Month: July 2024

Why We Can’t Trust Polls, Chapter 6,741…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I saw the NBC poll showing President Biden leading Trump by 3% in a six-way race over the weekend. I thought, “What the hell? This is proof positive that the U.S. public is too stupid to vote, and needs to be put under a conservatorship or something. Had the “Trump is Hitler! AHHHHHHH!” propaganda campaign by Biden, the Democrats and the news media really obliterated the natural implications of facts, like the fact that the President’s mind is falling apart in chunks, and that leaving him in office amounts to surrendering to a Soviet-style shadow collective? As it quickly turned out, no, the demonization campaign probably got Trump shot, but the public as a whole isn’t quite that hopeless.

Oopsie! The network issued a correction yesterday, citing “an error with the original polling documents.” The corrected network’s online article reported that Trump led Biden by 3% in a six-way race including Green Party candidate Jill Stein, Libertarian Party candidate Chase Oliver and independent candidates Robert F. Kennedy, Jr and Cornel West.

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Comment of the Day: “Hello. This Is Mira!….Trump Derangement Destroyed Her Brain…”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

AM Golden has delivered a fascinating Comment of the Day describing a phenomenon I was barely aware of: the practice of paying celebrities to attend conventions that have little of nothing to do with what the celebrity does or is famous for.

The COTD was inspired by my commentary on the brain-meltingly stupid anti-Trump “X” screed by one-time Academy Award winning actress Mira Sorvino, now on the shady side of what turned into a disappointing career. (To be fair, she was black-balled in her prime by Harvey Weinstein for not accommodating his sexual demands when he was one of biggest power-brokers in Hollywood.)

Incidentally, appropo of subsequent events, Mira’s polemic proclaimed Trump as the second coming of Hitler and said that if he was elected, it would mean the end of America as we know it. And as it is beginning to look like he will be elected…what is the patriotic thing to do to save the nation, hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm?

But I digress…

The convention practice is clearly a cognitive dissonance scale stunt in part: an organization that sponsors a generally admired and beloved public figure as a “guest” gets a boost up the positive end of the scale. Or the celebrity is more like a freak show attraction: Come meet Joey Buttafuoco! Kato Kaelin! And a convention that features a professional leach like Mary Trump (above)? Don’t expect me to register.

AM’s Comment of the Day is also something of an ethics quiz. Don’t jump to the end: that’s cheating.

Here is AM Golden’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Hello. This Is Mira! She Used To Be A Successful Hollywood Actress Until Trump Derangement Destroyed Her Brain. Won’t You Give a Tax-Deductible Donation To Defeat This Terrible Disease?”

***

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Is J.D. Vance Qualified To Be Vice-President of the United States of America?

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

As Bill Clinton might say, “It depends on what the meaning of ‘qualified’ is.”

The Vice-President has only two clearly defined jobs. The first is to preside over the Senate, and that’s a job even Joe Biden could do in his current state of confusion. The second job is to be the President’s back-up, insurance policy, and stunt-man. That’s a bit trickier, and as Kamala Harris has proven, it’s too challenging for some people. Still, paraphrasing Woody Allen, “Ninety percent of success as Vice-President is just showing up.”

I have this idealistic notion that a VP candidate should be at least minimally qualified to be President, since 9 out of 45 Presidents got the job when the top of their ticket couldn’t perform his duties any more. That’s 20%, one in five. Despite these ominous odds, most Presidential candidates choose their understudies without any concern about their fitness to be President, not to say that most of the choices weren’t at least theoretically qualified. Joe Biden was, in my view, one of the least qualified VPs ever, and look where he ended up.

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Ironically, If Trump Had Been Assassinated He Would No Longer Be A “Convicted Felon.”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

The memo has gone out to alert Democrats that part of the plan to vilify and delegitimize the candidacy of Donald Trump is to constantly refer to him as a “34 times convicted felon,” or just “convicted felon” for short. The former is a deceitful description, though I’d guess 99% of those using it have no idea what Trump was charged with in the infamous “hush money” trial. In an egregious example of over-charging, Alvin Bragg’s lackeys turned a single misdemeanor into 34 felony counts, a slimy prosecutorial tactic but unfortunately a common one. But even “convicted felon” is misleading. A conviction in New York (and just about everywhere else) isn’t final until appeals have been exhausted and the defendant is sentenced. Neither has taken place yet in Trump’s case, and since the trial was as much of a partisan contrived travesty of justice as the charges, the smart money is on all those convictions being reversed.

