Yup, it’s true: the “You Have No Enemies” By Charles Mackay post, which consisted of virtually no content from me at all, but was mostly an obscure poem by an even more obscure 19th century English poet, was the most-accessed post of the past 365 days. Not only that, it lapped the field, since it wasn’t offered until November 16. That’s right: more people wanted to read that poem in less than two months any of the over 12,000 posts on ethics that were available all year.

What are you trying to tell me?

1. About that spite impeachment, or “snap” impeachment (Jonathan Turley’s term): It’s not going to get to trial in the Senate, meaning that it’s a) pointless b) a waste of time c) a personal, childish, “Nyah, nayah! We hate you!” taunt as Donald Trump does out the door, and d) one more way for the Democrats, plus Joe Biden, to ensure that half the country detests the other. Good plan!

A spokesman for the Senate Leader Mitch McConnell informed Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer that McConnell would not reconvene the Senate before the 19th, the day before Biden’s inauguration.That means a trial and conviction, assuming Democrats disgrace themselves and vote for a phony impeachment resolution that is even less legally and constitutionally valid than the first one, can’t possibly get underway until Trump is no longer President, and that means he can’t be impeached. Yes, yes, some Trump Deranged lawyers argue otherwise, just as they argued that Trump should be impeached before he took office.

Earlier this week, Fox News and other news organizations ran with anonymous sources who quoted McConnell as saying he thought impeaching Trump would be a good thing. McConnell is a despicable weasel, as bad if not worse than Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi, so this was plausible but not news, as indeed no “un-named sources familiar with the situation say X is thinking Y and said Z” report is news under journalism ethics standards. These are called “rumors” and “gossip.” In the Trump years, however, such speculation and hearsay has been treated as news, at least when it reflected poorly on Republicans or advanced a Democratic big lie or narrative.

2. Spittin’ mad former and self-banned EA commenter Jeff Field continues to drop hate mail in my mailbox (three more pieces since yesterday), though now it goes straight to spam. In the last such poison pen missive that I read, he accused yet another commenter—a sane one— of a falsehood for writing that Ethics Alarms never agreed that the 2020 election was rigged. Who knows what poor Fattymoon was really told, but I have been clear and consistent. The mainstream media attempted to “rig” the election for four years, always reporting the words, actions and character of President Trump negatively, attacking him for what it praised in previous Presidents, virtually never giving him credit for his successes, refusing to do critical analysis of his political foes’ charges, elevating non stories to week-long “scandals,” burying actual stories that might undermine the AUC agenda.

This is beyond dispute; I documented the process thoroughly, as it was the greatest professional ethics breach in modern U.S. history, and I still didn’t cover its full extent. Coverage of the Trump presidency was warped to ensure that he would be unsuccessful, that the public would distrust him, and that he would not be re-elected. In the post about this, I used the term “steal,” not the President’s term “rig.” In a subsequent post focusing on the embargoed Hunter Biden story, I used “rig” with quotation marks, because it’s not my term, and it has been used misleadingly by the President. However that was a direct deception of the American people right before the election with the intent of affecting the election. The word isn’t that far removed from what happened.

I have never said that the election was stolen or rigged by voter fraud, as Trump and many conservative sources claim it was. Nobody should make that assertion at this point, especially President Trump. I have agreed that the use of mail-in ballots ensured that there would be some voter fraud, and that there is much circumstantial evidence to indicate that vote totals were manipulated in various ways to help Biden. Some of that circumstantial evidence is the refusal of Democratic officials to want to investigate the matter.

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