Thanks to my observant sister, who told me my head should be exploding due to the IRS settlement scandal when many sources, blogs and pundits hadn’t even covered it yet, I was able to get some commentary out even ahead of my legal ethicists listserv, which, predictably since they pounce on Trump whatever he does, REALLY pounced yesterday.
On the bad side, my head hasn’t stopped exploding yet, and the whole house is a mess. And I haven’t even been able to seriously consider the gravamen of the New York Times joining Margery Taylor Greene in condemning Trump’s helping to jettison a GOP Congressman who couldn’t bring himself to condemn anti-Semitism.
On my Facebook page, a smart, Trump Deranged Jewish lawyer friend who called for everyone to vote for the illegal and dishonest “restore fairness” Virginia gerrymandering referendum, bemoaned the end of CBS radio and called it smoking gun proof that CBS was now working for MAGA. Yes, CBS radio’s demise is Trump’s fault. He even included a weepy reference to Edward R. Murrow. News radio is, like the US Postal Service, bow ties, landlines and the Sears catalogue, outdated, anachronistic and disposable, having once served a great purpose. You know, like the Model T.
Yes, it’s crazy out there. Use the Open Forum to start fixing it,
According to J. Joseph Edgette from Widener University, there were twelve dogs that have been confirmed as passengers on the iconic doomed ship, which sank in April of 1912. Three of the dogs survived; they were all small breeds that their owners could wrap up in blankets and hide in their coats. The crew told passengers (only the First Class passengers brought their dogs) that the limited number of life boats meant that dogs would have to be left behind.
When the ship struck the iceberg and it became clear that it was going down, the dog-loving steward in charge of the ship’s kennel released all of its canine occupants, which then ran all over the ship, surely confused, while the chaos intensified. (How did James Cameron not use that in his movie?) The three survivors were all kept in their owners’ staterooms. Lady, a Pomeranian belonging to passenger Margaret Hays, was one; Sun Yat Sen, a Pekingese belonging to Myra Harper and Henry Harper, was another, and a second Pomeranian owned by Martin and Elizabeth Rothschild was the third lucky dog.
The larger dogs that died included a King Charles Spaniel, a Poodle, a Borzoi, an Airedale, another large terrier, a Chow-Chow, a Fox Terrier, a French Bulldog and a Great Dane.
According to Titanic lore, Ann Elizabeth Isham owned the Great Dane pictured above. Rather than leave him to die alone, she chose to stay behind and comfort her beloved dog as the sea rushed in. Isham was one of the four first-class female passengers who lost their lives on the Titanic, but the only one who allegedly decided to die rather than leave her pet.
In fact, there is no evidence that she really died that way, or that she ever owned a dog, much less died with one. Nonetheless, Isham has acquired a saintly reputation among dog lovers, so let’s assume she did die rather than abandon her dog.
Your Ethics Alarms Change-of-Pace Ethics Quiz of the Day is…
Was that decision rational and ethical or emotional and irresponsible?
Would you do that under similar circumstances?
I’m pretty sure my late wife Grace would have.
Incidentally, there is another famous dog story about Titanicthat has also been debunked. Supposedly a Newfoundland named Rigel belonging to Titanic’s First Officer William Murdoch was able to withstand the freezing waters after the ship sank. As the rescue ship Carpathia approached, nobel Rigel barked so loudly that the ship could locate the lifeboats.
The tale is fiction. Murdoch had no dog on board. No survivor mentioned “Rigel.” The story apparently first popped up in 1912, in“The New York Herald.” See? The news media was making stuff up even back then. The news reporter also claimed that Donald Trump was to blame for the sinking.
At the conclusion of the dispiriting previous post, I wrote, “I regard the episode a betrayal of trust by everyone involved, especially the President, reckless, beyond rational defending, destructive to the nation, and politically stupid. Now what?”
Upon further thinking, I find the answer to “Now what?” surprisingly clear.
President Trump’s disgusting conduct in this matter, along with the equally unethical conduct of his lackeys in the Justice Department and Treasury Departments, almost thrusts me, and any rational, objective and ethical citizen, back to the point I found myself in October of 2016. As I wrote then and have written so many times since, there was a stark choice between voting for a President I found ethically unacceptable and an entire political party, the Democrats, that had proved itself not only unfit to govern but so Machiavellian in its quest to achieve crushing power by any means necessary that to allow them such power was irresponsible and dangerous. I abandoned my plan to reluctantly hold my nose and vote for Hillary Clinton, instead writing in the name of a politician I considered to be honorable and capable. (I was wrong about that, as things turned out.)