Meanwhile, New York still operates under the common law doctrine of abatement ab intio, which holds that if a convicted individual dies before his or her appeals have been exhausted, the convictions no longer stand. That means, then, that if the aspiring assassin who shot the former President in the ear had killed Trump, he would have also rendered him innocent of those “34 charges.”

Trump would have been vindicated! Dead, but vindicated..

Ethics Reflections On The Trump Assassination Attempt Prelude and Aftermath

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

There are so many stunning examples of the apparently irrepressible Trump hate and anti-Trump bias in the news media that it would take an over-long post to thoroughly document it. I decided that the one above was the blue ribbon winner; I can’t even imagine the degree of ugly bias in a news room that would permit a headline like that to reach publication. Then there was CNN’s characteristically disgusting fake news spin:

Anyone looking at the video could see that Trump didn’t “fall;” he ducked down after feeling a bullet hit his ear and hearing gunshots. In its front page photo, the New York Times carefully cropped out the American flag over Trump’s head, making the spectacular composition of the original photo…

…look ugly: this was obvious cognitive dissonance scale manipulation. Mustn’t have any positive imagery linked to that monster Trump! Quickly after the incident, as EA already noted, a CNN talking head criticized him for saying “Fight!” minutes after he was shot, as blood dripped down his face. As I also noted, some found it an appropriate time to suggest that Trump’s upraised fist was another fascist “dog whistle.”

This was a confirmation bias classic: commenter Joel Mundt sent me these photos, none of which inspired a similar interpretation.

Gee, I wonder why? There was also a lot of triumphal fist-raising yesterday at Wimbledon too, but then we all know that pro tennis is a hotbed of fascism.

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Ethics Quiz: Biden’s Post-Assassination Attempt Phone Call

/ Jack Marshall / 62 Comments

This one is short and simple.

We are told that President Biden called Trump to express his sympathies, or something, and that the call was “brief and respectful.”

If I were Trump, I would not have accepted the call, or, perhaps, only accepted it long enough to say, “Bite me, asshole.” (Or, “dickhead.” I’m flexible.)

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Would my response be unethical?

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Ethics Dunce, Unethical Quote of the Week and Instant Entry Into the “Bias Makes You Stupid” Hall of Fame”: CNN Correspondent Jamie Gangel

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

First the quote…

“I do want to say that when I watched the tape there was one thing I found, because of all the heated rhetoric, and that is that after he was hit, former President Trump got up and said ‘fight, fight, fight, fight.’ I think what we’re hearing from people is that’s not the message that we want to be sending right now. We want to damp it down.”

—-Longtime CNN reporter/host/hack Jamie Gangel last night, reacting to the assassination attempt

What an idiot.

Gangel and CNN are catching flack for this truly offensive and classic Trump-Deranged reaction, but whatever it is, it’s not enough.

Someone had just tried to murder him, and what the media-vilified candidate aid in the moments after that close brush with death could not reasonably be held against him even if he had said, say, just to pick random nonsense out of the air, “We beat Medicare!” But what he did say, as I just wrote in the previous post abut his raised fist, was unimpeachable, though if Trump were currently President I’m sure Adam Schiff and Maxine Waters would try to impeach him for it.

Ann Althouse gets it: she wrote this morning, after quoting Trump’s Truth Social message that concluded, “In this moment, it is more important than ever that we stand United, and show our True Character as Americans, remaining Strong and Determined, and not allowing Evil to Win,” that “No one can forget his fist pumping and repetition of “Fight! Fight! Fight!” less than 2 minutes after he “felt the bullet ripping through the skin.” But as his antagonists call for shared love — and an abandonment of fighting — he brings the love into his fight message, merging love and fighting. Notice that he isn’t calling us to fight against any human being — indeed, he calls all Americans to fight on his side.  The enemy is ‘Wickedness’ and ‘Evil’.”

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Trump-Deranged Asshole Media Headline of the Day: The Economic Times

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I had to wrestle with myself about whether to post this first, or the next post.

