Happy Mother’s Day. It’s not going to be a happy one at the lonely Marshall house, though my sister and I will be having dinner to celebrate her motherhood as well as the two dead mothers in the family. She talked me out of bringing Grace’s urn to the dinner, as I expected she would. I’m still tempted.

In more dark news, it seems a cruel twist of fate that the major event in U.S. history that occurred on this date was the discovery of the kidnapped Lindbergh baby, dead. Happy Mother’s Day!

On to the ethics inventory…

1. About that Trump trial…I haven’t written much about Alvin Bragg’s blatantly political and partisan prosecution of Donald Trump in New York. I’m not there and it’s not being broadcast; meanwhile, the news media is setting new records for completely slanted and biased coverage: going back and forth among Fox News, MSNBC and CNN is like visiting parallel universes. But even a legal analyst on CNN confessed that the prosecution had yet to prove any crime had been committed, and it seems clear that the judge’s decision to allow Stormy Daniels to testify extensively about the alleged sexual activities engaged in with the former President guarantees a guilty verdict being thrown out. From what I can determine, the judge should throw out any guilty verdict as a matter of law, because guilt beyond a reasonable doubt cannot be legitimately found when the two primary witnesses for the prosecution are as inherently unbelievable as Daniels and Michael Cohen, who is a disbarred lawyer, a disgruntled former employee of Trumps, and an admitted perjurer. Jonathan Turley, who has registered his utter contempt for this case (recent posts here, here, and here), had a funny line about waiting to see if the courthouse is struck by lightning when Cohen takes the oath before testifying.

It is so clear, in listening to the MSNBC and CNN commentary on the trial as well as print and online accounts like Maureen Dowd’s column“Donnie After Dark” that the real objective of this trial is to humiliate Trump and expose his “bad character.” This is not an ethical or legitimate use of the justice system, but Democrats are committed to it. How desperate they are. I was thinking about this even as I laughed at Jerry Seinfeld’s movie sharply tweaking Democratic icon Jack Kennedy’s serial adultery and sex addiction: after JFK, after Bill Clinton, and with a their own current President credibly accused of rape and caught on film sniffing and touching young girls as his own daughter’s diary documents them showering together, this is the best they can muster to impugn Trump? And how many Trump supporters are under the delusion that he has embraced high moral and ethical values in his private life? if anything, Trump’s handling of the lawfare assault on him has raised my opinion of his character. His determination and resilience are amazing. He epitomizes the lesson of “Laugh-In” comic Henry Gibson’s favorite poem (by Frank Lebby Stanton), “Keep A-Goin’.”

2. Meanwhile, did you know Donald Trump lies all the time? So far, my quest to find a Biden lie or misstatement of fact every day has been too easy, and Wednesday’s softball interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett was enough for two weeks all by itself. As chronicled by the New York Post (with assistance from Factcheck.org, the most reliable of the left-biased factcheck organizations, in 17 minutes, Biden told 15 lies, or at least lies as the news media would call them if the equivalent came from Donald Trump. The biggest whopper, in the post’s assessment, was “[Inflation] was 9% when I came to office. ” Inflation was 1.4% in January 2021. Oh, details, details, picky picky….

3.From the “Rules are Rules” file: At the Orange County Marathon last weekend, Esteban Prado crossed the finish line first but was disqualified for a “drinking-related infraction.” No, he wasn’t boozing during the race. He had been given bottles of water on the way to victory by two men on bicycles, one of whom was his father. Rule 241 in the U.S.A. Track & Field rule book says only “authorized persons” at official stations along a course can provide liquid refreshment, and “no official shall under any circumstances move beside an athlete while he is taking refreshment or water.” The consequences of breaking these rules: “A competitor who collects refreshment from a place other than a refreshment station is liable to disqualification by the referee.”

Prado told race officials that he had only accepted the liquid provided by the cyclists because water stations had not been properly set up when he arrived, since he was ahead of the pack. That seems unlikely: he sure had an elaborate back-up plan in place if that was what really happened. Video from the race showed Prado getting water bottles from bicyclists several times; once he was captured in the act of running past volunteers offering water and taking a bottle from a bicyclist instead.

4. Once again, “The Ethicist” defaults to weasel words. Ugh. “The Ethicist” responded to a really annoying question that I would have answered with a short, swift, virtual tongue-lashing. The inquirer wanted a museum to take pains to point out that an artist being featured in a special exhibition is a racist. “Her show in our city is titled “Infinite Love,” the writer notes. “No Black person should see a show about “love” only to discover later that Black people are not included in that love.” EA has been absolutely consistent on this point: an artist and his or her art are distinct. Conflating the two is antagonistic to art generally as well as a guaranteed path to having society burdened with a lot of mediocre art by really nice people. Charles Dickens was an asshole, Frank Sinatra was a hood, Ray Charles abused women, Richard Wagner was a fascist, Woody Allen married his sort-of daughter, Charles Chaplin liked little girls, John Lennon was a pig, Arthur Miller abandoned his mentally challenged son, Roman Polanski is a rapist, Richard Rodgers was a misanthrope…none of that is relevant to the quality and values of the art they have produced. But Prof. Appiah can’t bring himself to say that concisely and clearly, instead blathering hundreds of words to get to a bland conclusion that reads, “My guess is that you’re troubled by what you’ve read because you would like to see a world where we treasure one another in our full humanity. You’ll have to decide, in the mirror room of your own mind, whether quarantining this artist is in keeping with that ideal.”

5. Here’s a “Kaufman” if there ever was one. You will recall that the EA Kaufman designation is reserved for alleged outrages and controversies that recall the famous wit and playwright George S. Kaufman’s spontaneous reply on a live Fifties panel show when guest Eddie Fisher ( father of Carrie) wanted advice from the panel. Desirable women were refusing to go out with him because of his advancing age, the singer complained. Kaufman’s unsympathetic reply:   “Mr. Fisher, on Mount Wilson there is a telescope that can magnify the most distant stars to twenty-four times the magnification of any previous telescope. This remarkable instrument was unsurpassed in the world of astronomy until the development and construction of the Mount Palomar telescope.  The Mount Palomar telescope is an even more remarkable instrument of magnification. Owing to advances and improvements in optical technology, it is capable of magnifying the stars to four times the magnification and resolution of the Mount Wilson telescope. Mr. Fisher, if you could somehow put the Mount Wilson telescope inside the Mount Palomar telescope, you still wouldn’t be able to see my interest in your problem.”

What CNN termed the shocking double resignation of Miss USA 2023 Noelia Voigt and Miss Teen USA 2023 UmaSofia Srivastava this week has thrown the beauty pageant world into a tizzy. Both women refused to explain what exactly they were resigning over: Miss Teen USA said on Instagram that her personal values “no longer fully align” with those of the organization, whatever that means, and Voigt issued a vague message citing her mental health. The women are both contractually bound by non-disclosure agreements, but symbolic resignations on principle mean nothing if one cannot specify exactly what the principle is. The rumor mill has it that the Miss USA organization isn’t nice to its winners, or something.

Since I see no reason for there to be beauty contests at all, I have little sympathy with contestants who aren’t satisfied with the experience: who doesn’t know that the pageants are swamps of exploitation and corruption?