But since 2016, the Democratic Party has revealed itself as far worse—unprincipled, dangerous, anti-American— than I had concluded before that election. Donald Trump has still earned more respect for his positions, his courage, his ability to successfully battle Democrats to a draw or better, and his policy successes than I believed possible ten years ago. Moreover, Trump isn’t running against the Democrats in the mid-terms, though the Democrats, as in 2024, are running against Trump. The party’s only hopes are 1) stupid voters, 2) running again on hate, lies, and “Trump is Hitler” and 3) the Axis news media continuing to misinform and mislead the public. [Aside:when the Democratic Party’s absurd post-mortem on the 2024 election was finally released today, and blamed Harris’s loss on not emphasizing Trump’s negatives effectively (despite Harris constantly calling Trump Hitler and an ‘existential threat to democracy,’) one wag wrote that “She should have really called Trump a super-duper really evil Nazi poopy-head than simply just another Hitler, I guess.”]
Donald Trump isn’t running in 2026. He’s President, and he will stay President until 2028. Allowing the Democrats, a party that has pledged to pack the Supreme Court, add Democratic states that shouldn’t be states (like D.C.), give voting rights to non-citizens, and gut the Constitution and Bill of Rights to guarantee permanent control so as to “remake America” into a Democratic Socialist utopia, is irresponsible. The party has shown its perfidy by its vile effort in Virginia to turn a 50-50 split state into a Democratic stronghold by lying to voters and violating the Virginia constitution. It has shown its values by enabling violence and abuse of the criminal laws as tools of political warfare. That’s your party, Democrats.
To vote into power this aspiring totalitarian party as a way of punishing Trump for his greed and narcissism makes no sense, accomplishes nothing positive, and will be the approximate equivalent of knocking in our teeth with hammers. He’s still tearing down the mechanism of “good” discrimination against men and whites. He is still doing what has to be done regarding Iran, while the Democrats increasingly embrace anti-Semitism. He still is working to undo as much of the catastrophic open borders policies of the Biden Administration as possible. He is still keeping free discourse on social media safe, and he has had success forcing the news media and the education establishment to accept some reforms. All of that is important enough to let him continue to fight the Angry Left, especially since no one else appears capable of doing the job.
And anyone who tries is liable to be shot.
Now what? Now hold back your gorge and remember what is substantive, lasting, and crucial. President Trump is an incorrigible asshole, doesn’t know ethics from tapioca, and will continue to embarrass his supporters, his office, his party and the nation. But at this crazy juncture in American history, the United States of American is better off and safer than if the Democrats are allowed to grab the nation by the throat.
I feel like an idiot. Since 2016, I have tried hard to be fair to Donald Trump, to give him the presumption of good will and legitimacy all Presidents deserve, and indeed must have to function. I am certain that the attitudes of the Trump Deranged have been destructive, undemocratic, biased and irrational, but this latest development raises the strong possibility that they happened to be right.
A Democratic, progressive criminal defense attorney who believes, with so may of my friends and colleagues, that the President “Trump “has two, and only two, motivations: Self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment. He’s done nothing in his second term to suggest otherwise”—a starting point that I still believe is biased and based substantially on hate—writes today in part,
“Can Trump do this? Is any of this lawful and constitutional?….[T]his post hoc addendum to a “settlement agreement” that elevates the concept of collusion to its apex breaks ground never before molested. The idea of any past President doing something so audacious, so self-serving, so blatant, seems incredible. The public would never accept it. Perhaps the public still won’t, even if the MAGA faithful will. That remains to be seen, subject to the likelihood of the Democratic Party doing something to self-destruct and remind Americans why they elected Trump a second time despite knowing who he was. There is no ready answer as to what can be done about this…We are deep into virgin territory of graft, corruption and self-dealing, with little expectation of any governmental guardrail holding fast…And much as it’s hard to fathom what he could do that’s worse than this, it would be stunningly naive to believe that we’ve hit rock bottom.”
The rest of Scott Greenfield’s commentary is, as usual, marred by the typical hyperbole of a true-blue progressive and Trump hater, but in those words above I find nothing that I can reject. I regard the episode a betrayal of trust by everyone involved, especially the President, reckless, beyond rational defending, destructive to the nation, and politically stupid.
Jonathan Turley quoted a gobsmacking statement from MSNow’s consistently ridiculous Katy Tur that is, I kid you not, too stupid to qualify for Unethical Quote of the Month.
Commenting on Speaker Mike Johnson’s evocation of natural rights at the “Rededicate 250” rally on the mall in Washington, DC., she said, “What about this passage from Mike Johnson declaring that our rights do not derive from government? They come from “you, our creator and heavenly father.” Is this him putting God over the Declaration of Independence?”
