Time for a Little Truth Therapy

Accepting Lies and Denying Reality Will Be Our Undoing If We Don't Wake Up Soon

There is too much pussyfooting around in our discussion of serious issues that demand real honesty these days. So let’s set a few things straight:

• Justice delayed is justice denied. It is an outright failure of our justice system that it will be more than four years since the January 6^th insurrection before there is an actual trial of even one of the high-level planners behind the event.

• It is an outright failure of legal judgment for Jack Smith to have brought the stolen documents case in Florida. Trump is accused of grave crimes that suggest he is not only a threat to our national security but to that of our allies. The public had every right to know whether he was guilty of those crimes or not. Bringing the case in Florida created the possibility of what we face today, delays and delays and more delays. And voters will not have the insights into Trump’s crimes that a trial and a conviction would have brought.

• The decision by Judge Merchan in New York today to postpone Trump’s sentencing in a case about his defrauding American voters (often misleadingly referred to as the “hush money” case) until after the election is another error of judgment. Again, voters have a right to clarity about the character and crimes of political candidates and they will not have that in this case.

• Anyone who suggests that we have a system in which all Americans are equal in the eyes of the law—a principle upon which the country was allegedly founded—is lying to you and/or lying to themselves. That has never been the case. Our system contains profound biases. The most notable of these that the rich who can hire many lawyers and pay fines easily can avoid consequences or only face consequences that are not burdensome on them have always had a special advantage in our legal system. So too, of course, have white men in a system that has long favored them. But now, it is also clear that presidents are a special category of people in this country. While in office, according to an outrageous and legally insupportable opinion by the corrupted U.S. Supreme Court, president can literally commit any crimes they wish and if they frame them as official acts they can escape consequences. They can even stop the justice system from prosecuting them. What is more appalling still is that everyone in the U.S. knows this and it is expected that if Trump is elected he will end any prosecution he is facing…even for serious crimes. He will also abuse the pardon power and has promised to forgive the crimes of those who participated in the January 6^th insurrection—a violent assault on the rule of law in the United States unlike any we have seen before in our history.