I recently noticed that one of my Facebook friends of long-standing whom I respect greatly is now officially bonkers, thank to the Trump Derangement pandemic. I find this more than sad: it’s terrifying that a lifetime of critical thinking and rational, balanced analysis can be unmoored simply by having too many friends and associates who are ignorant hysterics and not realizing that the news media you frequent every day is mind poison.
Lawyers and ethicists are being hit especially hard; the fact that almost all of my theater associates are freaking out is less of a shock, for most of them have always been this way. My legal ethics specialist listserv is in the process of melting down over a few well-reasoned objections to the most of the opinions being offered residing more in the realm of progressive politics than legal ethics. But Trump is a threat to the rule of law! There wasn’t any concern whatsoever expressed on this same platform when Donald Trump was being targeted by Democratic prosecutors so that their party could continue to hold power. If Merrick Garland or Joe Biden were even mentioned there in four years, I must have missed it. I was amused to see one of the loyal “non-partisan,””objective” ethicists defend the group’s obsession with Trump by quoting the “Man for All Seasons” speech about giving the Devil the benefit of the law (Guess who the Devil is!) as another resorted to the hoary “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out..” quote from Martin Niemöller. Trump’s not the Devil, he’s Hitler! My friend, a retired partner in big D.C. law firm, is just about as impossible to argue with now as this idiot. Watching him devolve is like seeing a zombie movie…
Meanwhile,
1. On the topic of politicized, ethically rotting professions, take librarians…please! Last week the President issued an executive order seeking to end seven obscure federal agencies. One of them is the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, as much of a fan of socialist and Leftist indoctrination as you could find, declared that “Tyrants view educated citizens as their greatest enemy. Slaveholders stopped the enslaved from learning to read. Nazis burned books. Dictators censor media. That’s why Trump is attacking education, science, museums, and the arts. Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny.” I’ll leave the hypocrisy, pot-calling- the-snowman-black and gaslighting aspects of that absurd rant to others. But over at The Federalist, Mark Hemingway neatly vivisects the current librarian cabal, introducing his assault by writing, “[S]peaking as an ostensibly educated, literate, patriotic American, I am asking the Trump administration to follow through and please, please, please in italics, stick it to America’s librarians.”
I know, I know…“First they came for the librarians…”
2. Here’s something to trigger another indignant defense of the New York Times from its indefatigable Banned Defender on Ethics Alarms. The Times headline: “She Devoted Her Life to Serving the U.S. Then DOGE Targeted Her.” Oh NO! Why would it do that? In fact, DOGE didn’t target her at all: the woman in question was just one of many staffing cuts. The headline’s a lie. Then we get this kind of spin in the article: “She had watched on TV as Trump’s billionaire adviser Elon Musk took the stage at a political conference wielding a chain saw to the beat of rock music, slicing apart the air with what he called the “chain saw for bureaucracy.” What is the relevance of Musk’s wealth to the article? None…except that it signals Times support for the ad hominem attacks on Musk from the likes of Rep. AOC and Bernie Sanders. The reporter, Eli Saslow, writes, “I am a reporter for The New York Times. I travel the country to write in-depth stories about the impact of major national issues on people’s lives.” He does not include, “My objective (assignment?) is to demonize Republicans, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, while building support for the Democratic Party.” He should.
3. A woman on a long flight fell asleep and woke up with her hair braided. She didn’t realize this until she had disembarked the plane, and she is, shall we say, annoyed. In a video that has gone viral, she demands to have the Mad Braider identify himself or herself and explain “why you thought it was OK to braid a woman’s hair while she was asleep.” She adds, “Don’t touch people’s heads or people while they’re asleep. It’s weird and it’s creepy. Don’t touch people in general that you don’t know. ” Question: why didn’t the flight attendants stop this battery?
4. Stop making me defend Rachel Ziegler! Disney’s misbegotten “Snow White” is now an official mega-bomb, and it sure looks like Disney has made the despicable organizational decision to turn the young actress who plays the Snow White-of-color into its scapegoat for the fiasco. True, Ziegler, being in her 20’s and stupid, made many obnoxious public statements that put the production on the defensive early and often, but the fact remains that she is the best, indeed arguably the only good thing in the movie. The plot, effects, dialogue, music Evil Queen (ugh!) and CGI dwarfs (or whatever the hell those things are) are awful, and so are the movie’s moronic woke politics (like not being able to decide what “fair” means with an only whitish Snow White), half-hearted romance, and a climax that is so lame that I had trouble believing my eyes. The movie isn’t flopping because of Ziegler; it’s flopping because it stinks. If everyone else connected with the movie did their jobs as well as Ziegler did hers, nobody would care about her support for Hamas and hatred for President Trump. She does not deserve to have “Snow White” crater her career, but history tells us that this will be the likely result.
