Commenter Chris Marschner’s observation that Kamala Harris is “no Jackie Robinson….She is tying an anchor around the candidacy of future black women candidates. Her campaign will be remembered” reminded me of an old Ethics Alarms post about Barack Obama. The fact that he (and Michelle, that feminist who has based her prominence, wealth and influence on her husband’s career and popularity: “Hear her roar!”) is viewed as having any positive influence over voters at all testifies to the fact that Obama played President as well as any POTUS we have had since George Washington. Oh, there have been many others as good at it: Lincoln, Harding, FDR, Ike, JFK and Reagan among the masters. This is the aspect of the job that Donald Trump is epically terrible at, and a main reason he isn’t leading in the polls by double digits. Obama, was the opposite: an inept and destructive President who survived his two terms, an election he should have lost, and, in all likelihood, the assessment of historians by looking and acting like a leader. From that post…

“The tragic legacy of Barack Obama will be recorded in three parts: his groundbreaking achievement as the nation’s first black President, his utter incompetence at governing and leadership, and his dishonesty and the dishonesty he engendered by those who reported to him. The first has been fatally undermined by the second and third, and the third, dishonesty, necessitated by the second, the relentless incompetence. The reason this is so tragic should be obvious to all. President Obama, like all trailblazers, needed to be a stand-out, exemplary performer to avoid setting back the causes his ascension needed to advance. But instead of Jackie Robinson, he has been Pumpsie Green, and that may be unfair to Pumpsie, the first black player to wear a Boston Red Sox uniform who knew his limitations, and did the best he could for as long as he could. It is also tragic because America, as much as any time in its history prior to the Civil War, needed a strong, wise, confident, unifying leader to deal with great and difficult problems that will only get worse with time. The challenges would have tested the best of leaders; for President Obama, with neither leadership instincts or talent, they have proven impossible. Worse, the basic requirements of governing have been proven to be beyond him, and he does not have the self-awareness or humility to seek the help he needs.

Key word: “unifying.”

One other note before we get into the weeds: I am always searching for signals regarding cultural emanations, and I am puzzled by the spectacular drop in Halloween decorations in my Alexandria, Virginia neighborhood compared to last year or any year within memory. This area usually goes nuts over Halloween. What’s going on here? Is it the election? Do people regard all of the “Harris-Walz” signs scary enough? Theories welcome….

1. I promised to post about the banning of Denver Dave last week, and never got around to it. DD, as he was fondly called, responded to this post, about a ridiculous set of bad arguments for abortion sliming up social media, with “it sort of like, if men had uteri, you’d be able to get abortions at gas stations.”

I “pounced”: I hate that argument, which is one of many polluting any effort to have a constructive discussion on abortion. It’s even worse than the similar retort opponents of capital punishment whip out: “I bet you wouldn’t feel that way if it was your son facing execution!” I wrote back to Dave, “What a moronic thing to say. Or think. One more comment like that, and The Stupidity Rule kicks in.”

I over-reacted. First, there was confirmation bias: DD was generally a knee-jerk progressive not given to deep or objective analysis, so I assumed he was defending the list of pro-abortion tropes with one of the worst of them all. I was also annoyed by the lack of a capital letter at the start of the sentence: this is my home, and respectful commenters at least make a minimal effort not to trash it up. It was only later, when Extradimensional Cephalopod admonished me (as he often does) that it sunk in that DD may have been trying to say that the “if men could have babies” line was another bad argument used by pro abortion activists. (I really don’t know what he was trying to say, upon reflection.)

It was DD’s next response that got him banned, though: “Remember when you asked “I’m not even quite sure what point the writer (my friend didn’t write it) is trying to make”? do you remember that? And you should stop insulting people for stating opinions you don’t agree with. It makes you look weak and petty.” DD had a habit of being unable to make a direct point clearly, and I also couldn’t tell what his “do you remember” point was. That comment also had a missing capital letter. And while I will accept constructive criticism from established and valuable participants here, this guy was already on my watch list.

This week has been marked by many superb and thoughtful comments, only a small percentage of which I will be able to honor properly as Comments of the Day. Commenters here like Denver Dave, in contrast, arrive with chips on their shoulders, determined to do partisan and ideological battle. They don’t want to talk about ethics; in DD’s case, his knowledge of ethics was beneath rudimentary. If such a commenter is respectful of me, other commenters, and the site, I may be tolerant in the interest of <gag> diversity. But my time is valuable, and so is my state of mind, which has been vulnerable since my wife dropped dead in the living room. In retrospect, I probably should not have banned DD, but he was almost going to be banned eventually anyway. I regret over-reacting…but not much.

