Gee, does this bother anyone out there who hates Donald Trump or who voted for Joe Biden?
If your answer is no, I’m disgusted with you. You’re beyond help, hope, or rehabilitation.
The farce of a Senate trial the nation just endured was predicated on emotion rather than law, logic, fact, language or evidence. Prime among the emotions weaponized was hatred of former President Trump (in the trial: hatred of then-President Trump was all the Democratic House needed for its evidence-free, investigation-free “snap impeachment” (credit: Prof Turley.) At the trial, House managers alluded to Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick being “killed’ in the riot, the intended implication being that President Trump was responsible for his death. Nancy Pelosi made certain that Sicknick’s body lay in the Capitol Rotunda, one of only five civilians so honored. All the better to show the nation that the President had blood on his hands. right, Nancy? The AP wrote on February 2,
Slain U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick lay in honor in the building he died defending, allowing colleagues and the lawmakers he protected to pay their respects and to remember the violent attack on Congress that took his life.
That’s false on its face, but it is the mythology the public and the Senators were fed in the weeks and days following the House impeachment. Here’s CBS: “‘Hero’: Lawmakers honor officer killed in US Capitol riot.”
This reminds me of Erika Mann’s discussion of mathematics education (Völkisches Rechnen or people’s arithmetic) under Nazi rule in the 1930’s, in her book School for Barbarians. Here’s an example (page 67):
“An airplane flies at the rate of 240 kilometers per hour to a place at a distance if 210 kilometers in order to drop bombs. When may it be expected to return if the dropping of bombs takes 7.5 minutes?“ -From National Political Practice in Arithmetic Lessons.
A question like this may not initially point to a scholastic propaganda problem until the other questions come into play, questions like:
“What was Germany’s population loss due to the Versailles Treaty?” What is the load capacity of four gas bombs?”
” How many people can fit into a bomb shelter?”
“What percentage of the German population is home to “alien” Jews?”
It suddenly becomes more clear that these questions are preparing these kids for war…and compliance with the state.
How’s that unity and no divisive rhetoric theme working out for you, Democrats? Joe? Both Senator Schumer and Nancy Pelosi insulted the Republican Senators who voted against conviction in their post-acquittal remarks. What happened to respecting good faith disagreement among colleagues? When Bill Clinton, who had, unlike President Trump, committed impeachable crimes, was acquitted by a straight partisan vote, no Republican leaders impugned the judgement or “morality” of the Democrats who chose to ignore a President of the United States engaging in conduct that would get any lawyer in the country disbarred for lack of trustworthiness, honesty and integrity. Comity, you know. Respect. Professionalism.
***
And so it begins...Senator Lindsay Graham suggested that a GOP majority in the House might well decide to adopt the precedent set by the Democrats and impeach, for example, Kamala Harris. Talking to Chris Wallace on Fox New, he mused.
“If you use this model, I don’t know how Kamala Harris doesn’t get impeached if the Republicans take over the House. Because she actually bailed out rioters and one of the rioters went back to the streets and broke somebody’s head open. So we’ve opened Pandora’s Box here and I’m sad for the country.”
Tit for tat! Revenge! Who could have predicted that?
I have had dreams that I was in a position to tell a TV news anchor exactly how biased, unethical and destructive his or her profession has become. So far, I have not had that opportunity, but the fact that Donald Trump’s defense attorney in the just completed Senate “trial,” a victory for his client, did have such an opportunity and took full advantage of it marks him as an Ethics Hero.
President Trump’s attorney, Michael van der Veen, appeared on CBS News and was asked by Lana Zak about Sen. Mitch McConnell’s (obnoxious and gratuitous) comments after Trump’s acquittal, specifically whether he was surprised at McConnell’s venom. “I’m not surprised to hear a politician say anything at all. No,” the lawyer replied. Zak then attempted to discredit van der Veen and his defense—he’s Trump’s lawyer, so her job is to discredit him—asking a “when did you stop beating your wife” question,
“Throughout the trial you denied that President Trump had a role in inciting the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. You argued first of all that there was no insurrection, but during your closing arguments you seemingly admitted that there was, in fact, an insurrection, using that word, saying that that was not up for debate. What role did the former President play —“
The lawyer cut her off and metaphorically slapped her in the face with a mackerel, saying,
I’m going to see if I can get through this entire post without mentioning yesterday’s acquittal of Donald Trump. There’s a whole other post around the corner for that. Let’s see.