Here’s the headline from The Economic Times:

“Trump’s Raised Fist: What the gesture means which is widely used by fascists, socialists, and communists”

…yeah, and also Rocky, Norma Rae, the much-lionized protesting American runners at the Olympics on the winner’s platform, baseball players after they have hit game-winning home runs, my Vietnam War protesting fellow students at Harvard,

and, oh, just about everyone in the past few centuries or so who wanted to symbolize defiance, victory, strength and resistance to forces that would abuse and persecute them.

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On the Trump Assassination Attempt

/ Jack Marshall / 68 Comments

Ethics never sleeps. There I was, having a nice dinner cooked by a friend, my first dinner invitation in the four months since Grace’s death, and my night of escape from grim reality was shattered when my host informed me that someone took a shot at Donald Trump in Pennsylvania.

I have some observations about that….

1. The Democrats, resistance and mainstream media are accountable for this. Of course they are. They have been saying and writing that Trump is an existential danger to democracy and the nation. They have said that if he wins there will be no more election, no more Constitution, that he is an American Hitler. They have gone further than mere fearmongering, to terror-mongering. What did they expect? The Left is full of hysterical, reality-challenged whack jobs that Biden, Pelosi, the New York Times and many, many others have been priming for violence. Trump is “dangerous,” said the Times today. What does a patriot do when someone or something is a clear and present danger, in Joe Biden’s words, to the nation? Eliminate the danger.

2. This is on the Axis. They built up the narrative that Trump was a demon from Hell, and suddenly all of the Democrats’ cheats, devices and conspiracies were failing. The effort to put Trump in prison was transparent and faltering. Trump’s opposing candidate had exposed himself as an empty, debilitated, prop leader. All of the Big Lies have been used, discredited, and debunked. What was left? Why, killing Trump, of course!

I expected this, didn’t you?

3. The blather from the Biden Cabinet and White House condemning violence should be metaphorically spat back in these villains’ faces. They are the same people who blamed Sarah Palin for the shooting of a random Congresswoman because Palin had “targeted” Democratic districts on her website. These are the same people who blamed Rush Limbaugh and conservatives for the Oklahoma City bombing because of their relentless attacks on “big government.” But the insane levels of hate and hysteria the Left has heaped on Donald Trump wasn’t general like those partisan attacks, but very personal and specific: one man was the danger to the continued existence of the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. One single evil man. Biden and the rest said this over and over. The nation had to be saved from this monster, and it became obvious over the last two weeks that Joe Biden wasn’t going be able to do it.

4. Now, the fact that Trump was shot at doesn’t make the unethical, unforgivable nature of the unrestrained vilification of him over the last nine years any worse. That’s just moral luck: what the Axis has been doing would be just as wrong and irresponsible if no fanatic was moved to violence by it. The incident does have a way of sharpening one’s focus, however.

5. I’ll put it simply: the Democrats and their Machiavellian allies were asking for this to happen. They got it. They must not be allowed to duck responsibility.

Other observations:

  • Bravo to Trump for having the presence of mind to show defiance after he was wounded. Personally, I would have liked to see him go full Teddy Roosevelt and insist on giving his speech anyway.
  • It will be interesting if the assassination attempt in any way moderates the Democrats’ Trump-Deranged panic and the extreme rhetoric it has spawned. Out side of demonizing Trump and claiming that he will destroy the nation as we know it, what’s the case for re-electing the demented incumbent? Finding a way to kill more unborn children? Biden’s two state solution for the Palestinians?

Ethics Quiz: The Biden Campaign Model

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

This one fascinates me the more I think about it.

Above is the model at the Official Biden-Harris Campaign Store advertising the Biden-Harris T-shirt. There are three other models to be seen at the home site: a kind of wimpy male-of-indeterminate-color modeling a “Free on Wednesdays” T-shirt (I don’t know what that means), a butch-looking female model who might be a stand-in for Lia Thomas, and a chunky middle-aged bespectacled guy, also of-some-sort-of-color, holding a “Color-Changing Mug.” This is clearly a DEI campaign site: apparently white models need not apply. But the model above is strikingly unattractive as well as sexually ambiguous. Unless the marketing industry no longer operates according to the Cognitive Dissonance Scale, the idea in advertising is still to connect the product with positive images.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

What’s going in here?

I could see the same model being used in a satirical ad put out by the Trump campaign. Is this flagrant virtue signaling? (What’s the virtue?) Pandering to radical feminists? DEI madness? Gross incompetence?

Oh…here are two of the Trump campaign’s models:

Yeccchh.