My head just exploded. The New York Times. oh, about three years late, maybe more, does an exploration of the effort to hide Joe Biden’s increasing disability from the public. The key conspirators, the Times says, were “Jill Biden, the first lady, and Hunter Biden, his surviving son, fervently believed in his ability to win. Mr. Donilon and Steve Ricchetti, the counselor to Mr. Biden, knew when and how to deliver information, along with Annie Tomasini, the deputy chief of staff. She and Anthony Bernal, the first lady’s most senior aide, took tight control over the president’s public schedule.”
I wonder if any of them were as capable as Edith Wilson.
The Times does not enlighten us as to why its crack reporting team never did any reporting about this Constitutional debacle while it was going on, perhaps because the answer is too obvious: the Times, like the rest of the Axis media, was complicit and wanted the Democrats to get away with it. Then the Times readers, who the now-banned Ethics Alarms defender of the Times always cited as evidence that the paper wasn’t as biased and unethical as it obviously is, mostly disgraced themselves with one or more of these positions: 1) It was worth electing Biden because he beat Trump in 2020; 2) Trump will be worse; 3) It was all Biden’s aides’ fault. 4) He was a good President. 5) Biden still would have done better than Harris. None accused the Times of betraying its mission and and its readership. Occasionally a lone commenter made an observation like this:
“In any other situation Biden would have been considered a part time worker and wouldn’t even have qualified for health benefits. Yet he was allowed to continue as president while working less hours than a crossing guard. This was a covered up coup where someone or some persons were really making decisions.”
Here’s a gift link to the piece.
Meanwhile,
1. What an unethical—and stupid—hill to die on. The House of Representatives passed legislation banning trans women who are biological men from competing in women’s sports. The vote was 218-206, with all Republicans present supporting the bill and all but two Democrats opposing it. Apparently the Democratic Party is unwilling to abandon the absurd argument that preventing female athletes from losing games, matches, scholarships, championships, records and maybe an eye by having to compete with newly-minted women who are taller, heavier, stronger and better due to the advantage of going through puberty as a male is just plain old discrimination. “Republicans fearmonger about the trans community to divert attention from the fact they have no real solutions to help everyday Americans,” ranted Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.). “Transgender students, like all students, they deserve the same opportunity as their peers to learn teamwork, to find belonging, and to grow into well-rounded adults through sports.” The first part of that statement is deflection, and the second part is misdirection. Transgender individuals don’t deserve the opportunity to have an unfair advantage and to endanger the safety of women they compete against. Doing what she does, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) said, “Let me tell you something: Trans people ain’t going nowhere, just like when the racists wanted to make sure that black people somehow were going to be dismissed in this country, we ain’t left either.” Now there’s a brilliant analogy, but it appears to be all the Democrats can come up with. You know, ‘Racial discrimination is based on prejudice and nothing else.’ The effort to keep trans women out of women’s sports is not “invidious discrimination” but the acceptance of reality.
2. There is hope! Racist, Trump-Deranged, one-note, arrogant, New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow is finally out. A typical Blow exploit was in 2015, when he accused a police officer at Yale of racially profiling his son. That the officer was also black somehow wasn’t considered a detail worth relating. Here’s his Ethics Alarms dossier. Lord he was horrible. I wonder where he will turn up next…
3. Over at the PBS News Hour (If DOGE can’t kill public funds for NPR and PBS, then it can’t cat anything) the tag-team of David Brooks and Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart both carried on with the Big Lie that Donald Trump’s election signified a failure of democracy, never noting, of course, that it was his opponents who had created a figurehead Presidency run by un-elected ideologues, and had then offered an un-democratically selected DEI candidate when he wasn’t able to pull off the deception sufficiently.
Brooks: “His job was to end — to fight authoritarianism. The whole thing was to preserve democracy. And the election of Donald Trump suggested to some large degree he failed at that large mission.” Capehart: “I just wonder if, with these results, the American people just sort of gave up on democracy, or wanting to, hey, let’s try this authoritarianism, this guy who has told us what he wants to do.”
Right. I think the best rebuttal of that nonsense is the tweet Federalist editor Mollie Hemingway issued in response to Biden’s declaration that the ERA had been ratified:
Bingo!
