OK, Maybe Bill Maher Is Sincere In His Criticism Of Democrats and Progressives…MAYBE, Part II: Why Bill’s “New Rule” Is Not As Ethical As He Thinks It Is

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

In Part I, I published Bill Maher’s surprising slap at Democrats and progressives for their unethical drift into anti-Semitism. It’s pretty good—for Bill. The 18 paragraphs are numbered so I don’t have to repeat them here, especially since WordPress nearly sent me to the woodchipper when I was trying to compose the first post. I’m sorry that you’ll have to jump back and forth, but so do I, to write this.

And away we go…

1. Everyone has a right to be anti-Semitic, just as everyone has a right to lie, or commit adultery. Advocating anti-Semitism, promoting it, and acting on it is still unethical. These ethical nuances, rights vs. law vs. ethics, are beyond Maher’s comprehension.

2. See? Bill immediately defaults to a Rationalization #22 defense of Israel. It isn’t the worst country! Wow. Talk about a back-handed compliment!

3. Not quite as bad as China, Russia, Sudan, Iran, Myanmar, Haiti, the Congo, and North Korea, eh? Way to make anti-Semites feel ashamed, Bill….

4. Ezra Klein is nothing to be proud of. He has been a leader of Axis bias for a decade.

5. A “They’re just as bad” (Rationalization #2) cheat by Maher, and he’s cherry-picking. Carlson has been excoriated by conservatives for his anti-Israel stance. He is not representative of the Right at all, and I, for one, never thought he was.

6. Bill managed not to mention the Times’ “dog rape” libel.

9. Maher likes the #22 rationalization so much he comes back to it. This is because Bill doesn’t get ethics. He also evokes “Everybody does it!” here, the hoariest rationalization of all. Jeez Bill…read a book.

10. The “new rule” is about Democratic Party anti-Semitism, but the candidate he writes the most about is an obscure anti-Semitic Republican. Huh.

11. Israel overwhelmingly has the “right-wingers” on its side, and it has the President of the United States on its side in particular. Maher never mentions President Trump at all. He’s only willing to infuriate his audience so much, apparently.

12. Trying to continue his false equivalence argument regarding anti-Semitism on”both sides,” Maher pairs two typical leftist academics with…Candace Owens? She is persona non grata among conservatives, a true embarrassment, and she is the opposite of an academic, as she is illiterate.

13. Again with the rogue Republican joke in a statement about Leftist anti-Semitism, and again, Bill is cherry-picking. There is a reason that Margery Taylor Greene isn’t in Congress any more. Representing her idiocy as mainstream Republicanism is despicable. Rep. Fine’s sharp quip after one of Mayor Mamdani’s Muslim minions derided dogs was, in my opinion, undiplomatic but defensible. No dogs in the U.S. have engaged in any mass shootings or terrorism.

14-18. Bill finishes very strong, almost making up for his rationalizations and weasel words on the way to his conclusion

You Know That Ridiculous “100 Best Vocalists” List? The Guardian says “Hold My Beer….”

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

Well yes, John, I’d say that’s a fair and accurate assessment.

Read the Guardian’s explanation of how they got this list. It’s even worse than the list itself, but it does explain the bias creating this mess with this single phrase: “Atwood’s horribly prescient The Handmaid’s Tale.” Prescient? I guess I missed the U.S. turning women into involuntary full-time baby machines.

This is a DEI list, and not a very smart or informed one. No Mark Twain, because “Huckleberry Finn” has been cancelled. Jack London was too much of a toxic masculine writer for these weenies, I guess. “Treasure Island” is too full of men and boys too. “The Three Musketeers” is nowhere to be found; nor is “The Count of Monte Christo.” The women in “Ivanhoe” are too girly. But knee jerk political correctness kicked three of the very best novels, all written by women, off the list: “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Gone With The Wind,” and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” almost certainly the most influential and important American novel ever written. Humor is pretty much verboten, unless it’s anti-war humor (“Catch 22”). P.G. Wodehouse wrote the funniest novels of all time: the problem with including him would be picking which were the best. Yes, ancient odd-ball novel “Tristram Shandy” is on the list: I challenge anyone to claim it has even half the outright belly laughs of Wodehouse at his best.

Not including Tolkien is inexplicable (and I don’t even like his writing); similarly, the greatest novels that engage children while reaching adults as well were cut: “Wind in the Willows,” Watership Down,” and especially the two Lewis Carroll classics, “Alice in Wonderland” and “Alice Through the Looking Glass,” both among the cleverest, most original, most quoted and influential novels in the English Language.