No, you moron, it is him correctly interpreting what Thomas Jefferson wrote about natural rights, the core of the American philosophy of liberty and individual determinism over government domination. The Declaration states without equivocation, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Who or what “The Creator” is was consistently left up to individual faith and judgment by the Founders, who often used neutral terms like “Providence” to describe the origins of life, humanity and the universe. Jefferson’s point, which of course statists like the Axis of Unethical Conduct and its mouthpieces like Tur want to ignore, is that certain rights accrue in a just society to an individual automatically, and government cannot ethically or morally take those rights away. To maintain that such rights have to be granted by the government is to declare humanity unacceptably dependent on the power and will of others. The Declaration, Constitution and the Bill of Rights explain what the government can’t do.
How can someone who doesn’t understand this—because they never learned it, presumably—get to be a network news host? It’s horrifying. Similarly horrified by Tur’s ignorance, Jonathan Turley wrote today,
“The Revolution was fought over natural rights that belonged to colonists as human beings, bestowed by God and defended by the American Revolution. The Constitution created a system that guaranteed the protection of those rights contained in the Declaration of Independence.Speaker Johnson was speaking directly to the foundation of this Republic in reaffirming his faith in natural rights. Of course, the rejection of natural rights in academia and politics is consistent with the view that our rights evolve with a “living Constitution.” What the government giveth, the government may taketh away. The debate reflected in Tur’s comments could not be more timely or elemental on our 250th anniversary. We must again decide not just who we were then but who we are now as Americans. There are many who want to decouple our system from natural rights as they “reimagine” American democracy and “trash” the American Constitution.”
No wonder so many Americans are gulled by the Democrats’ cynical claim to be “protecting democracy.” They don’t know what American democracy is.
They haven’t always been titled exactly that way. but the first “The Unabomber Was Right” post went up in 2017, and there have been nine since, with the most recent being here, in January. Today, however, I experienced an all-time classic.
Getting up earlier than usual, and waiting for my coffee to cool, I tuned in DirecTV channel 71 as I have been doing for, oh, 30 years or so. That channel is “News Mix”, which allows me to see sxi screens: CNN, Fox News, MSNow, BBC America, and two weather channels. To my surprise, the screen said the channel was not available, because I did not subscribe to it. Even more perplexing was the language of a second screen that popped up. “Newsmix is blocked. Our search for another channel does not indicate that your selection is available.”
Now that is the notice I get from DirecTV when a baseballgame is blacked out because of regional restrictions. The news is blocked? Were we conquered by Iran overnight? I tried everything. Shutting down the TV. Disconnecting the satellite box. I kept getting those alternating screens.
So with a huge sigh of resignation, I realized that I was about to enter, once again, “The Customer Service Zone”:
“You unlock this door with a futile key of naive expectations. Beyond it is another dimension: a dimension of annoying AI bots, a dimension of infuriating repetition, a dimension of incompetence. You’re moving into a land of both impenetrable accents and ineptitude, of scripts, disconnections and ass-covering. You’ve just crossed over into… “The Customer Service Zone”!
DirecTV has a new, perky, sexy female voiced AI, but after I gave her all the information I asked for, she handed me over to the old AI, which asked me exactly the same questions I had just answered. I was told three times that the conversation might be recorded, so maybe someone will hear my shouts into the phone of “I already answered that!” and “And I answered that already too!”
“She’ll turn Karnes ICE Detention Center into a prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers for human trafficking. (lt will also be a castration processing center for pedophiles which will probably be most of the Zionists).”
This is TX-35 Democratic candidate Maureen Galindo. And her very existence unmasks the Democratic Party and the American left revealing the monsters they have become.
She’s not a fringe candidate either. Galindo was the top Democrat in the March primary election, with 29.2% support to her closest competition’s 27%. Since no one got a majority, Galindo advanced to a runoff election to take place next week against sheriff’s deputy Johnny Garcia. An awful lot of progressives and Democrats (I mean “awful lot” both ways) like anti-Semites and hate Jews.
As we are increasingly seeing…we are also seeing the Axis of Unethical Conduct trying to spin away the obvious implications of Democrats producing such a vile candidate with a “Republicans have anti-Semites too!” deflection. This was Bill Maher’s deceitful tactic, as I wrote earlier this week.
Watchdog group StopAntisemitism, which is one of those “independent” groups that always bashes Republicans, said, “The standard that Democrats rightly apply to right-wing anti-Semites must apply equally to left-wing Jew-haters. Democratic leaders must clearly, publicly denounce these bigots infecting their party without hedging. They must decline to appear on platforms with Hasan Piker. They must stop winking at extremist voices and truly stand for the principles they claim to stand for.”
Wait: what “right-wing Jews haters” are leading candidates in a Congressional race? Who is a Republican equivalent of Hasan Piker? Anti-Semites Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson have been emphatically rejected by President Trump, MAGA, and most conservatives. The Axis is now trying to claim that the PAC Lead Left that has spent $428,713 backing Galindo according to the latest data from Federal Election Commission filings is really run by Republicans. The problem with that dodge is that ethical, fair people won’t support anti-Semites no matter how much is spent on their political ads, unless the voters like anti-Semites and hate Jews. Both Piker and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who polls highly among potential 2028 Democratic Presidential candidates, endorsed Galinda. Is AOC a double-secret Republican agent?
