There has been a dramatic increase in hysterical, exaggerated, fact-free, unfair, dishonest and contrived attacks on President Trump in the last few weeks, creating a practical problem for Ethics Alarms. The blog is neither devoted to politics or partisanship, but since the 2016 election and the “resistance,” progressives, Democrats and the news media decided that it was worth tearing apart the nation and ripping to shreds its institutions to remove an elected President they oppose by any means necessary. It is, as I am forced to write too often, the single greatest continuous ethics breach since the Democratic Party’s support for Jim Crow.
I have so many issues unrelated to Donald Trump, whom I dislike intensely, that I want and need to discuss here. I spent much of both 2015 and 2016 explaining why he should never be allowed to run for the Republican nomination, be nominated for President, or elected President. I do not retract or regret a single essay on these matters, but I cannot sit back and ignore what the Democrats and the news media are doing. I can’t. Neither my temperament, my love for America nor my mission here permit it.
But BOY am I sick of having to write about crap like…
- “Trump administration to send migrant children to Army base once used as Japanese internment camp” screamed the Hill today.
How unethical is that headline? Let’s see…It begins with a deceit: “migrant children” is the latest euphemism for “children of illegal immigrants being used as human shields to allow them to break the law via the Think of the Children! rationalization, #58. It is also called, ironiclly, “The Universal Trump.” “ It is deceitful, the equivalent of condemning a politicians as pro-white supremacy with a headline like: ” Senate candidate holds fundraiser in building where Lincoln was assassinated by Confederate sympathizer!” Just as Ford’s Theater is also just a theater, Fort Sill, in Oklahoma. To quote Wikipedia,
Fort Sill is a United States Army post north of Lawton, Oklahoma, about 85 miles southwest of Oklahoma City. It covers almost 94,000 acres (38,000 ha).[ The fort was first built during the Indian Wars. It is designated as a National Historic Landmark and serves as home of the United States Army Field Artillery School as well as the Marine Corps’ site for Field Artillery MOS school, United States Army Air Defense Artillery School, the 31st Air Defense Artillery Brigade, and the 75th Field Artillery Brigade. Fort Sill is also one of the four locations for Army Basic Combat Training. It has played a significant role in every major American conflict since 1869.
So what the Hill did is to pick a single use of Fort Hill during its long history so it could make a sinister analogy between the Trump Administration policy regarding immigration, and the racist policy of the Roosevelt Administration regarding Asian-Americans during WWII.
The analogy is also a false one. Children entering the country illegally have to be put somewhere. The image the Hill’s Rebecca Klar intentionally evokes is that of American citizens being placed behind barbed wire fences because of the color of their skin, like this…
Not only is this not the way the young illegal immigrants will be housed, there is no fair analogy between the two situations at all. The Japanese-Americans were interned in violation of the Constitution. They were citizens; they had homes; the government didn’t have to do anything with them at all. They were also singled out because of their ethnicity. None of these factors apply to the children. They don’t belong here. They are not citizens. The have to be temporarily housed somewhere. Their ethnicity is irrelevant.
Finally, as we have seen over and over again, if the Trump Administration does exactly what the Obama Administration did with no uproar, it is suddenly monstrous. A TIME Magazine story points out,
When there was a controversy over this use of Fort Sill in 2014, no media outlet raised the Japanese internment. Fort Sill was referred to as…Fort Sill.
I can’t tell you how much I loathe this kind of unethical journalism and having to keep reading it and writing about it. s I also loathe the denials that the news media is biased.
I loathe this more, however…
“We cannot accept a second term for Donald Trump.”
—Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, May 7, 2019.
“I’m concerned that if we don’t impeach this president, he will get re-elected.”
—Rep. Al Green (D-Tx) on MSNBC, May 6, 2019
Gee, Al, if impeachment doesn’t work, I guess the only alternative is to kill him!
