Currently bugging me…

• Walking Spuds just now before the rains come, I saw no fewer than five fellow Alexandrians, ranging in age from about 60 to 13, walking along on a lovely, cool day without appearing to look up once from their cell phone screens. I said “Hi!” to two of them, but they didn’t hear me because they had earbuds blocking out all auditory stimulation from the outside world. One was walking a dog trailing behind., but I could have replaced it with a rabid wolverine for al she would have noticed.
• Right after I posted about Stacey Abrams’ ongoing con and the mainstream media’s immediate resort to the “Republicans pounce!” deflection, New York Times reporter Trip Gabriel tweeted, “Why did John Fetterman chase down a Black person with a shotgun?’ asks Barnette. The GOP use of this 2013 incident – which some PA Dems predicted would be used in the general to discourage Black turnout – has begun.” Barnette is recently defeated GOP Pennsylvania Senate hopeful Kathy Barnette, who raised the 2013 incident when Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman detained an innocent African-American jogger with a loaded shotgun and pointed it at his chest. How rude of her! (That was criminal assault, by the way.) Instapundit asks, “Who Among Us Has Not Chased Down an Unarmed Black Jogger with a Shotgun?” and the National Review muses on how the mainstream media would handle a similar incident if the candidate in question were a conservative rather than an extreme progressive “Bernie Bro.”

1. While we’re on the topic of mainstream media bias, Philip Bump, one of the Washington Post’s more blatant Democratic operative with a press pass, rushed to Hillary Clinton’s defense after her campaign manager testified that she approved his sending what she knew was specious evidence that candidate Trump was “colluding” with Russia to the FBI. His argument: people were already suspicious of Trump’s alleged “ties” to Russia, so you can’t blame the convenient conspiracy theory that bobbled more than half of the Trump administration on her. It’s the “Everybody was doing it!” defense. He (and most Post commenters added the “it’s a right-wing media nothingburger!” refrain. The article does have value: it makes it clear how Hillary Clinton will avoid any accountability what was, at best, a Nixonian “dirty trick.”

Did you know that Republicans and Trump are an existential threat to democracy?

2. I repeat: President Trump should have told Kellyanne Conway to stop her husband from undermining his Presidency, or resign instead. Here, in 2018, I wrote (Item#1):

I would give Kellyanne an ultimatum: get your husband to stop undermining us, dump him, or quit. This is analogous to the crazy estranged husband who keeps coming to his wife’s place of business to harass her. The employer’s completely justified message: “We can’t have this. It’s your problem; fix it, or we will.”

She didn’t do any of t three, and Trump, he of the quick “You’re fired!” finger, irresponsibly let the fiasco continue. Now in her new unethical tell-all cashing in on her Trump years, the former White House Counselor writes about husband George, “Night after night, I would come home from a busy day at work … While I was minding dishes, dogs, laundry, managing adolescent dramas and traumas, George would be just steps away from me, tucked away in his home office, plotting against my boss and me.”

Idiot.

Trump, you know, promised that the “best people” would work for him in Washington. And the horrifying truth is that Conway was one of the best….[Pointer: Althouse]

3. Ethics Hero, Russian Division: Russia’s counsellor to the United Nations in Geneva has resigned, the most senior diplomat to defect since his country’s invasion of Ukraine began in February, according to an exclusive report by UN Watch, an independent non-governmental human rights organization based in Geneva. “Never have I been so ashamed of my country,” wrote Boris Bondarev, in a public statement.

4. “Nah, there’s nothing unethical about packaging a dementia sufferer who was never very bright to begin with as a puppet President!” In at least the second unplanned and dangerous utterance to wander out of Joe Biden’s Presidential mouth upping the risk of involving the U.S. in a war, Joe said the United States would respond militarily if China invaded Taiwan. Even I know that this has been deliberately maintained as  an unstated possibility only,the policy of “strategic ambiguity” that is at least as old as the Eisenhower Administration. I guess nobody informed Joe, or, more likely, he forgot. 

China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin reacted with alarm, saying, “China has no room for compromise or concessions on issues involving China’s core interests such as sovereignty and territorial integrityChina will take firm action to safeguard its sovereignty and security interests, and we will do what we say.” The White House quickly explained that Biden didn’t mean what he said, and that he stands by the One China Policy and  the Taiwan Relations Act which provides Taiwan with resources to defend itself.

You know, one reason it was such a relief getting rid of that Trump guy is that he was always a risk to  get us into World War III…

4. Oh yeah, this is a good idea...If the Smithsonian Channel’s show “Air Disasters” teaches anything, it is that pilots with less than extensive experience help cause a large proportion of commercial air catastrophes. So now it is being reported that Delta and United are so desperate for pilots that they are considering cutting flight time training requirements by half to speed up the line to cockpits.

On the plus side, we won’t have to be wearing those annoying masks as we plunge to a fiery doom. The damn things interfere with screaming…

5. Once again, the public is presented with a challenge: just how stupid are they? It really does look like Democrats, progressives and, you know, irresponsible morons are going to stick with the narrative that Tucker Carlson and conservatives are responsible for the acts of the racist Buffalo shooter, regardless of the fact that there was no mention made in his endless “manifesto” that he had ever watched Fox News or cared what Tucker Carlson thought about anything. (See, he wasn’t completely crazy…) Never mind, though, Facts Don’t Matter. Former Fox News chief political correspondent Carl Cameron went on MSNBC to say, in response to a leading question by Glenn Greenwald’s favorite talking head, Nicole Wallace, asking about what should happen to Fox News in the wake of its imaginary accountability for ten murders:

…the Republicans have become the purveyors of misinformation, and when our two-party system is broken like that, democracy is seriously in trouble. The President acknowledged that. It’s time to actually start doing things and maybe taking some names and putting people in jail.

Carl’s only 60; I wonder why he’s forgotten about things like the the First Amendment, Due Process, cause and effect, and such ethical values as fairness, responsibility and competence?