I was sorely tempted to post the simple word “Good!” to my Facebook feed, but resisted the temptation. All it would have accomplished was to trigger some genuinely, or at least formerly, nice and reasonable people….who have nonetheless been smug, abusive, irrational, nasty, obsessed, hateful and harmful to the culture and society since November 2016. And as much as the Duke in “McClintock!” is an inspiration…
…I won’t. At least, not right now.
1, And the audacious hypocrisy continues! To a ridiculous and childish extent, too. Here’s Dr. Jill Biden’s kindergarten-style, “do as we say not as we do,” signaling-virtue-while-not-actually-engaging-in-it White House lawn display.
Former President Trump was acquitted in the second impeachment trial stemming from the Democrats’ relentless effort to remove him from office after his shocking election in 2016. In both efforts, the two-thirds super-majority necessary to convict was always impossible, because unlike previous impeachment efforts, these involved no crimes, and were not bi-partisan . They were exercises in pure partisan warfare, despite the contrary intent of the Founders and the flood of exaggerated rhetoric from Trump’s enemies who had presumed he needed to be impeached from the moment he was elected.
The sudden vote yesterday came as a surprise, as the Senate had just voted to allow witnesses in the “trial,” and that would have extended the fiasco considerably. I assume, without knowing, that the Democratic leadership finally figured out that its plot wasn’t working, and that it was time for the party to cut its losses. They might still be considerable. I hope they are considerable. This has wounded the nation badly, and the party that has blathered on about accountability needs some, and hard.
Republican Senators Richard Burr of North Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Patrick Toomey of Pennsylvania voted guilty along with every Democrat. Interestingly, only two of the seven have a law degree, which may partially explain why they think a guilty verdict is defensible (it’s not.) The two lawyers, Romney and Murkowski, are barely Republicans and have been consistently anti-Trump. The fact that not a single Democrat had the integrity to buck the party’s mandate and oppose such a damaging precedent and such a dubious impeachment tells us all we need to know about the state of the current Democratic Party.
One would think the suspension of a heretofore obscure Biden staffer with the risible name of “T.J. Ducklo” couldn’t possibly be important or significant, but it is. The episode demonstrates that less than a month into his administration, Joe Biden has squandered his credibility and the public trust, and done so foolishly. The news media cannot save him from this, though of course it will try. Biden has already shown, with his appointments and his executive orders, that his pledges and promises are just PR bluster. For example,
…has already been shown to be empty words by his nomination of an anti-white, pro-black biased NAACP lawyer to run the Justice Department’s civil rights division. Rights in America are supposed to apply to all Americans equally, and discrimination on the basis of race is wrong regardless of the race. but Joe’s pick doesn’t believe that. His administration also quit the discrimination lawsuit against Yale for not admitting qualified Asian and white students in favor of less qualified blacks.
So much for that promise.
Then there was this one:
That one is particular amusing in a sad sort of way. The President hasn’t lifted his finger to pull the plug on an unconstitutional impeachment trial, fueled entirely by his party’s hate, that is guaranteed to inflame the partisan division in the nation further.
In these pronouncements, Biden has revealed himself to subscribe to the Obama style of dishonestly. Obama made soaring, general statements of purpose and promises of future actions, and regularly ignored them or violated them, hoping for minimal news media criticism (and usually getting it). The most infamous of these was his “if you like your health plan” lie, but there were others, like his campaign promise to ban lobbyists from high posts, his pledge to have “the most transparent administration” ever, and most damaging of all, his “red line” threat against Syria. Lies and broken promises like those are crippling to effective leadership; only the worshipful loyalty of Obama’s irrationally admiring base spared him the consequences that usually follow such recklessness.