2. Not exactly a new low, but near it: Trump-Deranged social media mobsters and left-wing bloggers and websites thought this was significant in Trump’s podcast interview with Joe Rogan: “Donald Trump tells Joe Rogan that Abraham Lincoln was a “very depressed guy,” after he lost his son Tad. There’s only one problem: Tad died 6 years after Lincoln’s death.” Gee, I guess that means Trump is sinking into dementia: he doesn’t have the names of all Lincoln’s children straight. Yes, it was the death of poor Willy, not Tad, that threw Lincoln (he was already prone to clinical depression, like Teddy Roosevelt and Churchill) into an emotional tailspin. I make these kinds of mistakes when I’m writing and speaking off the cuff; Joe Biden has been making them daily for years.But Trump’s momentary Presidential history minutia flub becomes suddenly significant, because the Trump-haters are desperate and grasping at metaphorical straws.

3. Not that Trump didn’t foolishly (but as expected) give his foes many sticks to bash him with in his interview with Rogan—he did. You might think, in a week in which the Axis defaulted to the old standby “Trump is Hitler” as their last ditch argument for voting against him, the former President would be a little careful with his rhetoric. Nah. Talking to Rogan about the foreign leaders he will have to contend with as President, Trump riffed,

“We’re dealing with the smartest people. They hate when I say, you know, when the press — when I called President Xi,  said, ‘Well, he called President Xi brilliant!’ Well, he’s a brilliant guy. He controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist. I mean, he’s a brilliant guy, whether you like it or not. And they go crazy.”

Completely predictably, this was immediately characterized in Axis strongholds like the Huffington Post and Yahoo! News as Trump praising Xi FOR controlling the Chinese public. It’s Trump’s fault: he triggers confirmation bias constantly, and he will never stop. Trump’s point was not that dictating to a nation of 1.4 billion people is a good thing, but that it’s a difficult task and takes skill and intelligence to accomplish. That is unquestionably true. Presidents are fools if they underestimate foreign adversaries. FDR always told anyone who would listen that Stalin was smart and said in public, as a matter of diplomacy, that he liked the Soviet dictator personally. Of course, Roosevelt had so much public good will that he could get away with saying almost anything. Trump doesn’t, and unlike FDR, he doesn’t communicate clearly.

4. In the throes of the unethical “Trump is Hitler” and fearmongering assault, Jonathan Turley, who despises the tactic as much as I do, pointed out in part,

The predictions of mass roundups, disappearances, and tyranny ignore a constitutional system that has survived for over two centuries as the oldest and most stable democracy in the world…Voters in swing states believe that Trump is more likely to protect democracy than Kamala Harris, who is running on a “save democracy” platform. The poll sampled 5,016 registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. When asked whether Trump or Harris “would do a better job” of “defending against threats to democracy,” 43% picked Trump while 40% picked Harris… the result was crushing for not just many in the Harris campaign but the press and pundits who have been unrelenting in announcing the end of democracy if Harris is not elected.

…Nevertheless, Harris supporters have ratcheted up the rhetoric to a level of pure hysteria. Recently, Michael Cohen, a convicted felon and Trump’s disbarred former lawyer, told MSNBC that if Trump wins the election, he will “get rid of the judiciary and get rid of the Congress.” Recently, MSNBC host Al Sharpton and regular Donny Deutsch warned viewers that they will likely be added to an enemies “list” for some type of roundup after a Trump election.

It is impossible to overstate how much these people deserve to lose, and then after they do, have their faces rubbed in the defeat.

5. David Brooks admits the obvious…In a PBS panel deploring the decision of the Washington Post to avoid endorsing Kamala Harris, the New York Times’ Stockholm Syndrome conservative David Brooks, said, while conceding that newspaper endorsements don’t have much influence any more, that “it’s not a mystery which candidate the Washington Post actually supports.”

Well, it should be a mystery, and if a news source is trustworthy, fair and objective, it will be.

6. And now for something completely different: World Series ethics notes!

• DEI strikes again! The Fox broadcasters in Game 1 between the Yankees and the Dodgers (for once baseball’s lousy, greedy play-off system has resulted in the two best teams in each league playing in the World Series, the first time since 2018) waxed enthusiastically about the “historic” fact that a Venezuela-born umpire was a crew chief in a World Series. Then that historic umpire called a truly horrible game, with balls being strikes as often as strikes were balls. In a game that was tied after 9 innings, his incompetence may well have changed the outcome. But he is historic, so it doesn’t matter….
• Speaking of tie games, the World Series doesn’t use the execrable extra-innings “zombie runner” device that shortens games and defiles baseball’s integrity. That’s a tacit admission that the contrivance results in a lesser product. Game #1, sans zombie, ended in a shocking grand slam walk-off home run by the Dodgers’ Freddy Freeman that would not have occurred with the the inferior regular season rules.
• However, the Series games are back to running over three hours, although MLB’s pitch clock had cut the average time to about two and a half hours. This is because the TV commercial breaks are suddenly interminable. Greed makes MLB stupid. The shorter game times have sparked a significant increase in baseball’s popularity, attendance and TV ratings. Yet in baseball’s best and most important showcase, it is returning to the long games that frustrated fans for decades. Morons. I spoke to several fans who missed Freeman’s homer because they went to bed before the game ended.