This really kind of sums it up.

How much more of a disgrace can you be? Trump is not just unfit for office, he barely qualifies as a human being.

I was just reading about Trump’s complaining about the timing of the debates, and the article quoted Trump as saying he’d received a letter from the NFL complaining about it. The article noted that the NFL denied ever sending him a letter, but made nothing of it. It struck me that this is quite common—Trump lies about everything, the media just lets it slide.

Remember back in 2000 when all Al Gore had to do was to confuse which of 17 trips he had gone on with the FEMA director and everyone called him an insufferable liar, with the media questioning his integrity and electability?

Now Donald Trump makes up lies literally every single day, and it’s just kind of glossed over.
Standards have changed, haven’t they?

Oh no, wait—you know who is branded an insufferable liar? Hillary. No one even doubts that, including so many on the left. Despite the fact that sources like Politifact actually found that she has been the most honest of all the candidates this year. And yet, the Washington Post declares, “Hillary Clinton has a major honesty problem,” the Baltimore Sun proclaims, “Hillary Clinton’s lies can’t survive the age of social media,” and the Boston Globe says that Hillary deserves her special standard. And that doesn’t even begin to touch on the right-wing media… while a search for Trump and Honesty not only yields fewer results, but many of them are headlines parroting Trump’s statements about Hillary’s honesty.

Why does this happen? The answer lies in the media.

In an objective media, Trump would have more than ten times the headlines proclaiming issues with his honesty, let alone his other faults. But the media has long been cowed by conservatives into finding an “equivalency,” where they must be equally critical of both sides, even if the one on the right is a hundred times worse, or else face scathing attacks for being a “Liberal Media.” Remember the boast, “Without Fear or Favor”? So much for that—the media cowers in fear at any such charge; the right wing has “worked the ref” so thoroughly that honesty and objectivity are long forgotten memories of the institution that we depend on for accurate information.

Here’s Republican Representative Steve King from Iowa (the same guy who keeps a Confederate flag on his desk) making a complete fool of himself after a panel member on the TV show he was a guest on said that the time of “old white people” is passing:

This ‘old white people’ business does get a little tired, Charlie. I’d ask you to go back through history and figure out, where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you’re talking about, where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization … [t]han, than Western civilization itself. It’s rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world. That’s all of Western civilization.

Do you hear that? The only significant contributions to civilization came from The United States or Europe. He doesn’t mean just “white people,” it just happens that Europe and the United States are dominated by white people, just a coincidence there.

Of course, he’s wrong on a number of levels. For example, writing developed in Mesopotamia, which I’m pretty sure is in the Middle East. And our numbering system? It’s called “Arabic” for a reason. See those stars up in the sky at night? A lot of them got named by Arab astronomers, who pioneered the field. Remember back in high school, in fact, when you heard about the “Cradle of Civilization”? That wasn’t in Rome. Not to mention things like gunpowder, the compass, and movable type, all invented in China. Many contributions in math (ever heard of Pythagorus?), astronomy, and metallurgy came from Africa.

But the most hilarious way that King is wrong comes from his very own statement. See if you can spot it:

It’s rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world.

That’s right: the one contribution that King himself would probably rank as the greatest contribution to civilization ever, the one that he mentioned in that very statement, and it most decidedly did not come from Europe or the United States.

Christianity.

What an idiot. Though, I suppose I can’t blame him too much: in the American education system, history and culture are taught pretty much as if only Western civilization mattered.

Today, I read a writing which essentially said, “Most law enforcement people are good people! Don’t lump them all in with the bad ones.” It is pretty much the umpteenth time I have heard that sentiment repeated. I have repeated it myself several times—because it is very much true.

You know what I’ve never heard? Anyone on the side critical of BLM and the cause of protest saying, “the majority of black people and of the membership of BLM are peaceful, non-violent, law-abiding citizens fighting for their rights; it’s just the few bad people on the margins making the rest look worse.” We pretty much *never* hear that stated aloud. Quite the reverse: the Dallas shooter was not BLM, but he discredited the entire movement just by being black—something that is supposed to be avoided at all costs when regarding the police.

Why is that?

This is one of the central issues, in fact: cops are automatically afforded respect, society demanding that we give them the benefit of the doubt even when they commit a crime; the reverse is true for people of color in this country.

When the five cops is Dallas were killed, *everyone* hailed them as heroes and decried the villain who shot them. If any of them had a blemish on their record, bringing it up after their deaths would be unforgivable; it would quite rightly be pointed out that such a thing would be irrelevant, and trying to make it relevant would be crass and indecent. Suggesting that the shooter was anything but the worst of criminals would be literally unimaginable, and any fate they suffer would be justly deserved.

When an innocent black person is killed by a police officer, however, the exact opposite happens: that victim is instantly demonized, every blemish on their record is instantly released to the public so as to define who they were, and their names are dragged through the mud—while the person who killed them is shielded, excused, defended, and in almost every case, exonerated.

In short, we treat black people as if their lives don’t matter.

Ergo the movement.