Donald Trump’s brand of dishonesty was different. The subject matter was usually trivial; most of what the news media categorized as lies were exaggerations, puffery and hyperbole. President Trump was actually better at following through on what he promised to do than most Presidents, though that is a low bar. Nonetheless, he squandered his trust and credibility too, and even earlier than Biden has. If one of the anti-Trump media members is asked to support the “Trump is a compulsive liar” narrative, he or she will probably start with the President’s boasts about the size of his inauguration crowd. even for him, it was a spectacularly stupid lie, a Jumbo level lie that could be disproved with ease. Nevertheless, his press secretary Sean Spicer tried to support it, and Kellyanne Conway compounded the mistake by defending the Trump version as “alternative facts,” a phrase that would haunt the administration to the end. How much better off everyone, including the President, would have been if Spicer or Conway had just said, “Yeah, the President get exuberant sometimes and sees what he wants to see. No, it wasn’t the biggest inauguration crowd ever, and he knows that he will have to be more careful with his superlatives going forward.” After all, who the hell cares how big the crowd was? This controversy wasn’t worth losing one iota of public trust, yet Trump and his staff threw away a chunk of it for nothing.
Commenters are being far too pessimistic here of late, and so are the rational people I know. Complaining is fine; so is worrying. But action is mandatory. Defeatism, despair, submission—these are not only self-destructive, but un-American. The nation got in its current mess (as it has gotten into others) by inattention and complacency; it is time, once again, to consider first principles, and act. As is usually the case, the bad guys are not nearly as bright as they think they are, as well as being cocky, careless, and corrupt. The public is naive, ignorant, driven by emotion and reckless, but it has come through for the nation throughout our history, and can, and will, again. There were a lot of positive developments in the past five days. Getting the word out is difficult, because our journalists are journalists no longer but tools of aspiring censors and dictators, but there are ways. The United States has always been lucky, sometimes amazingly so, and often when the odds against it have been daunting.
Don’t bet against it.
Meanwhile, make sure we get rid of the marked deck, the crooked dealers and the loaded dice.
1. This day in 1945: U.S. terrorism. On February 13, 1945, the Allies firebombed the German city of Dresden, killing roughly 25,000 people and destroying one of the cultural gems of Europe despite its having no military or strategic value at all. Germany were certain to surrender, it was only a matter of time. Yet more than 3,400 tons of explosives were dropped on the city by 800 American and British aircraft, with the resulting firestorm setting the city on fire for days, creating a horrific landscape of charred corpses, many of them children. Many believe that Dresden was bombed in retaliation for Hitler’s bombing of Coventry, the lovely British city that also had little military value. It doesn’t matter: the unquestionable truth is that Dresden’s destruction was pure terrorism, an act of pure cruelty designed to destroy German morale and create widespread fear. Although the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima is usually the focus on anti-war critics and those who accuse the U.S. of war crimes, the alternative to that bombing was and still is widely believed to have been an Allied invasion of Japan that would have involved huge military losses.There was no justification for the Dresden bombing. It was, as an infamous Civil War battle was once described, “Not war, but murder.”
2. “First they came for Hercules, and I said nothing…” Kevin Sorbo, the actor who played Hercules in the TV series “Hercules: The Legendary Journeys” for many years, announced yesterday that Facebook had deleted his account along with its half-million followers. He says he has received no explanation from Facebook (just as Ethics Alarms has never received an explanation from Facebook for blocking links to my blog for two years just as it was beginning to see significant growth in traffic and followers). Sorbo, you will be surprised to learn I’m sure, is an outspoken conservative and Christian.
If I posted this on Facebook—I don’t bother any more—I know the response: the rationalizers would condescendingly explain that Facebook, as a private company, has the right to block anyone they choose from using its platform. Yes, asshole, I know that. I also know, and unless you are a complete idiot as well as a fan of progressive domination, that because social media has become a primary means of communication and political advocacy in this country, censoring one side of any issue is an attack on both democracy and freedom of speech, and thus unethical and dangerous. I don’t care if it’s legal (and if you and people like you hadn’t voted for the censors, it might not have been for much longer). It’s unethical. You can’t process that because you believe that the ends justify the means.
3. Despicable and totalitarian screed of the week: Washington Post hack Dana Milbank. The headline says it all: “If Republican senators acquit Trump, they will own the violence that follows” needless to say, Milbank isn’t a lawyer, and apparently hasn’t even watched many TV lawyer shows. An argument like that would mean an instant mistrial in any court in the nation. If is an inflammatory, irresponsible, idiotic argument that appeals to bigger idiots. It represents an endorsement of the unconstitutional concept of pre-crime. the fact that the Washington Post employs a writer capable of making such an argument without “hiding his head under a bag,” as Justice Scalia liked to say tells you all you need to know about how untrustworthy the Post has become, and why it is now the tool of those who oppose individual liberty.