4. Oh look, now that Trump has been elected, everyone’s upset about his conflicts of interest again. Clearly, it’s time to impeach him. Yesterday a Trump-owned business launched a cryptocurrency token, a so-called memecoin, which is a digital token with no intrinsic real-world value that is traded on a digital ledger technology called blockchain. Its market capitalization was above $5 billion as of 2:30 p.m. today, according to data from CoinGecko, and it has seen more than $11 billion in trading volume. Trump ‘s company CIC Digital LLC owns 80 percent of the coin’s supply, according to its website. Two hundred million of the tokens are currently available, with the circulation set to grow to 1 billion over the next three years, according to the site. I have no idea what any of this means, but obviously a President launching a new business enterprise is unusual, and any business owned by a President creates a potential conflict of interest. Trump is the only businessman to become President, although our early Presidents ran plantations and farms, and their decisions could easily affect their financial interests. This was a major controversy the last time Trump was elected, and instead of trying to lock him up over the last four years the Democrats could have passed much-needed legislation creating ethical guard-rails for Presidential business interests. Nah, they would rather complain about the obvious conflicts they knew would come after the fact.
Yes, Trump peddling cryptocurrency is a conflict of interest. Yes, it is an ethics problem. No, I have no sympathy for anyone raising this issue now.
Ethics Alarms 
The effort to keep trans women out of women’s sports is not “invidious discrimination” but the acceptance of reality.
Would they be allowed in men’s sports?
It depends!
Wasn’t Herbert Hoover a businessman? Or was there sufficient time between that and being President (when he was a government emissary overseas or Secretary of Commerce) to make his business profession no longer applicable?
No, Hoover wasn’t that kind of businessman. He was brilliant, a top geologist and a shrewd investor. He was considered the top mining engineer in the world and was paid a great deal in salaried jobs.He started a lucrative mining consulting business and bought silver mines in Burma that paid off. He also made a lot of money in royalties by writing the leading textbook on mining engineering. Hoover was one of those incredibly smart people who make money because everyone knows they are smart, and because everything he touched was a success. This was true his whole life, except for the four years he was President. He easily makes the top ten smartest Presidents list, with Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln, Garfield, TR, Taft, Wilson and Nixon. OK, 11, with J.Q. Adams
Harry Truman was also a businessman for some time when he came back from WW1, a partner in a haberdashery in downtown Kansas City, although it closed during the economic downturn in 1921.
I actually was looking up how many presidents have been exclusively politicians their entire professional lives, and the number is comparatively few. Most of them have had at least some other profession before entering the world of politics.
Most (31) have been in the military in some capacity at some point, and 12 (Washington, Jackson, Harrison, Taylor, Pierce, Johnson, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Benjamin Harrison, and of course Eisenhower) have been generals, albeit some “in name only.” Many were lawyers, judges, or bureaucrats, but there were also such diverse jobs as mining engineer, farmer, haberdasher, land surveyor, actor, teacher, executive, and publisher. Arguably Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt might qualify as polymaths, since both could do multiple things well.
Pure politicians, who spent their entire professional lives or close to it in elective office were relatively few. FDR almost was, but his political career was derailed for a time by the illness that left him wheelchair-bound. LBJ comes close, since he taught only briefly before getting into politics, and left only briefly to serve in the Navy in WW2. JFK definitely was, since he came out of the Navy, spent something like a year and a half as a “special correspondent” for Hearst Newspapers, then ran for the House and never looked back. Biden was also pretty much purely a politician. He came out of law school, spent about a year in private practice, then possibly less than a year as a public defender (the history is murky, and he only “rediscovered” it when he needed social justice creds in 2020) before he ran for his first office and never looked back until the four years between being Obama’s vice president and running himself, during which he “wrote” a memoir and was an “honorary professor” at the University of Pennsylvania.
Joe spent most of his life in the House and then the Senate, grinning, flustering people to the point where they gave up trying to convince him of anything and occasionally throwing his weight behind legislation. His first attempt to run for the presidency was derailed by a revelation of plagiarism, and that should have been it, but he just sank back into the Senate, where he was good and entrenched, until Obama tapped him to be VP. As VP he was anything but distinguished, actually telling Obama not to try to eliminate bin Laden because if Operation Neptune’s Spear failed, he would have no one to blame.
Biden was also a hypocrite at best, a moral slug at worst, willing to compromise his principles when he thought it would get him further. For years, even decades, he claimed to be pro-life and touted his Catholicism. He suddenly discovered otherwise when he was running for the big chair. He claimed to be all about law and order and threw his backing behind centrist Clinton’s “Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act,” then went woke and abolitionist when he was running for president and saved almost forty inmates from death who didn’t deserve it. He claimed to be all about advancement and protection of women – and at the same time couldn’t keep his hands or nose to himself. He also may have had some pedophilic urges, there’s plenty of evidence to support that, between photographs showing him acting creepy with young girls and his daughter’s revelation that he showered with her.
