I was going to mention the attempt by the Axis media to cover for CBS in the epic betrayal of the American public and its journalistic duties it engineered in the Harris “60 Minutes” interview. Now I’m glad I waited. The entire Axis is trying to spin this into what it is not, and what it is is a flaming example of how hard the news media is working to foil democracy and bring down Donald Trump, as it has been since the 2016 election.

First, there were initially headlines describing “accusations” of unethical editing of Harris’s interview, or “Trump complaints about “alleged” editing. Those were lies, of course: this was res ipsa loquitur all the way: “60 Minutes” aired one version of Harris answering a question that showed her in typical incoherent Gabby Johnson mode (“Rarit!”), and another version with the identical video of the question and a completely different response, that is, a relatively coherent one by Harris.” “60 minutes” did this. There’s no “alleged” about it.

Then the news media shifted into a different strategy, because, to be blunt, the American news media is scum.

Part of the strategy is to ignore the story and hope it goes away. The New York Times hasn’t written about the “60 minutes” in-kind contribution to the Harris campaign at all yet, and the story has been out there for four days. At all!

You know what? I’ve had it. Anyone who tries to argue here that the Times isn’t a dangerous, sinister propaganda mouthpiece for Democrats is also scum, and I’m taking the gloves off. A smug asshole who was banned here long ago keeps sending in asinine illicit posts defending the Times and accusing me of bias for pointing out reality. Screw him, and anyone tempted to take a similar road on my ethics site. The New York Times sits on a story that reveals that an iconic name in American news is now little more than a cheap Democratic propaganda agent, and this isn’t news that’s fit to print?

For the Times to bury CBS’s cheat is almost as unethical as the cheat itself.

The Washington Post is taking the other approach. The Post wants to make the story about Donald Trump, who was the victim of the “60 Minutes” Harris trick. We see this deflection device all the time, it’s the “Republicans pounce” cheat. Jim Treacher neatly described it four years ago, and Instapundit has encored hit regularly since:

Low-life Rolling Stone headlined the issue this way: “A Pouty Trump Cancels ’60 Minutes’ Interview, Calls for CBS to Lose Broadcast License.” After what CBS did to bolster Harris, Trump would have been certifiably mad to agree to let “60 Minutes” manipulate his interview. A Presidential candidate is “pouting” when he objects to a major news show deliberately altering an interview video to help his opponent? See above. Scum.

The Post headline is  “Trump calls for CBS to lose broadcasting rights over Harris interview.”  Donald Trump wasn’t involved in the “60 Minutes” false editing incident in any way: it was all CBS and the Harris campaign.

Aside:  The Harris campaign is denying that it was involved in the cheat. “We do not control CBS’s production decisions and refer questions to CBS,” a Harris campaign aide told multiple outlets including Fox News and Variety. Hilariously, any response by the Harris campaign in such matters resembles the old puzzle about the two tribes on an island where one tribe always lies and the other always tells the truth. 2024 Democrats, and the Harris campaign particularly, lie constantly. It’s answer regarding whether it was complicit in the “60 Minutes” scam would be identical whether it was or was not conspiring with CBS. You can guess what I think, presumably. Continue reading →

“We have not identified a single event to explain the drop in end-of-day forecasts for the Democratic ticket between October 6 and 7.”

—-Data scientist Dr Thomas Miller of Northwestern University on his website called The Virtual Tout that posts daily electoral vote forecasts mapped on  a timeline of major events that could sway voters

Huh! What a mystery! Why would anyone decide that voting for Kamala Harris is irresponsible and bonkers now? After all, she…she…

There isn’t a single event that would cause support for Harris to drop, there are dozens of them, and the effect is cumulative. Someone needs to introduce the learned professor to the words and wisdom of Abraham Lincoln, and a timeline of the events that got us to this point.

The news media has done its best to keep throwing dust in the public’s metaphorical eyes so that they can’t see what Harris obviously is—that would be a phony, hollow, incompetent radical leftist determined to gain power by any means necessary—but she’s given them nothing to work with and too much to try to cover up.

She’s been undermined by a thousand cuts of her own making, like her declaration to the fawning panel on The View that she wouldn’t change anything the Biden-Harris administration has done. Like her increasingly evident choice of an extreme Left dolt as Vice-President: funny how people lose trust in an understudy POTUS who tells the world that he’s a knucklehead, as well as in the judgment of the aspiring President who selected him.

The entire Harris campaign strategy has been predicated on the assumption that the American public is naive, apathetic, willing to believe anything, and swallows the Big Lie that a man who served as President for four years and was more respectful of the Constitution and personal liberties by far than Harris’s party in the following four years will suddenly turn into Nero in his second term. But they can see Harris faking being Presidential as she flies over the storm devastation; they can hear the feckless FEMA huminahumina-ing over its misused funds; it can see and hear Harris whirl like a DEI dervish around guns, fracking, immigration, Israel and more.