If there is violence, it will be because Milbank and journalists like him have enabled the foes of democracy. Donald Trump will have nothing to do with it.
4. Relating to the previous EA post...Professor Turley argues here that the Democrats were “tanking” the impeachment trial—losing intentionally. If someone can explain why the usually astute professor thinks “tanking” in politics makes sense (in professional sports it can result in better draft picks), please do. he makes a strong case that the case for impeachment is incredibly weak (“In the last impeachment, I criticized the House leadership for impeaching Trump on the thinnest record in the shortest time in history. It then outdid itself by impeaching him a second time with no record and no hearing.”)but fails to explain how the Democrats can possibly benefit from fiasco. He concludes,
“That is why, with the start of the trial, there is growing suspicion of a tanked trial. The House will present a case long on emotions and short on evidence. Trump will then be acquitted and Democrats will look to picking up new talent in the 2022 draft.”
Huh? Turley is often described as a “progressive” professor by the conservative news media when he criticizes Democrats. I’d call him a fair and objective professor who is capable of rising above his own preferences and bias. This is one of the few pieces by Turley that suggests a Democrat Party bias. He’s desperately trying to rationalize utter incompetence and stupidity fueled by irrational hate. “They just can’t be this stupid,” he’s arguing. “They must be losing on purpose.”
With due respect for Professor Turley, that’s almost as ridiculous as Rep. Greene’s “The wildfires were caused by Jewish lasers from outer space” conspiracy theory. Occam’s Razor applies. The Democrats are running an incompetent impeachment because they are incompetent.
As readers here know, I have not watched a second of the “impeachment” (it is no longer an impeachment) “trial” (it does not comport with the Constitution’s prescription for a Senate trial of a President because I have an unruly sock drawer. There was never a chance that President Trump would be convicted of the manufactured charges rammed through the House when he was in office, and the effort to convict a private citizen or construct a Bill of Attainder to prevent a private citizen from running for office are unconstitutional. If either or both were successful, which is impossible, they would be over-turned by a conservative Supreme Court whose Chief Justice has already signaled his contempt for the partisan exercise by refusing to participate in it. (I hear Roberts’ sock drawer is immaculate).
I’ve read many articles over the last week speculating on what the Democrats are trying to accomplish. Here’s one from yesterday. It’s been pretty clear to me, though incredibly and damningly not the Trump Deranged, that what they are accomplishing is embarrassing and disgracing themselves, their party and the nation; weakening the Constitution and ensuring similar behavior from Republicans in retaliation; exacerbating dangerous division and cynicism among the public, and generally continuing their despicable series of plots over the last four years to reverse the results of the 20i6 election no matter what harm it does to our institutions.
Bias, as the Ethics Alarms motto goes, makes you stupid, and the impeachment charade/fiasco/debacle/ farce/shit-show—you pick your favorite—and hate, as Richard Nixon realized too late, will destroy you. The “trial” is an abject lesson in both truths.
I didn’t watch the any of the trial, but I could not resist watching the video above, not that any of it was a surprise or should have been to any Americans who were paying attention, as in, for example, actually reading the text of Trump’s speech to the protesters. There was no “incitement” in his words, and no one could have been convicted on such evidence, as many objective authorities have pointed out, and many biased professionals have denied, to their eternal shame. Inciting a riot is a crime of intent, and outside of some amateur mind-reading, no intent has been proven or could be. The “case” against Trump—there is no case—has been based on the the “resistance”;s news media allies ludicrously re-casting a riot, a minor one compared to those we have seen over the last decade, almost entirely from the Democratic base with official approval, as an “insurrection,” which it was not. This has been repeated daily since January 6, as if repetition makes it so. It wasn’t even an attempted insurrection, because even the dimmest bulb among the small minority of angry Trump supporters who actually stormed the Capitol could have thought for a millisecond that a couple hundred fools, dummies and clowns had a prayer of overcoming the government or even slowing it down.
Ethics Alarms 