I agree that when rogue police officers kill an unarmed black person, it does not and should not reflect on the million-plus law enforcement officers who are doing their jobs well. The problem is, though a million do their jobs as expected, thousands of others are corrupt and violent, and some of them commit murder. The majority of the good cops do not make the minority irrelevant or excusable.

When black people on the periphery of a Black Lives Matter protest commit wrongs, it is blamed directly on all of the non-violent, law-abiding Black Lives Matter protesters, who are castigated for not instantly condemning such acts—even when they do exactly that.

You see the disconnect: one group is not shamed for failing to condemn their brothers who commit crimes, the other is shamed even when they do.

Those million good cops are said to be protecting the people on any given day, which is true. They work hard for little pay, they face danger, they protect us, and they sacrifice. No one questions that.

However, there is an exception to the duty of protection. It is called the Blue Wall of Silence. Cops defend other cops. Along with a legal system inclined to not prosecute cops, a serious fault emerges. As asked by the Roman poet Juvenal, “Who will guard the guards themselves?” Because even the good ones are shielding the bad ones. It’s the code.

Can we really say that the police are in fact protecting the public when they defend their own who harm the public?

We did not accept that from the Catholic Church, when otherwise good clergy defended child molesters, allowing them to molest more children still—all in the name of defending the order.

Why should we accept it from the police? This is far from a victimless crime. Just the deaths alone are in the hundreds each year. The beatings, tasings, stops based on race, and false arrests not ending in deaths number far greater than that.

If the police are truly committed to defending the public, they must not shield those who violate that trust.

That is not happening, however. They do shield their brethren.

And that is a legitimate and powerful objection to the “good cops” point. They are supposed to be held to a higher standard; in fact, they are held to a much lower one.

The same can be said of prosecutors and judges who, even when the victim of a police shooting is known to not be a criminal, the word of the police officer is given every benefit of the doubt—even when video evidence directly contradicts their statements—while any blemish on the record of the accused robs them of any credibility, and it takes only the most egregious and blatant of crimes to result in a prosecution.

This is not justice. So long as this happens, the police are indeed failing in their duty to protect the public. Nor should you accept this as “the way it is” or “the way it has to be” simply because the job is difficult, or (hopefully not for this reason) you are not the one likely to be tased, beaten, shot, or killed at a traffic stop.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? It is a valid and important question, as it is rather clear that, at this time, the police are not policing themselves.

There is a term for that: being above the law.

Reading this CNN story about Hillary at the FBI today brought two points to mind:

1. “The timing … couldn’t be worse.” Gee, it’s almost as if someone engineered an investigation of her so that it would culminate at just the right time.

2. In the story, Bill Clinton’s meeting with Loretta Lynch and Hillary’s use of a private email server “fuel the narrative that the Clintons operate under different rules than the rest of the political world.”

They are correct: a string of Bush administration officials did the same thing as Clinton, and they never got investigated for it. Their Attorneys General just gave them a bye, as did their congressional ethics and other committees. Different rules indeed.

Remember when it was discovered that George W. Bush had a drunk driving conviction? He got away with that history and the fact that he hid it, just by crying foul at the timing of the release. All he did was to say, “The Democrats are playing dirty tricks!” and it all went away: the “liberal” media decided that a presidential candidate arrested for drunk driving and then lying about it was not worth reporting on. Different rules indeed.

Remember how, when Democrats took control of both houses of Congress in 2006, they launched massive congressional investigations into the Bush administration for every imagined misdeed?

Of course you don’t, because they never did—even though (a) Republicans warned that they would, and (b) they had a large number of very real, serious crimes to investigate: massive illegal warrantless wiretapping, torture, lying to get us into a war that killed thousands of troops, the mishandling of Katrina leading to many civilian deaths, various lapses in security, the outing of a CIA agent as political payback, the US Attorney scandal—and, oh yeah, private email servers. They held back, and did not use their power as a cudgel. What investigations there were were limited, and did not punish anyone.

Not so the Republicans—they immediately went hog-wild when they got control back, and as soon as they were able, began using that power to attack not just Obama, but in particular Hillary, the presumptive nominee after Obama. And not just once, but multiple times (at least eight different Benghazi probes, for example, new ones sprouting even after previous ones cleared Clinton of wrongdoing).

Can you imagine what Republicans or the media would have said if Democrats in Congress had investigated John McCain in 2006 for his own past scandals? Or better, in 2008, when McCain rather clearly violated election laws, then Bush fired the only FEC member who objected? Did Democrats hold hearings on that? Of course not—both Republicans and the media would have screamed “Dirty Tricks!” Instead, Democrats in Congress and the “liberal media” both gave both McCain and Bush a free pass on it.

Different rules indeed.

Stories like these very often bring me to ask that question again and again: “What if it had been the Democrats who had done that, how would Republicans have reacted?” The response is obvious: if Republicans do something, it’s no big deal; if Democrats do the exact same thing, it’s a scandal so big that investigations never cease. IOKIYAR.

Yes, the timing couldn’t be worse, and yes, they live under different rules. Just not how the CNN author meant, though.