A new low - #3. This is how bad it is.

I want to further clarify what is really the issue in the senate's rejection of nominee Debo Adegbile to head the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.

It is entirely defensible that any lawyer can provide legal defense for anyone without that being taken to be an indication of the lawyer's beliefs in anything other than the Constitution's guarantee of a legal right to representation in a court of law.

However, even beyond that basic test of fairness, Debo Adegbile did not represent the man accused of killing a policeman in his initial trial of a murder that occurred 30 years ago (when Adegbile was 17 years old).

No, as head of the NAACP's legal assistance program, he became involved in an appeal based on the constitutionality of the trial judge's sentencing instructions.

Furthermore, the appeals judge agreed that there was a violation of the defendent's constitutional rights and commuted the sentence to life in prison.

That's it.   Adegbile was involved in helping a man get his constitutional rights in a court of law.   Nothing more, nothing less than that.     And for that, the nation has been denied the service of the most qualified person who could head the Civil Rights Division at this crucial time of voter suppression state laws that need to be challenged.

FoxNews spun this into guilt by association for Adegbile, calling him a "cop-killer coddler," and framing their video background to make it look to the casual viewer that the black man they were talking about, whom President Obama had nominated to head the Civil Rights Division, was actually the black thug in prison garb shown in background videos.   And if you repeatedly call him a "cop-killer coddler," what's going to stick in people's minds is "cop-killer."

Thus, FoxNews and their far-right echo chamber set out to taint a good man so that it would become politically difficult for some senators to vote for the confirmation.

That's what we're up against.   It's another example of how the money bags of conservative billionaires exert their influence.    It's not just that they buy congressmen;  others they simply destroy by tactics as were used against Adegbile.   They buy news networks that do this kind of distortion and character assassination of good people in order to inject their politican slant into what's supposed to be news.   This distorts public opinion and builds outrage, so that good congress-persons either vote in bad laws or guarantee they will be defeated in the next election.

Aided and abetted by the Supreme Court's "Citizens United" decision -- and a pending case will possibly make it even worse -- our nation is moving to the point where we are being governed more by big money than by democractic processes.   We are becoming an oligarchy.

Ralph