So it’s come to this.

The 2024 election is its own, massive ethics train wreck, as the tag will show you. It officially began with Democrats (and the news media, but I repeat myself) spending too long lying to the public about Joe Biden’s deteriorating mental state and deciding to select a Presidential nominee Soviet-style bypassing all democratic norms and processes. The party broke all previous campaign records for hypocrisy by taking this course while already making the dangerous claim that Republicans are the threats to democracy, and that Donald Trump as President would never allow another free election again. Amazingly, the campaign has gone downhill ethically since that point.

Just as tornadoes sometimes spin off little baby cyclones that still are deadly enough to kill people, the big Ethics Train Wrecks (or ETWs) as designated by Ethics Alarms, like the 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck, the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman Ethics Train Wreck and the Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck (which spawned the Biden Presidency Ethics Train Wreck), often generate related ethics train wrecks that cause a lot of their own damage.

But I did not foresee that a Don Rickles-style “roast comic’s” jab at an ongoing news story would or could, even in the Age of the Great Stupid, turn into a controversy dominating headlines when the election is so near and serious matters should be the public’s focus.

I’ll summarize the events as efficiently as possible to get to the main point:

• Desperate to avert a well-deserved defeat, Democrats and the news media decided to make “Trump and his supporters are fascist/racist existentialist threats to democracy” their main argument for voting against him, because there is no reason to vote for Kamala Harris.
• Absurdly, they pointed to Trump’s audacious decision to hols a rally in New York City’s Madison Square Garden as more evidence, saying that he was emulating a 1938 (pre-WWII) Nazi rally there despite their own party holding several conventions there in the interim.
• At the rally, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, a defiant Don Rickles throwback in a the cancel culture era, did a stand-up set including this joke: “There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”
• In many cases with headlines leaving the false impression that Hinchcliffe was a Trump supporting speaker rather than there as a performer, the media “pounced,” characterizing his joke as racist and demeaning to Puerto Ricans…because, of course, Donald Trump is a racist.

This was, I discovered today, a deliberate lie.

I did not know, but commenter Chris Marschner did, that a trash and landfill problem has been plaguing our island territory for decades, and the federal government is under fire for being slow to fix the problem even though much of it (and the trash) is of the U.S.’s making. Chris posted this link on the recent post about comedian Jon Stewart’s defense of Hinchcliffe. What it means is that Hinchcliff was not insulting Puerto Ricans or the island, but tweaking the government on Puerto Rico’s behalf. The New York Times, the Washington Post, Politico and other alleged news sources should have known the context—it is their job, after all—but either deliberately withheld the context from their audiences or failed to provide it because they are incompetent and irresponsible. Either way, it is inexcusable and unethical.

Then things got really weird. On CNN, a conservative contributor trying to defend the comic was called a fascist by a Muslim pro-Palestinian activist. The conservative implied that the Muslim contributor was a terrorism supporter (a fair assumption) and cracked that he hoped his beeper wouldn’t go off (a reference to Israel’s recent exploding pager attack on Hezbollah and was banned from the network as a result. (Calling a conservative Trump supporter a Nazi on TV is, however, perfectly acceptable to CNN.)

The “Puerto Rico Is An Island of Garbage” Sub-Ethics Train Wreck really settled in, however, when our President, just as Kamala Harris was preparing to give a speech calling for unity and mutual respect (which is pretty funny coming from her now, but I digress) commented on the joke, saying,

“Donald Trump has no character. He doesn’t give a damn about the Latino community. Just the other day, a speaker at his rally called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage. … They’re good, decent, honorable people. The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters. His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”

Let’s see: 1) Trump didn’t make the joke. 2) It was a comedian, not a “speaker” 3) This is in line with Biden’s “Soul of the Nation” attack on Trump supporters as threats to democracy 4), and this is the Big Enchilada: Biden called about half the country “garbage,” immediately evoking Hillary Clinton’s 2016 “deplorables” gaffe that if it didn’t lose her the election, sure didn’t help.

An Ethics Train Wreck is defined as a rampaging ethics-related national event that tars everyone who gets involved in it, and next on the victims list was White House spokesman Andrew Bates, who had to release statement claiming that Biden didn’t say what he meant or didn’t mean what he said or something. That was a Jumbo: “Elephant? What elephant?” Biden’s botch also undercut Harris by making Biden’s comment the main controversy, since even a demented President’s statements are more significant and newsworthy than those of a comedian most American never heard of. Good job, Joe!