the Electoral College and the founding fathers as a buffer against democracy run amok, as a safe guard against someone who was unsuited for the office to take the office,” Axelrod said on CNN’s “New Day.”

“But it’s never been used in the history of our Republic,” he continued.

“To have it happen now, despite the fact that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote and all that’s swirling around with Russia and so on,” he said, “I believe would split the country apart in a really destructive way and it would set this mad cycle in which every election the Electoral College vote would be in question.” 

Although Axelrod deserves credit for acknowledging the sheer stupidity of the thing, if Trump had actually been denied the Presidency in such a manner the situation would’ve been far worse than what he envisions. Indeed, we’d have been on a fast-track to some sort of Civil War/disintegration of the union. Unfortunately, as dangerous as the attempted electoral college coup was, it’s far from the most concerning thing I’ve witnessed since the election.

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