Meanwhile, one entry on the list, “The Turn of the Screw,” isn’t even a novel. I thought the vocalist list was absurd because it was lazy and ignorant, but “The Hundred Best Novels of All Time” is even worse, because it is overtly political. “Never has such a list been more needed,” The Guardian says. Why would incompetent, biased, misleading lists ever be “needed?” Amusingly, the explanation of this thing starts with the correct assessment in its very first sentence: “[C]ompiling a list of the greatest novels of all time is an impossible task.”

Here is the stupid list. Go crazy…

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OK, Maybe Bill Maher Is Sincere In His Criticism Of Democrats and Progressives…MAYBE, Part I: Maher’s Ethics Quote of the Month

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Ethics Alarms has been skeptical of HBO’s clown nose on/clown nose off host of “Real Time,” Bill Maher, who has recently been critical of his favored side of the political divide and even, mirabile dictu, defending Donald Trump from time to time. Bill is a pompous left-biased jerk, not half as clever as he thinks he is but not stupid, and I have detected a strategic move rightward to distinguish himself from the all-progressive-all-the-time hoard on late night TV. I have also stated that I doubt his sincerity, as I doubt the sincerity of many professional pundits and comics who style themselves as truth-tellers.

Maher recently gave a long, not particularly funny speech in his show’s “New Rules” segment harshly criticizing Democrats and progressives for their increasingly anti-Semitic and anti-Israel rhetoric. It’s long: I’m going to number the paragraphs so I can comment in Part 2. Here was Bill’s speech:

1. And finally, new rules since yesterday was Israel’s birthday. Having become a nation on May 14th, 78 years ago, everyone must either wish her a happy birthday or admit they’re anti-Semitic. Now, it’s everyone’s right in a free country to be anti-Semitic, but enough with hiding behind Israel or Zionism or Netanyahu.

2. If you think, as so many do now, that when it comes to human rights, Israel is the monster country of all time, you either don’t read or you don’t care about your own hypocrisy. Because there are so many worse places. But that’s where we are these days.

3. No Jews, no news. Ha ha. But China, Russia, Sudan, Iran, Myanmar, Haiti, the Congo, North Korea, all way worse. And that’s how you know it’s anti-Semitism. It’s the inconsistency. People talk about Jews these days like something out of Stormfront, except it’s not Stormfront.

4. It’s an editor from the American Prospect, which is a venerable liberal publication that launched the careers of journalists like Ezra Klein. And yet no one blinks when one of their editors says, Israel is a brainwashed, psychopathic death cult that might need to be nuked to save the human race. Uh-huh.

5. People say the left and the right can’t agree on anything these days. Well, there is this one thing they agree on. Right-winger Tucker Carlson has Nick Fuentes and Holocaust deniers on his podcast and wonders along with them, who really was the bad guy in World War II?

6. And the New York Times has on their podcast super leftist Hasan Piker, who they call a progressive mind, and who says Zionists should be treated the same as Nazis, which I assume means hung at Nuremberg. That’s what progressive is now? I guess so.

7. The kids are sure into it. They went nuts last year at Coachella for Kneecap. That’s the name of an Irish rap group, as if Ireland hasn’t suffered enough.

8. Their stage set is a sign that says, fuck Israel. And then they send a beach ball around the crowd. Again, ha-ha.

9. Because again, Israel is the only country in the world doing anything bad. I see why the Meathead Manosphere and the Code Pink people are on the same page. Because they both went to high school in America and they don’t know anything.So we… So we really could someday soon have the tiki torch Jews will not replace us crowd and the queers for Palestine people working together to elect the next Hitler. There’s a North Carolina teenager who’s been charged with plotting to drive through a synagogue to fulfill her life goal of killing as many Jews as possible.

10. Because a kid’s got to have a dream. I’m just asking why in the world would this be the dream of some kid in North Carolina? Why is it the dream of Dan Bilzerian, who’s running as a Republican to win a House seat in Florida? Who’s Dan Bilzerian? Well, he’s a professional douchebag who’s attracted 30 million followers by doing this all day and posting it. Yes, he’ll fit in fine with the current Congress. And Dan is fairly typical of the guys in the Manosphere when he says “the only real battle in the world today that I see worth fighting is fucking exterminating Israel. I mean, I would sign up tomorrow to go fucking put boots on the ground and go fucking kill Israelis.” Why is this asshole’s life about two things? Getting more Viagra and exterminating the Jews?

