I’m going to send you over to Harry Litman’s substack to read his whole rant against Donald Trump and the LA Times: who knows, some of you may want to subscribe. As for me, “Why I Just Resigned From The Los Angeles Times” just fills me with sympathy for the poor guy, and hope he finds some help. He’s not an idiot, or wasn’t: he’s a lawyer with an impressive CV, and has all the markers of a normal, functioning citizen like you and me. This is what living in California, allowing yourself to be lobotomized by the Axis of Unethical Conduct’s Big Lies, and and being blind to the misconduct and flaws of your own party will do to you. Litman just metaphorically set himself on fire to protest Trump’s election and signs that his trade, which has completely disgraced itself over the past decade, might be slowly reforming.

The thing is more than 2000 words, almost all of them you have read or heard before from Rachel Maddow, Joy Reid, The View, Charles M. Blow, Jonathan Capeheart, Van Jones, the Lincoln Group, among others, including…

…you know. Here are some choice excerpts:

• “I don’t want to continue to work for a paper that is appeasing Trump and facilitating his assault on democratic rule for craven reasons.”

“Appeasing”…nice. A Nazi reference not because his paper decided to endorse Trump, but because it wouldn’t embarrass itself by endorsing his Democrat opposition, who never made any coherent case to support her desire to be President other than “Trump is Hitler” and “I like abortions.”

• “Given the existential stakes for our democracy that I believe Trump’s second term poses, and the evidence that Soon-Shiong is currying favor with the President-elect, they are repugnant and dangerous.”

Try to keep up, Harry. Your party wasn’t serious about Trump being an existential threat to democracy, as Biden’s conduct after the election demonstrated, not to mention “Morning Joe’s.”  It was always a cheap shot, dirty tactics move to use irrational fear without substance to stampede voters of dubious competence. In the essay, we learn that “currying favor” means diversifying the editorial board with someone who isn’t a blood foe of Trump’s and the papaer’s owner signaling that a new President should start his administration with a clean slate and the benefit of the doubt. The Horror.

• “Trump has made it clear that he will make trouble for media outlets that cross him. Rather than reacting with indignation at this challenge to his paper’s critical function in a democracy, Soon-Shiong threw the paper to the wolves. That was cowardly.”

Trump has made it clear that media outlets that abuse their special privileges the First Amendment gives them to the detriment of the nation should face consequences, as they should, as all professionals who breach their ethical duties should. I already mentioned both examples once today, but CBS stealth editing Harris’s “60 Minutes” interview to clean up her trademark word salad-making and NBC violating FCC regulations by giving Harris a late boost on Saturday Night Live demonstrated just how corrupt the mainstream media has become. Trump was right about “fake news,” right about the media being “the enemy of the people,” and right to say he’ll push for some accountability.

• “Before he has even taken office, Trump has faced down two of the country’s most prominent newspapers, inducing them to back off longstanding, well-reasoned editorial opposition. That is terrifying.”

Trump hasn’t faced down anybody. Some media outlets are realizing—late— that being non-stop propaganda merchants for a single party and ideological position isn’t smart business, never mind ethical journalism, when that party has behaved like the Politburo and that position has embraced open boarders, exploding the debt, men in women’s sports, “good” racial discrimination  and censorship.

• “As a commentator, especially one dedicated to constitutional norms and the rule of law, I have spent much of the last couple of years arguing that Trump is a genuine menace to our constitutional system.”

Oh look, the “norms” again!  This alone would make me stop reading Harry’s Lament were it not for having to write Ethics Alarm, because it is such a flashing neon sign reading “HYPOCRISY!” This character is resigning because the LA Times wouldn’t endorse a candidate who never won a single vote in a Presidential primary, after the President, whom she had covered for by lying while he was slipping into senility, was forced out by a party coup and whose campaign avoided normal media interviews and direct questions about her real policy positions, trying to run out the clock until election day while counting on fear and anger by aspiring abortion patients to carry the day. You know: “norms.”

• “Look closely at this already deeply eroded landscape: all the electoral branches are not only Republican but firmly within Trump’s fist and dedicated to loyalty to him over any principle of governance. The Supreme Court has assisted his authoritarian initiatives in ways that the legal profession and society as a whole have condemned.”

Really, does Harry know how silly he sounds? The Democrats dominated Congress for nearly four decades after World War II, and the Supreme Court was decisively liberal well into the 1970s. Republicans weren’t happy, but nobody suggested that the sky was falling. The House majority is narrow; the GOP majority in the Senate is hardly overwhelming. Evidence please: what makes Litman think that Congress has “loyalty to [Trump] over any principle of governance”? It just told Trump that Matt Gaetz’s nomination was DOA, and Hegseth’s nomination may be as well. And what “authoritarian initiatives”? Thanks to Democrats, the last time around, exploding the D.C. norm that government professional and workers will automatically try to support an elected President, Trump, quite reasonably, isn’t taking any chances this time after leaving office with his back looking like a pin-cushion from all the daggers sticking out. When Trump seeks to do what he was elected to do without being sabotaged, it’s called “authoritarianism” by progressive pundits like Litman. It is, in truth, simply an elected leader seeking to lead and govern despite unprecedented resistance. And the “legal profession” doesn’t speak with one voice or anything near it. True, most of the legal profession are knee-jerk progressives, and as a result their opposition to the current Supreme Court is far from objective, reasoned analysis. Litman is a member of that wing, so he refuses to acknowledge the existence of those whom bias has not made stupid.

Yikes! I’m not even half through this screed. Well, read on at Harry’s substack; you can spot the mouth-foaming as well as I can.

This is Trump Derangement, my friends. I can’t wait to see how Litman and his pack rationalize these outbursts when the United States comes through the next four years without pogroms, executions in town squares, and a nation that still pretty much looks and feels like America, maybe even a little bit more than now.