Here is the “single event” that explains Trump’s surge: the Democrats nominated an incompetent, charisma-challenged, dishonest, none-too-bright replacement for Joe Biden without due process, democratic vetting or any accomplishments on her part to justify her heading the ticket. They counted on the corrupt news media to cover for her copious and obvious flaws, but as the song goes, “the age of miracles is past.” The public, which understandably would like a rational alternative to Donald Trump, has been “wishin’ and hopin” for months that Harris is such an alternative (I’m thinking in song lyrics today for some reason) but she isn’t. I think it was the Walz meltdown that was the catalyst, but it could have been any of a dozen moments, or all of them together.

One more comment: Good.

One of the reasons the EA Comment of the Day feature is important is that a lot of readers skip comments, especially since on most blogs they aren’t worth reading and are carelessly moderated. On sites like the New York Times, there can be hundreds of replies, with the percentage of perceptive and substantive ones too small to justify wading through the rest.

I have been uncharacteristically swamped with work and personal matters for over a month now, and have not been sufficiently diligent in posting worthy COTDs. I’m going to start a catch-up effort by combining several comments by Chris Marschner on the post about the college debate competition that excluded white students. The collective Comment of the Day is thought-provoking and useful. I also include a response to Chris by Michael R that is helpful.

***

I really don’t know why a psychological approach toward combating the progressive agenda is not taken. Campus Reform should merely report the activity and then editorialize why it believes such events occur.

I would expect significant outrage from participants if the editorial content suggested the reason for the BIPOC event was that too often that demographic has been marginalized given their poor performances against white debaters and why it us important for less capable debaters to win occasionally to gain confidence.

That would end that crap toot sweet.

Want to reduce the number of abortions? Stop trying to prevent abortions and start promoting it in black and poor communities using the very rational progressive views about being born into poverty and agree that these women simply would be poor mothers.

If the goal is to stop or limit a behavior do that which is the opposite of the goal but attach a stigma to it. When they gripe, say “Prove me wrong and I will retract my statements.”…

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If this is a parody, and I am now 99% convinced that it is thanks to EA’s crack commentariat, I have some further observations to follow-up on the previous post, written while I was in a state of web-hoax-induced confusion:

• The main reason I fell for this is confirmation bias. In my view, it is only slightly more ridiculous and tone deaf than many other genuine aspects of Harris campaign, her rhetoric, and her general contempt for the intelligence of the American people. I didn’t suspect for a second that the video was satire—that’s how little respect I have for Harris, her staff and her party at this point. I won’t apologize for that; it is deserved.
• The main thing that set me up to be punked  is the absurd attempt by Democrats and the Axis media to frame Harris’s silly (and quite possibly domestic abuser) husband as some kind of role model for the 21st Century non-toxic male, and the equally ridiculous characterization of Knucklehead Walz as “America’s Dad.” Those parody manly-men are no less credible than Walz and Doug.
• I was informed of the video by several previously reliable “Harris craziness” hawks, and I’m pretty sure they were fooled too. But I’m supposed to be more trustworthy than they are.
• That a former Jimmy Kimmel writer circulated the thing should have tipped me off, as well as the fact that it was on TikTok.  Kimmel is pure scum, an ethics corrupter, and anyone who would take a check from that creep is inherently suspect.
• Ethics Alarms has fallen for hoaxes before, not many, but a few. In each case, it has been the result of satire that did not sufficiently announce itself as satire. This is unethical. Fooling people is one thing; fooling them to the extent that they act on false information is something else, and indefensible. The claim by such sowers of chaos is always that those fooled were at fault, because it is “obvious” that the hoax was a joke. Wrong. It is the ethical obligation of anyone who plants a deliberate lie for a humorous purpose to state, clearly and unmistakably, that the satire is not fact.
• Releasing a video like that in a political campaign is particularly heinous, and is the kind of misconduct that creates support for censorship.

When Kamala Harris finally answered some specific questions about the gun she owned and would use to blow home invaders away, as she told Oprah, it marked another highlight in the most dishonest and insulting of all Presidential campaigns at least since 1840. I had already expressed dubiousness about Harris’s surprising transformation into Dirty Harry here, and this week, in segments of the “Sixty Minutes” interview to be aired on Sunday, Harris was seen telling one of CBS’s Democratic operatives that she has fired the gun at a firing range (This should be verified, like her alleged McDonald’s stint, which has not been) and that it is a Glock, a semi-automatic handgun, even as Harris’s gun-hating party and President keep calling semi-automatics “weapons of war.”

The dizzying and mock-worthy reversal mandates an Ethics Alarms post, but Jonathan Turley beat me to it, and did such a terrific job (he even quotes “True Grit,” one of my favorite novels and my most cherished John Wayne film) that I’m going to send you over to his blog.

Here are a few of my favorite quotes from the post. Turley appears to almost as disgusted with Harris as I am. The problem is that everyone isn’t.

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