11. Israel was founded on the idea that anti-Semitism made a Jewish state unnecessary because Jews would never be safe without one.Can you honestly listen to this rhetoric and not see why that turned out to be true? If you don’t have the right-wingers on your side, if you don’t have the progressives, what do you have? What’s more progressive than college, where professors now say things that would make Kanye wince?

12. Osman Umarji calls Zionists bloodthirsty animals. Who’s he, the leader of ISIS? No, he’s a professor right here in California at UC Irvine. And Candace Owens agrees with his assessment of Jews as animals because she says wherever they go, they bring their filth with them. Another professor, Hamid Dabashi, says of Israels, they have a vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture. These are the kind of statements Goebbels would have read and said, no notes.

13. I mean, where are the Jewish space lasers when you need them? Now, there are absolutely horrible things said about Muslims, too. That should also be, of course, roundly condemned, like Republican Congressman Randy Fine saying, if they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one. That’s awful. But it’s not the same as they need to be nuked and let’s exterminate them. This is why Jewish people here and in Europe now say they sometimes hide their identity, afraid that the Star of David will get them attacked, as has happened in almost too many places to mention lately.

14. Leave your Star of David at home. But the keffiyeh? You can wear that anywhere. You can wear it to Fiddler on the Roof and you’ll get applause. Jew hatred isn’t just acceptable now, it’s cool. Celebrities love it and make it trendy. It’s the new Che Guevara T-shirt. The Islamophobia is just as bad argument is simply a false equivalency. Can you name a Jewish professor who talks about Muslims the way they get talked about?

15. No. Anti-Jewish crimes, hate crimes, now outpace anti-Muslim hate crimes 9 to 1. It’s not a contest, and I’m certainly not saying do more of the other.I’m just saying these are the numbers, the facts, the reality. There is a frothing anxiousness for the literal extermination of this one group. And Democrats, where are you?

16. If any other minority group was being talked about this way, you’d break out the kente cloth and have ten benefit concerts. But because you see that so many of your brainwashed-by-TikTok constituents now have an unfavorable view of Israel, you indulge them when you should be correcting them. You don’t tell your woke idiots Israel isn’t a colonizer or an apartheid state or committing genocide, and that if you brats had to spend a week anywhere in the Middle East other than Israel, you would understand what liberalism is not.

17. All the people likely running for president now on the Democratic side want it known they don’t take money from AIPAC, the Israeli lobby, a stanch which gives permission to actual anti-Semites to say, see, we’re right about Israel. That’s dirty money from a dirty country. Oh, please, you take money from crypto and factory farmers and big tech from Diddy and Weinstein and Epstein, but AIPAC is too far?

18. Let me just say this to all who ask me. Why are you harder on the Democrats than you used to be? Until you fix this whole issue, stop asking me.

I analyze this Ethics Quote of the Month in Part II, which you can read here.

___________________

Source: RealClearPolitics

“The Great Stupid” Keeps Rolling Along, and I Finally Realized That I’ve Seen This Before

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

I really should have watched “Mad Men” when it first came out on AMC (2007-2015). It is first and foremost an ethics show, and it covers—pretty accurately, I have decided—the two decades I believe are the most important in U.S. cultural history, the Nineteen Fifties and Sixties. But the series’ episodes on the Crazy Years, 1967 through 1971, are weirding me out, man.

I had forgotten how many friends and acquaintances I had regarded as smart, stable, well-educated and raised with strong values and common sense suddenly showed up one day with wild hair, in tie-dyed T-shirts and tinted granny glasses, flipping peace signs, getting stoned constantly, talking about “pigs” and “doing your own thing.” It was like a horror movie. On “Mad Men,” one previously sane young woman leaves her husband and child to be permanently drugged out at a commune. Another once normal wife spends too much time in California and starts sleeping around in threesomes. The responsible adult daughter of a single mother turns up one day pregnant by a wandering musician, “out of bread” and dressed like a character in “Hair.” Everyone is chain smoking one substance or another and spouting hippie lingo like an idiot. In real life, I ran into my old high school girl friend three years after graduation and she was hooked up with a pompous Amherst grad Communist, quoting Jane Fonda, and she told me she was pregnant and moving to a cabin in the woods to make rustic furniture. And she did. I hardly recognized her.