I’m also not at all impressed with his stories of personal tragedy or family. What happened to his first wife and toddler daughter was awful, but before too long he was pursuing then-model Jill, who divorced her husband to grab the coattails of a politician who could take her places. I wouldn’t wish what happened to Beau on anyone, but Joe didn’t have to inflate it with lies to try to turn him into a Kennedy-style pawn. Hunter’s history is well-documented, and I won’t go into it here except to say it’s as much a reflection on Joe and Jill’s parenting as on his nature. Then there’s the question of his granddaughter who he had to be essentially forced to recognize, and his late gaffe bringing up his great-grandchild in a press conference that was supposed to be about the disastrous fires in LA.
As for his actual performance as president, there really isn’t much to say that hasn’t already been said. You only need to look at the prices when you gas up or go grocery shopping to see what his economic policies did. You only need to read about the Ukraine and Israel to see what his feckless foreign policies did. Don’t kid yourself that he finally brokered a peace between Israel and Hamas. Hamas and Iran only decided they’d better get an agreement in place because Trump was getting closer and closer to returning to the White House and he said what was going to happen if they didn’t stop this, same as Iran decided in 1980 they’d better release the hostages because Reagan was about to take power. I think the fact that his ratings tanked after the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and have never recovered also tells you all you need to know.
The fact is that Joe Biden’s career was built on two things: luck and the ability to paper over failures. It was luck that made him the last candidate except for Bernie Sanders and luck that made Trump a president battling a deadly virus, race riots, the media, and hostile governors all at once. It was the ability to paper over failures that got him in position to run at all. It was papering over failures that enabled him to look semi-competent during a campaign season where he could hide in his basement and during a term that started to unravel really fast after the first year. Then finally, on that stage this past July, his luck ran out and he turned in a performance that couldn’t be papered over. The rest is history. Like Castillon was Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt in reverse, this election season was COVID, George Floyd, and lawfare in reverse, and in not much more than 24 hours Donald Trump will retake power to hopefully finish what he started in 2017.
It didn’t have to be this way. Joe Biden could have kept his promise to be a transitional president and make way for new leadership. He could have kept some other promises, like not to pardon his son. He could have picked a vice-president for competence and not gender and color. He could not have waged lawfare trying to lock his main political adversary up. He could have not called half the country garbage and enemies. Or, better yet, he could have faced up to the fact that his mind was going and not run in 2020, putting his entire party and the entire media in a position where it had to lie for him and cover for him.
Whose fault was all this? An overly proud second wife who was determined to stay the power behind the throne as long as the Constitution allowed? A ne’er-do-well son who knew that without dad protecting him he was just another junkie making excuses for his wasted life? A shadowy group of Deep State apparatchiks determined to hold onto power they were never elected to? A legacy media who long ago stopped being reporters of fact and became advocates for one side? A ruthless political party interested in getting power and keeping it no matter who or what it destroyed to do it?
It may have been all, some, or none of the above. In the end it really is irrelevant, because one man could have stopped all of this by saying no. No, I won’t indulge this. No, I won’t protect someone who doesn’t deserve to be protected. No, I won’t cede power to the unelected. No, I won’t be a party’s conduit to power and pawn in keeping it. More importantly, no, I’m not up to this job now if I ever was, and I know I’ll do more harm than good if I take it. He didn’t say no, though, and we all paid the price.
Excellent pre-inauguration post, Steve, thank-you. Teddy and Tom were definitely polymaths—I’d say TR’s photo belongs under the word in the dictionary. Comment of the Day. Thanks.
YW, and maybe so, although master of the arts Leonardo da Vinci, jack of all trades and master of many Benjamin Franklin, and humanitarian Albert Schweitzer also pretty much define the word.
Ben is probably a better poster-boy than Teddy: why I forgot about him I do not know. Aristotle would probably be the first entry. Danny Kaye qualifies, I think. Airplane pilot, Master Chinese chef, conductor, UNICEF ambassador and the entertainer stuff.