If you can process this whole astounding ethics debacle and come out anything but but disgusted and disillusioned, you apparently are capable of rationalizing anything.
Hint: This is not a good thing.
In this post, I wrote about the gob-smacking, unprecedented settlement of President Donald Trump’s lawsuit over the leaking of his tax returns. My conclusion yesterday: “[T]his deal stinks, and should be challenged ethically if not legally. The whole Justice Department and the Treasury Department too had irresolvable conflicts, and should not have been allowed to make a settlement with their own boss.”
I learned of this revolting development two days ago, when a Trump Deranged relative asked me why my ethicist head wasn’t exploding over “Trump’s corrupt deal with the IRS that gave him a billion dollars to pay his militia, the J-6 rioters.” I had no idea what she was talking about. See, she only watches MSNow for news, and of course they were all over the story, as were all the Axis news platforms. The last few days I have been less than diligent in my bi-partisan news searches, mostly checking websites. However, that potentially exaggerated description of what two Executive cabinet departments and their employees who Trump can fire at will agreed to in settlement of a lawsuit that almost certainly would have been tossed by any judge who could beat Justice Jackson in Scrabble turned out to be shockingly accurate.
Now we are learning that the deal is even worse than it first appeared to be. This account is straight from Politico. I will not make a habit of the lazy Instapundit-Althouse blogging practice of posting a long quote or article and asking readers, “What do you think?”, but the ethics horror here is pretty straightforward, and I would just be rewording the item unnecessarily:
I would’ve come out sooner, but I had to call my opponent and concede. And it took a while to find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv.”
—Rep Thomas Massie, (R-Ky) after losing his primary against a Trump-endorsed candidate.
I would have more respect for Massie if he just came right out and called his opponent a “Jew-lover.”
Nothing could more emphatically validate President Trump’s decision to oppose Massie, who has cemented undying infamy at Ethics Alarms by insulting a victorious opponent in his concession speech. Such lack of civility, respect and decorum only exacerbates the decline of civic comity in Washington, and there is no excuse for it. Being a poor loser shows poor character, and an inability to meet one of the key markers of virtue in Rudyard Kipling’s “If”: “Meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.”
Naturally the Washington Post lionizes Massie in defeat, saying his lost primary was because of his “consistent unwillingness to go along to get along,” and that “Massie’s independence earned the enmity of President Donald Trump, who deployed his political machine to crush Massie and recruited primary winner Ed Gallrein. Yet the quixotic congressman, for better or worse, always seemed more driven by ideas than personalities.”
Yeah. One of those keen “ideas” was anti-Semitism. Burying the lede, the Post’s long sigh regarding Massie’s loss culminates in this admission:
“He was the only House Republican to vote against a resolution condemning antisemitism. Reasonable people might oppose U.S. aid to Israel, but Massie too often did so with over-the-top, even conspiratorial, rhetoric.”
Well nobody’s perfect.
Post Script: You want unethical “advocacy journalism”? Read the MSNow spin on Massie’s loss. Trump’s “revenge,” “a huge cost,” the whole event is presented as a platform for more Trump-bashing. No mention of Massie’s anti-Semitism, which all by itself justifies, indeed mandates, his loss. But then the MSNow gang is angry about all those dog-rapes…
I checked to see if Ethics Alarms has ever had a post about the Congressional Black Caucus, and there have been many, that didn’t indicate an an unethical culture embedded in the group like a tic.
No.
So I suppose the recent example shows that at very least, the CBC is consistent.
For over six years now, the NCAA and other collegiate sports organizations have been asking for Congress to reform college sports, which has been confused and chaotic since schools were told that they had to treat college athletes like mercenaries rather than students. The SCORE ACT is sorta kinda such legislation, and was was supposed to come up for a vote in the House of Representatives this week but was pulled from the floor at the last minute.
A few hours before the vote was again postponed indefinitely, the bill slammed into a roadblock when the Congressional Black Caucus and its 54 voting members in the House announced unanimous opposition to the SCORE Act, not because of anything the bill contained or ignored. The CBC announced that it would oppose the law until the SEC, ACC, and NCAA started protesting state gerrymandering and redistricting that didn’t benefit black Democrats. In other words, the CDC is practicing extortion. It is telling sports organizations that they must endorse the “good discrimination” against whites that the Supreme Court just declared illegal and unconstitutional (because, you know, it is), and if they don’t, well, the CBC will just refuse to vote for laws that have nothing to do with race, redistricting, sports or college. Neener neener!
Ethics Alarms 