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The Warped State of Mind of Today’s College Grads In One Funny/Horrifying Letter

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and author of, among other works, “The Coddling of the American Mind.” he has been vocal on criticizing attacks on campus free speech for more than a decade, warning that the American education system is handicapping generations of students by allowing them to avoid ideas, opinions, and even facts that they find unpalatable. Last week he gave the guest commencement speech at NYU, but not before students, including the Executive Committee of the NYU Student Government Assembly, angrily protested his selection…because they found his ideas and opinions opposed to their “values.”

As Mr Rogers would say, “Can you say ‘irony’? Sure you can!” Below is the hilarious letter they sent to the school’s administration. Frankly, I don’t know how any student with the sense to come in out of a lightning storm could read this and not think, “Wait a minute…doesn’t this letter prove that this Haidt guy may be on to something?”

But no. Read this thing without your head exploding or dissolving into giggles. I’ll try to keep my comments brief at the end:

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Sen. Cassidy Loses His Primary In Louisiana As He Deserved To…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Louisiana Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy missed the runoff in the state’s GOP Senate primary last night, finishing third. This means his tenure as U.S. Senator will end in 2027.

Well, good. Cassidy voted to convict President Donald Trump after he was impeached by the Democrat-controlled House in a purely partisan abuse of the impeachment process. Emulating Liz Cheney is not a good look for a Republican Senator.

Or anyone, really.

In 2021, Cassidy joined Democrats and a small band of bitter anti-Trump Republicans in voting to convict Trump after his second impeachment trial. Trump had called Cassidy a “disloyal disaster” and warned Louisiana voters that the senator was “BAD FOR LOUISIANA.” Well, convicting Trump would have definitely been bad for the nation, the stability of our government, and the institution of the Presidency. The second impeachment, properly mocked as the “snap impeachment” by Prof. Jonathan Turley, occurred without thorough House hearings, witnesses and an investigation. It was not designed to remove a rogue President, because Trump had already lost his re-election bid. The case that the riot at the Capitol was an “insurrection” was always legal nonsense, and the accusation that President Trump was somehow an accessory to the criminal acts of the drunk and stupid rioters never made sense.

I am pretty certain that the dual abuse of the impeachment process by the Democrats has effectively killed the device as a necessary fail-safe on Presidential misconduct. Now impeachment has been reduced to a cheap weapon of political warfare, and Cassidy was willing to cross party lines to endorse what was a Constitutional debacle. Never mind loyalty…the problem with voting for an unjust impeachment of one’s own party’s POTUS isn’t a lack of loyalty, it is an excess of stupidity, judgement, and responsibility.

Good riddance.

So NOW the Climate Change-Hyping “Experts” Admit That Their Fear-Mongering Models Were Garbage!

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment
GUEST POST BY RYAN HARKINS

[From your host: I know the headline and graphic is my style and not Ryan’s. The valuable commentary below came out of a thread on the last Open Forum. I decided that it was worthy of a stand-alone guest post, especially since I should have written pretty much the same post when this news was first reported. Also, with this post I am officially Christening “The Climate Change Hysteria Ethics Train Wreck.” I should have done it years ago. JM]

I’m seeing some news that the IPCC (the International Panel on Climate Change) has rejected the RCP8.5 model as pretty much an impossible scenario. What is significant about this is how much research and how many policies were based on this scenario. With the IPCC actually stating that RCP8.5 is simply not plausible, the foundation for so much of the climate change hysteria has been ripped away.

To provide a little more detail, RCP8.5 is one of thousands of different models (computer simulations) trying to predict the impact of human activity on climate change up to the year 2100. These models try to take into account factors like human population growth, adoption or rolling back of climate policies, differing degrees of climate forcing due to carbon dioxide (because the science is definitely NOT settled on how much forcing CO2 actually contributes), and a host of other factors. RCP8.5 has always been one of the most extreme models, predicting an increase of 8.5 W/m^2 by 2100. There are scores of other models that are far more modest in their projections, and certainly observed data has favored models that project something closer to 3.4 W/m^2, though even those are diverging from observed data as time goes on.

