Here is another important news story that the mainstream media (or Democratic operatives, per Instapundit) is ducking, spinning and warping like mad in order to protect its totalitarian allies in the Axis of Unethical Conduct (“The resistance”and the Democratic Party): the emails and other material recently declassified and released by Tulsi Gabbard backs up the contention Ethics Alarms began putting forward in the first Trump administration when it christened the 2016 Post-Election Ethics Train Wreck.
This morning I stumbled on Fox News contributor and former GOP House member Trey Gowdy flipping out in frustration over the revelations and pretty much quoting Ethics Alarms from years ago. I can’t find a video of his explosion that will embed, and I can’t type well enough to make a transcript, but here’s the link, and here is a close approximation of the key quote:
“They did it [the Obama intelligence community relied on Clinton opposition research that they knew was false] to place a cloud over the Trump Presidency, and the Democrats and the media, took it hook, line and sinker! And they put a cloud over his first term! Less than 50 people have been elected President…imagine the frustration of having to fend off [accusations of treason]”
What I began writing regularly all those years ago was that whatever one thought of Donald Trump, and I was on record (massively and unequivocally) as not thinking he was a responsible choice to be President, he nonetheless had an absolute right to have the unfettered opportunity to fulfill the role voters had duly elected him to fulfill. This he was not allowed to do, as obstacles were thrown in his path, ranging from contrived impeachment theories to the Russian Collusion hoax along with the Mueller investigation, all while the news media commenced on a still-proceeding effort to make as much of the American public as possible fear and distrust him. I deeply resented…I resent to this day…what was done to Trump following his stunning upset of Hillary Clinton. I resent it as an ethicist, I resent it as a lifetime student of the American Presidency and Presidential leadership, and I resent it as an American citizen—and so should every American of either party who believes in democracy.
If what Gabbard says can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, those responsible, including Hillary Clinton, Clapper, Comey and Brennan, Obama’s complicit aides and Obama himself must be held to account. I say “must” knowing full well that they won’t be (The King’s Pass takes over in such situations) but at very least their reputations should be blotted for all time. They are ethics villains and traitors to their nation. So too are the reporters and journalists who have enabled their treachery. Now the Axis media’s spin is that this is just a Trump revenge operation. Deceit! I’m certain President Trump relishes having these bad Americans exposed and, if possible, punished, but the revenge is incidental to the justice this exposure will represent. The orchestrated conspiracy to prevent an elected President from being President was indeed, as the conservative media keeps saying, worse than Watergate.
After all, it cost my ethics blog about 40% of its traffic. I wouldn’t mind a little revenge myself…
Ethics Alarms 
This also turned public opinion against Russia.
Who told us that the 1980’s called and they want their foreign policy back; the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.
And then there’s Hillary with her moronic “reset button,” Bill’s honorarium, and the Uranium One give away. Assholes.
Oh. And let’s not forget Saint Barak asking Putin to back off and let him get re-elected so he, Obama, could give Putin more what he wanted on the missile deployment front.
Romney was a turd sandwich but was right on Russia (or was he the douchbag?)
Trump is finally figuring out he’s not dealing with a rational Putin, but a sociopath bent on rebuilding the Soviet union. The right was effectively swayed by a very effective propaganda operation. Russia used their media outlets to tell the truth about all things not Russia, while simultaneously telling Russian propaganda. The whole 2016 collusion narrative played in to this on a way that worked beyond the Russian’s wildest dreams. The right was bought the Russian war narrative hook, line and sinker.
Trump is figuring this out. The US is now sending even more arms than ever before, and talk of the cost is gone as a talking point.
P.T. Barnum is right. It is easier to fool someone than it is to convince someone that they’ve been fooled. But if you believe Russian is anything other than an evil actor, you’re the fool.
Obama also had the original Russia incursion with Hillary, Syria. Many things could’ve probably happened differently. I’m no foreign policy expert but Benghazi and Syria combined lost her my vote.
The most egregious dirty trick in the history of the country.
So ironic that the Dems in Hollywood are so fond of making movies where a bunch of out-of-control government employees are running amok and doing all sorts of seemingly implausibly nasty things to the elected office holders. And yet, when one of their movie plots plays out in real life, they say it’s nothing but a GOP conspiracy theory and a nothing burger.
I am old enough to remember when people generally felt that it was important to respect the office of the presidency, even if the person currently holding it was not their first choice (this is often the majority feeling right? even if this person belongs to a party of which one is a member, one might have preferred a different person in the primary…). Seems to me that was mostly true when Reagan and the elder Bush were president. I currently have no useful thoughts of how we might find our way back to that situation. It seems to get worse and worse with each presidential election.