High-level Democratic officials now openly admit that their objective is to block democratic processes that do not give them the power they crave, and that the impeachment push is a desperation gambit to prevent the American people from being able to vote on whether they want the current President to continue in office.
I give Green credit for being honest about his party’s calculations.
Any citizen who does not condemn the Democratic attack on our system for what it is has forgotten what it means to be an American. It is unfortunate that defending our system of government requires a full-throated and unyielding defense of a President with the repulsive flaws of Donald Trump, but the “resistance” created the crisis, he didn’t—except by winning an election.
Ethics Alarms 
Perhaps you should reconsider some of your previous essays. Here’s why.
Trump, for all his faults, has exposed the truth about the relationship between the media, tech companies, and the Democratic party that may not have been as universally obvious as it is now. He has forced the Democrats to show Americans what their true colors are, and their true vision for America — the usurpation of the U.S. Constitution, replacement of the U.S. economic system with the many-times-failed system of socialism and/or communism, the rejection of natural rights enshrined in the constitution, and the limitation of freedom except for a select few. This is often called, “totalitarianism,” but none dare say so in the media because of the special relationship the Democrats have with the Fourth Estate, and the ability of the tech companies who deliver the news to censor it.
This is a big deal, and none of it would have been obvious without Trump’s presidency. Barak Obama successfully couched the Democratic Party policies in milquetoast words while aggressively implementing them behind the scenes. Should, in the fullness of time, the full breadth of the FBI and intelligence agency become exposed by the AG investigation (assuming it survives the next election), we will likely see the exact apparatus through which this soft coup of the republic was to take place.
Make no mistake, I share virtually all of your dislike of Trump, and in his personal capacity, it rises to outright loathing in my case. It is a tragedy that America has to suffer such a man as President, but we should all be very thankful that he came along when he did. He may have saved us from our own self-absorption and political hubris, as well as exposed the Democrats for the nascent tyrants they have become.
What will we do with this information? I have no idea. We may elect Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, and place America right beside ancient Rome as great powers that collapsed under the weight of their own success. Such an end would be no surprise — the old saying about being doomed to repeat lessons unlearned from history comes to mind.
The only question would be is if the several states would sit still for it and go down with the federal government. If not, a bloody revolution is the likely outcome, to an end nobody can foresee. Perhaps we will all be speaking Mandarin Chinese in twenty years.
But if it does happen, thanks to Trump, we will fall with our eyes open, fully cognizant of the threat that we ignored. In the end, I think, that’s all we could ask. So while we may detest Trump, we owe him a great debt.
Moral luck. And the fact that in order to reject the vile un-American values being currently modeled and promoted by the Left one has to depend on an individual like Trump is the epitome of Hobson’s choice. I’m glad someone is in the White House who will stand against all of it, but it is tragic that this is the best we could get. He undermines the rightness of the mission through cognitive dissonance. The brain says: How right can any position be if this kind of leader is its champion?
Yeah, I agree with you completely. It is moral luck and Hobson’s choice.
Eh. Sometimes the truth is just where you find it, even in the worst places.
We have Trump instead of someone more principled because any conservative (or other non-Democrat) who runs for high office faces attacks that only the shameless can endure. It doesn’t matter whether you’re Diogenes’ one honest man, as pure and upright as Galahad, you will be subjected to hysterical attacks on your history, your beliefs, your family, your finances, your integrity, and anything else that they can concoct about you.
The attacks on Justice Kavanaugh are textbook examples: Whatever you think of Professor Ford’s claims (For my part, I think she’s a transparent fraud), several of his accusers were proven to be frauds. Their false accusations were enough to reduce him to tears, leading the lefties to allege that “Kavanaugh lacks judicial temperament because he got angry when these women (falsely) accused him!”.
Anyone who steps into the arena will be subjected to the same level of abuse and degradation, something that any normal man would find intolerable.
Agree with all of this. But surely there are competent, ethical, principled leaders of ethical character who are as capable of standing up to abuse as Trump, no?