The upshot, though, is the sheer scope of how much of the world’s climate policies are based on RCP8.5. From this article, we have

“Why this matters: these scenarios live in policy. The now-implausible upper-end scenarios — RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5, and SSP3-7.0 — are not just academic constructs used in esoteric research. They are embedded in the policies and regulations of most of the world’s largest economies, found across the world’s most important multilateral institutions, and used in the climate stress tests that govern hundreds of billions of dollars in bank capital. National climate impact assessments in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Australia, Japan, and the Netherlands all use RCP8.5 or SSP5-8.5 as a reference scenario. The Network for Greening the Financial System framework, used by more than 140 central banks, has utilized a “Hot House World” scenario calibrated to RCP8.5 physical risk into the bank stress tests run by the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Banque de France, and the US Federal Reserve. The World Bank’s Climate Change Knowledge Portal, which provides the climate diagnostics that feed into the Country Climate and Development Reports for more than 100 client countries, defaults to SSP5-8.5 and SSP3-7.0.”

We have trillions of dollars worldwide tied into climate policies. Europe is practically destroying itself trying to achieve Net Zero targets. Industries are dying, people are facing energy insecurity, prices are skyrocketing, and the entire continent is growing in unrest over the devastation to livelihoods. All this comes from countries making policies based on a model that people have warned for years is unrealistic. But the good news is at least with the IPCC ruling the scenario implausible, there is no defense for anyone to keep using those high-end scenarios to craft policy.

Sadly, I’ll bet few policies are actually updated to reflect this ruling.

“The Ethicist’s” Progressive Bias Makes Him Stupid…Again

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Increasingly both the questions and the answers published by Kwame Anthony Appiah, the NYU philosopher professor who has been the caretaker of the New York Times Magazine’s “The Ethicist” advice column for more than a decade, show signs of ethics rot. This is why I haven’t been commenting on them as often, though the column is like a window into the warped minds of the Woke and Wonderful.

This month, for example, the previous three questions have been “Is It Wrong to Work for a Charity That’s Funded by a Questionable Source?” (the old “dirty money” trope), “Can I Ask My Brother to Have His Racist Prison Tattoo Removed?” (of course you can ask—you can ask him if he can fly to Mars by flapping his arms, but what someone chooses to wear on their skin or their body is none of your business, and removing a racist tattoo won’t make him any less racist…), and “A Homeless Person’s Pet Needed Help. Should I Have Tried to Buy It?” (The pet is there to give love and comfort to the homeless person. Butt out.)

But this week’s question prompts the Popeye in me (“It’s all I can takes ‘cuz I can’t takes no more!”) A woman who rents a storage unit (in a bad Los Angeles neighborhood) discovered that a man is living in the unit across from hers. This makes her uncomfortable (Ya think?) but she feels compelled to ask Kwame, “I Think Someone Is Living in the Storage Unit Next to Mine. What Should I Do?” We then get an exchange of what a friend calls “toxic empathy.” It’s all the U.S.’s fault, see, because we don’t take care of homeless people like—I kid you not—Norway. This supposed ethics expert’s advice: “Asking to move yourself, rather than trying to get him removed, is probably the most humane course, and the one most likely to preserve your peace of mind.”

Well, Kwame (in NYC) and “Anonymous” (In L.A.) certainly are doing their part to make those two cities the leftist hellholes they are becoming. Hey, it’s cruel to enforce laws! The most humane course is let people disobey laws that are inconvenient or get in the way of their needs. By all means, tilt policies to the benefit of the untrustworthy and irresponsible. It only lowers standards, conduct, well-being and safety for everyone, but that’s the goal of equity and inclusion, right?

Morons. How did so many Americans end up thinking this way? I am distraught.

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The Low Chair Trick

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Kudos to Ann Althouse: she flagged the use of the old chair dominance trick by Xi to make sure he appeared higher in his chair than President Trump.

Ann’s sketchy popular culture literacy was also exposed again: most normally-acculturated Americans would immediately think of the famous scene in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” where George Bailey (James Stewart) bargains with town bully Mr. Potter in a chair that reduces him to the stature of a child. Ann’s mind went instead to the scene in “The Great Dictator,” a far less well-known Chaplin film, where satirical versions of Mussolini and Hitler (Chaplin) keep raising their chairs’ heights during a meeting. Ann’s choice makes the point better, but she often posts about not having watched a lot of old movies, and it shows. (I have watched too many old movies, and it also shows.)

But kudos to Ann again for tracking down a December 2, 1987 David Letterman show when a young Donald Trump called out Letterman for having his guest chairs lower than the host’s, complaining, “How come this seat is at such a low level? You know, I’m looking at him. He’s got this stage rigged, folks…. That seat is a good six inches higher than my seat.”