5. And now, the rest of the story...In January, EA discussed the students at Assumption University who just for giggles decided to imitate the awful old ABC series “To Catch a Predator.” Six 18 year-olds assumed a “creepy guy” was a sexual predator, got a female student to use the dating site Tinder to lure him to where he would think would be a hook-up with a 17-year old girl, and then had about 30 other students lying in wait for him. The mob chased and assaulted the guy as cell phone cameras caught it all. The ring-leaders were arrested and charged with felony conspiracy and kidnapping. Last week, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette reported that a lawyer for one of the students made a head-exploding argument to the judge for why the charges should be dropped. He described the incident as “a bunch of kids making bad decisions” and argued that this is just what students do. “They decided they wanted to confront a person they disagreed with,” he said. “Isn’t that what college is all about?”
Ethics Alarms 
On the subject of Spring Bouquets, here’s our first: Intoxicatingly fragrant Hyacinths and Daffodils.
PWS
Our daffys were done weeks ago, Paulie. Mrs. OB has four baby tomatoes on one of this year’s plants. Spring in the desert.
Starting ~67 Tomato plants (~47 varieties) on Wednesday!
PWS
Thus leaving Heinz 57 in the dust!
Prologue: My sister and I have gotten into it the last couple of times on our Zoom call, leaving my other sister in the middle of the whole thing. Trump-Deranged sister makes sure she talks about how the university for which she works is struggling under D.O.G.E. and the way the place is overcompensating for the D.E.I. issue by freaking out over the use of the word “biodiversity” (nothing to do with DEI) and other nonsense that can only come from spineless college administrators. She makes sure she mentions the protests she’s attended. She had little to no sympathy six months ago when the Biden administration messed with my industry, costing us millions by limiting what we could offer our clients.
At this point, I don’t know what else to do or how to handle it. I’m tired of the pontificating on what’s supposed to be a family chat.
To be fair to people that are suffering TDS, I think that some of it dovetails with what I wrote about before regarding mental health, where left leaning people tend to care about big issues that they can have between ‘absolutely no’ and ‘very little control’ over.
I find myself caught like this sometimes… There are things happening out there… Things that I have no idea that are happening. Atrocious, self-evidently bad thigs. And once I’m faced with them, I do a little cursory investigating, and then develop an opinion. That seems like normal human behavior. And I think that base behavior is being weaponized. Things that are well and truly part of the normal business of government are being put in front of lay people by people who either know better or ought to, spoken in grave tones and given the inference that not only are these things not normal, they are a threat to democracy.
I wonder if the problem isn’t a true derangement, or stunning hypocrisy, but a symptom of a relatively naïve population, a poor media diet and a hyper partisan media. If the media had reported the similar actions of Democrats in just as fraught terms as they do whenever a Republican sneezes, I think at least some portion of these reactionaries would have come out as anti-sneeze.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/ice-admits-administrative-error-after-maryland-man-el/story?id=120359991
I can’t say that I see the point of that link re HT’s comment. ?
See below.
I think your point was supposed to be that previous administrations hadn’t identified, detained or deported American citizens as illegals before now.
Except they have.
And I think that makes this exhibit A on my list.
“Since 2002, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has wrongly identified at least 2,840 United States citizens as possibly eligible for deportation, and at least 214 of them were taken into custody for some period of time, according to ICE records analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.”
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ice-citizen-arrest-20171129-story.html
But you know about this one, Zoey, you have an opinion about it. And I’m not saying that your opinion is wrong… I’m just wondering why you didn’t know about the other 3000 cases over the last 20 years. Why did you think this was special?
2. When will the papers start saying, oh, for example, “multi-millionaire Nancy Pelosi,” or “multi-millionaire Chuck Schumer,” or “multimillionaire Bernie Sanders.” When will they start complaining about all the thousands of “unelected” young “consultants” from Booze Allen and other firms who are running rampant throughout the federal bureaucracy, yielding millions for their multi-millionaire senior partners?
On #5, in the article you originally linked, it said the following: “he started messaging with Brainard on Tinder, who allegedly said she was 18.” They accused him of seeking sex with a 17 year old, but there’s no evidence provided that HE thought she was 17.
About #5: what is a criminal defense attorney supposed to do when there is no good defense possible for the conduct of his client? As per legal ethics code he still has the obligation to defend his client zealously. And if the best defense he can come up with is a head exploding one he still has the obligation to offer that defense.
That’s why Rule 3.1, regarding “meritless” actions, has an exception for criminal defense. There is no such things as frivolous criminal defense.
Not all librarians are wacko. Tke my wife she was a school libraain, the director of a llocal municiple libray, now a high levl department fothe army librarian. She is the past presidnt of the Alabama Library Assn. She was an active voice at both the state and nationall level that the professioal associatiosn’s goal is to protmote librarainship and not issue statemtns about any particalr ideology. She is a fervant defender of free speech, but also a proponent of chldren being parented by their parents. I add that most professioanl associaitons fall into the trap of someof its members wanting to ve virtue signalers. I was a nurse anethesitst in the military for decades and active in the nation Association of nurse anesthetists. but when they invited President Clinton to be a key note speaker i had to diavow my association withthem. All professioan associations need to remain in the lane of their scopeof practice.