Serious question: Do you categorize the two-field geniuses as polymaths? I don’t: I put them in a separate category: Paul Winchell, the ventriloquist/medical equipment inventor, Hedy Lamar, actress/inventor; Richard Gil: Met opera bass and Harvard Economics prof; Ted Williams: baseball hitting expert, fly-fishing expert, fighter pilot; Orin Hatch, politician/pop music composer; Omar Shariff: bridge grandmaster, actor. For polymath, I want to see at least three. No?
Given that if you speak three languages you are called a polyglot, but you are called bilingual if you speak two, I guess the same logic applies here.
Bimath?
Apparently the Democratic Party is unwilling to abandon the absurd argument that preventing female athletes from losing games, matches, scholarships, championships, records and maybe an eye by having to compete with newly-minted women who are taller, heavier, stronger and better due to the advantage of going through puberty as a male is just plain old discrimination.
To be fair to the Democraticals, that isn’t their argument. Rather, it is that all disparate outcomes are the consequence of structural oppression. Since there are disparate outcomes between males and females, they must be due to patriarchal oppression, because gender is a social construct.
Okay, this is bollocks on stilts. But because progressive reasoning has no limiting principles, this is how they end up dying on this hill. Should they concede that in athletics oppression explains nothing, then that will lift the veil on all the other things for which oppression is the fits-all explanation that explains nothing.
The real trick is that they’ve redefined terms. Male, female, man, woman, boy, and girl all indicate sex, not gender. Masculine and feminine indicate gender.
The trans movement both requires gender and sex to be distinct and to be the same thing, depending on what they are arguing for.
Isn’t the whole point of crypto currency to provide a medium of exchange and store of value that the government cannot manipulate its value through the monetization of debt? If so, I have a hard time believing that this creates a conflict of interest.
Of all the possible business opportunities that exist this one seems to me to be the most benign. Of course, I have only a rudimentary understanding of cryptocurrency and welcome an alternative point of view for my edification.
It creates the kind of conflict of interest the Founders realized and President with significant business interests would have, like George Washington. They inevitably will have control over events that will financially benefit them and/or their friends and families down the line. Eventually the government is going to have to get serious about regulating crypto. A President active engaging in entrepreneurial activities while in office is extremely unusual, and could be regarded as an abuse of position and influence on its face.
I can understand the potential conflicts of interest while operating in a market system that trades in goods and services. Politicians, especially those whose governments spend trillions of dollars annually, could make decisions that benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else who are not privy to advance knowledge of the policy impacts or procurement plans.
It seems that the only reason that the government would want to regulate crypto currencies is that they are unable to manipulate the money supply, crypto would be harder to seize using civil forfeiture laws and it would be a disruptive element in the industries of finance and law. In short, the government would try to regulate it to reduce the democratization of wealth accumulation.
From Investopedia
Cryptocurrency Explained With Pros and Cons for Investment
What Is Cryptocurrency?
“A cryptocurrency is a digital or virtual currency secured by cryptography, which makes it nearly impossible to counterfeit or double-spend. Most cryptocurrencies exist on decentralized networks using blockchain technology—a distributed ledger enforced by a disparate network of computers.“
“A defining feature of cryptocurrencies is that they are generally not issued by any central authority, rendering them theoretically immune to government interference or manipulation.“
Conversely,
“Market Manipulation: Market manipulation remains a substantial problem in cryptocurrency, with influential people, organizations, and exchanges acting unethically.“
This however, exists with private decision making and not government policy choices. The only way that manipulation can take place is by bidding up the price creating volatility.
There is a web service that tracks Paul Pelosi’s stock trades that investors use to make their own investment decisions. It is laughable that even Open Secrets tells us that Nancy’s wealth is derived from Paul’s affluence.
Trump may hold considerable business assets as a business person but so too do most every other politician. Majority of lawmakers in 116th Congress are millionaires • OpenSecrets .
Buying or making and selling something to earn income is the definition of a business. We tend to differentiate “investors” as just people who put their own money up and let others manage it from those we call “business” people who take an active management role in the actual business. To suggest that Trump is different than most of Congress because he is a business person fails to accept the fact that most of the earnings made by a majority of those in Congress is business income. They buy and sell assets for profit. Some may use professional managers as does Trump.
My personal opinion is that if you derive the majority of your income from active personal management of the trading of trading securities the profit derived from those activities should be treated as ordinary income and not capital gains just as if you were buying and selling widgets.
In order to eliminate financial conflicts of interest is to have every politician and family members liquidate their investment portfolios and convert it to Treasuries during their time in office.
Personally, I have no interest nor would advise anyone else to invest in crypto-tulips.
–Dwayne