Star-Ledger's Tom Moran: An accusation is enough to convict!

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Well, there goes the rule of law.

In the future, we should not expect a judicial process to determine our guilt or innocence.  What we should expect is the Moran prescription:  Merely to be accused, then to have a media-appointed judge determine our guilt, and finally a social media firestorm whipped-up to ensure our punishment.

How arrogant must someone like Tom Moran be to believe that he has the power to erase due process and our Republic's democratic traditions?  With his dutiful satellite Julie O'Connor, knelt passively by his side, Moran passes  judgment to take away the civil rights of an American citizen.  To muzzle a point of view by saying that someone should not be permitted to access their constitutional right -- protected by our Bill of Rights -- to run for office and freely voice their opinion.

Hey Julie!  Didn't you recently write an entire column about the falsely accused and admonishing those who would rush to judgment?  Guess your words don't apply to Tom, do they?

Is it not enough that the property taxpayers of New Jersey are made to subsidize out-of-date print media like the Star-Ledger?  Moran and his ilk have used their political relationships to successfully lobby for a law that forces local governments to use money from property taxes to advertise in print media when so many other formats cost nothing.  The law keeps Moran and his kind in a job even as the pressure it places on working people raises New Jersey's foreclosure rate to the highest in the nation.  But this is only one instance of Moran's corruption.

Sadly, Tom Moran and the Star-Ledger newspaper continue to add to the growing stain that is New Jersey's public life.  Moran has long been the subject of derision by professional journalists, who have been appalled by his panegyrics to political bosses like George Norcross.  Moran has long supped at the posterior of the Newhouse clan, who own the Star-Ledger and other organs (Moran amongst them) and for this Moran has been hated by the union workers and journalists who have suffered personal and material privations to service the greed of the Newhouse corporate masters.  Yes, Tom Moran is a sheepish fellow (and from the looks of him he might have been sired by one).

But it hardly ends here.  Tom Moran and his editorial board of sports writers and pom-pom girls have purposefully participated in the lowering of New Jersey's standards in public life.  They have steadfastly ignored the presence of convicted criminals in New Jersey's political system and have unflinchingly remained silent when these convicts were given political power or even elected office. 

When Montclair State University proposed fashioning a course in public service modeled around the life of a bureaucrat and lobbyist who had actually been criminally indicted for public corruption (he was saved from the legal process by an untimely death) Moran and O'Connor did not wince.  There was no admonishment in the Star-Ledger's editorial pages about what they were "celebrating".  The judicial process was mocked -- even though those who were indicted along with this "model of public service" were found to be, most guilty.

You see, to Tom and Julie, public theft and public corruption and criminal conviction and all that once was bad, it no longer matters.  What matters now, so our warm couple insist, is what goes on in your head.  They -- Moran and O'Connor -- want to be the judges of your inner moral conduct.  And while their concern for public morals does not encompass corporate prostitution and office trysts, what they will not tolerate are words.

Words and writing and books and speech are what they are on about.  They will use them, to reach into another person's soul, to determine motives and character, to decide if their subject is worthy of a human consideration, like doubt.

Tom Moran and Julie O'Connor are corporate versions of Captain Beatty in Ray Bradbury's  Fahrenheit 451.  Narcissistic windbags, usurpers of process and of judgment, haters of any way other than their own, of words and of writing that expresses what they do not embrace, and so -- haters of books and of free speech.  They terrorize them without power while sucking corporate ass, are friends of corruption and criminality.  They are authoritarians and the destroyers of liberty.