Notes:

  • In law school I took a negotiation course from Adrian Fisher, then the Dean of Georgetown Law Center and known as a key U.S. negotiator in both SALT Treaties. Fisher had an exhaustive knowledge of negotiation mind games, and mentioned the chair trick as such a well-known and devious tactic that attempting it would be regarded as an insult by professional diplomats.
  • Trump had the good sense not to mention his annoyance with the chair trick in China. This indicates to me that he is capable of self-restraint when he chooses to exercise it, which is, obviously, not nearly enough.
  • Read (at Ann’s link above) the exchange between Letterman and Trump from 40 years ago. I detect no difference in Trump’s discourse from what we are used to today. One of the more irritating Big Lies the Axis (including my Trump Deranged Facebook friends) keeps pushing is that Trump’s rhetoric indicates cognitive decline (so he should be removed via the 25th Amendment.) He’s always talked this way.
  • Letterman has also always been an asshole. And a liar. When Trump points out that Letterman’s chair is “a good six inches” higher than Trump’s chair, Letterman says “And so am I” suggesting that it’s an illusion because he’s taller than Trump. Letterman is (or was) 6’2″ and Trump is (or was) an inch taller.
  • I blame Letterman for late night TV turning into the all-partisan-propaganda-all-the-time blight on society epitomized by Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert. He’s an Ethics Villain.
  • Trump proved in that exchange that he, like Fisher, knew the negotiation game well.
  • Note also in the transcript how a Trump was talking about the same international trade grievances in 1987 that he has tried to address in his second term.
  • Letterman meanwhile, like any good class-obsessed left-winger, keeps trying to bring the discussion around to Trump’s wealth because, after all, as AOC tells us, billionaires are the cause of most of America’s problems.

Letterman’s wealth is estimated to be only 400 million.

__________

Pointer: Ann Althouse

An Unpleasant Reminder Of Why Ethics Alarms Holds That Editorial Cartoons Are Unethical (and Outdated) [Revised]

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

This:

[The revision referred to in the headline is that I changed the phrase “political cartoon” to “editorial cartoon” throughout the essay. My fault: that was what I meant and still mean when I use the term “political cartoon.” Obviously that confused people: I apologize. “Doonsberry” is a political cartoon; so were “Pogo” and “Li’l Abner.” They were cartoons about politics, and their primary purpose was to amuse. Editorial cartoons, like the one above, are supposed to be treated seriously, like editorials. That’s what this post is condemning. I’m an idiot for not realizaing I was confusing the issue.]

As I wrote in 2017, it’s time, long past time, really, for editorial cartoons to be sent to the ash heap of history.

To clear up any confusion: I’m not a huge fan of memes, but I’m warming up to them a little because they are unequivocally graphic jokes, intended to be outrageous, satirical, maybe offensive but always funny. Editorial cartoons evolved as artistic punditry; they might use humor, but their ultimate goal was to make serious, trenchant, ideally witty observations on the political scene while appearing in newspaper editorial pages.

With very, very, very few exceptions, editorial cartoonists are artists who are partisan one-trick ponies.They are neither as smart or as analytical as they think they are. The template for these would be Herb Block, the mysteriously acclaimed Washington Post editorial cartoonist, who thought he was being clever by always drawing businessmen with huge bellies and smoking long cigars, or making Richard Nixon look like an axe-murderer.

That shameless cartoon above was posted with approval by an old friend of mine, a history professor at an elite college. To say that I was disappointed would be an understatement. How many things are wrong with that thing? The mind boggles. The juxtaposition of the flag-raising over Iwo Jima and the majority opinion in Louisiana v. Callais makes no sense. The implication that the long-needed judicial holding that a 60 year old law crafted to deal with conditions in the Southern states in 1965 no longer is relevant to those states in the 21st century is somehow pushing the nation back 160 years is temporally, historically, factually and legally gibberish. True, it is a pictorial equivalent of the Democrat’s House leader’s meltdown, as the ridiculous Hakeem Jeffries ranted, “Because we know this unprecedented assault on black political representation, the likes of which we have not seen since the Jim Crow era, the ghost of the Confederacy has afflicted the United States Supreme Court majority and is invading and haunting the nation right now! ” That, however was, or should be, an embarrassment to all Democrats and black Americans with a 6th grade education.

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