I think Glenn is on to something here. No one who isn’t a shameless asshole had a chance of winning. Trump’s defects are not a byproduct, but the key feature of his presidency.
So, I am left to conclude that while President Trump is not the leader we wanted, it is the one we needed.
And maybe deserve?
That there is some funny stuff 🙂
“But surely there are competent, ethical, principled leaders of ethical character who are as capable of standing up to abuse as Trump, no?
I think the answer is ‘no.’
Either 1) those people are too smart to subject themselves to the shit show our beloved media inject into politics, 2) they do not actually exist, or 3) they actually try to run but are sabotaged by both parties (aka “The Swamp”) who are in politics for personal power and wealth.
I am betting on a combination of 1) and 3). Since ethical behavior look a lot like conservatism these days, these candidates are destroyed out of hand by the process itself, well before they can get traction or large money donors.
I am open to discussion.
I think your essay is prescient. If Trump does win a second term, which I think is likely with the economy still doing well and the Democrats’ inability to get out of one another’s way, I think there is likely to be an assassination attempt. I’m not talking about a kook who really doesn’t have a plan, like the one guy who tried and failed during the campaign (snatching a police officer’s gun? Seriously?), although I’m sure if it failed the assassin would say he was acting alone. I’m talking about a serious assassin in the service of the deep state. The FBI, CIA, and other agencies have plenty of sharpshooters and covert operatives, I don’t think it would be too hard to find a few who would be willing to do it, nor to find a few Secret Service agents who’d create a gap in the president’s protective screen at just the right moment.
Think it can’t happen? 13 years ago Gabriel Range made a film called “Death of a President” in which a disgruntled Gulf War veteran kills GWB in revenge for the death of his son in Iraq. The left thought it was a wonderful piece of art and even a feel-good movie. I can very easily see the left thinking it was great that someone finally took up arms to end the reign of this racist, sexist, xenophobic dictator, and cheering them opening the way for diversity, inclusiveness, and more perfect equality.
I’d call it Operation Midnight, after dark (the deep state) and blue (the Democrats). It can happen.
Well, that would get them the Civil War they are looking for. I mean, VP Mike Pence is no pansy either.
Shoot both of them? Impeach the VP after POTUS is dead? What exactly is their plan?
Suppose the Democrats are successful in their efforts to impeach Trump; this would obviously carry well into 2020. So Trump is removed from office, runs for President again, and wins. Then what? I’ll have to check what the Constitution says about years in office, but if he were then eligible to run again in 2024, I think the “resistance” would die, foaming at the mouth.
With 54 Republican senators and a requirement to get 67 votes to remove Trump, that’s an impossibility before the Senate makeup changes after 2020.
I… tend to think statements like Green’s are a mixture of fearmongering and projection.
Right up until Trump’s election, we were told, for instance, that when, not if, but when Trump lost, we might have a constitutional crisis at hand, because he might not except the results of the election. My, but does that not seem novel in hindsight? A candidate not accepting the results of an election? Unthinkable! Oh. Wait.
Now we’re hearing “If we don’t impeach him, he might be re-elected”. Well, I got some bad news for you, Democrats: You can’t impeach him. You can start proceedings, you can hold hearings, you can whine, and bitch and spit, but you don’t have the votes. Republicans will not support you. Hell, I don’t think you’ll be able to whip all the Democrats.
So no, that doesn’t concern me. Not when there’s people like Bill Maher, telling one of the contestants in hot contention for the “who-is-the-dumber-Cumono-brother award, that he is deeply concerned about the possibility of Trump not leaving office if he loses. THAT concerns you, eh? Well if history is any judge, maybe that thought niggling in your hypocritical minds ought to concern me.
Looks like Beto might have stepped on hid di…er, uh TONGUE with Colbert last night too.
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2019/06/13/beto-orourke-makes-dire-prediction-about-not-impeaching-donald-trump/23748839/