Ditto.
In 2008, I was a graduate student at the University of Wyoming, studying theoretical computer science. Our department’s system administrator knew my conservative leanings, and after Obama was elected, he asked me if I was in the doldrums of despair like so many other conservatives he knew. I replied something to the effect of, “Obama was duly elected president, so he’s my president. I’ll oppose him on any policies I disagree with, but I’ll support him where I do agree.” I’ve tried very hard to hold that, despite the, shall we say, irregularities of the 2020 election. And I may be sorely tested in the future. Could I say that Gavin Newsom is my president? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Pete Buttigieg? I hope I can, but we’ll have to see.
I would have no trouble extending this respect to a Presidency held by Pete Buttigieg. To me he stands out from the current horde of prominent Democrats by actually showing respect to people who have different perspectives, rather than insulting and demonizing them as fascists etc. I also doubt that he could garner majority support from primary voters in a party in which so many seem to hunger for a campaign of retribution (while, of course, denouncing the current administration for what they view as ITS campaign of retribution). And round and round we go…. viewing actions as terrible/inexcusable/unforgiveable/evidence of unspeakable evil/apocalyptically bad when those “others” do it, divinely mandated when WE do it…
Except that he’s demonstrably incompetent! He was arguably the worst Secretary of Transportation in history: a real President would have fired him. And based on some of his statements when he was running for President, hopeless. Still, I would extend the office respect if her were in it.
I think the problem dates to the Clinton administration and the emergence and dominance of political consultants and their insistence that their clients always “play to their base.” Current politicians never have or utter an original thought. Everything is tested and run past focus groups. There’s no point in compromising if you’re always focused on “playing to your base.” Professional consultants have turned politics into a zero-sum game. If you lose, I win. If I lose, you win.
You are right: Clinton was Ground Zero for this problem, when the GOP decided that he was a scumbag who should be foiled before he had a chance to succeed. What’s ironic is that Bill was conservative at heart, just as Nixon was basically a liberal whom the Democrats should have embraced.
So many ironies here!
So I am curious, not as a whataboutism, but as a priority setting measure, which is the worse problem?
First we have the Russian collusion issue mentioned in this article with Hilary Clinton, Barak Obama, et al who tried to stop a duly elected president from being elected through shady dealings and then from governing.
Second we have Slo-Jo the puppet president who had the country under the control of shady backroom dealings of unelected bureaucrats.
There is a proverb of chasing two prey and getting neither. Congress should focus on one of these at least for the moment, and figure out what happened, who to hold accountable, and how to avoid this in the future. Which is the problem that is of higher priority?
I personally haven’t the wisdom to determine which issue is worse. They both seem reasonably Republic-shattering.
Reminds me of the late post columnist Michael Kelly’s observation that the Clinton administration used its own scandals to distract the media from other scandals. Yes, they are both worse than Watergate, and yes, having two looming helps the bad guys..regarding whom I note that the same party was behind both attacks on the Constitution and democracy, and it’s not a coincidence.
I would say Biden.
Not that it’s necessarily any worse, but I think you have a better chance of actually catching the scoundrels.
And there’s already an investigation ongoing.
I would also choose Biden, but for a different reason — I personally would REALLY like to see the addition of age limits at the upper end (we have them at the lower end, so why not?) for President, Senate, and House.
The “covering for senility/dementia/incapacity” scandal highlights the consequences of this predictable situation in a gerontocracy–unelected people around the incapacitated person make decisions/manipulate the situation for their own ends. Dianne Feinstein another poster elder for this.
I believe there was also a case recently in which a house member was actually in a memory care facility and her staff were covering for her. Same kind of problem, but with much less impactful consequences for actually running the country.
Yes, some people are mentally sharp and capable into their 80s (my mother was one!) but at some point (often in their 80s, even more likely if they reach their 90s) decline set in, and it can be precipitous (my mother between ages 88 and 90).
By the same token some people may well have the maturity and skills to be up for the demands of the job BEFORE reaching the minimum age (35 for president, 30 for senate, 25 for house) but that doesn’t mean the minimum age rules are problematic.
I’d rather see term limits that would kick out most of the geriatric elected leaders. Something like 20 years total in the House, Senate, VP and President. Biden would have been three decades into retirement when he ran and would not have been eligible.
Congress would never go for it without a strong push. There is the convention of states threat that has worked. The 17th, 19th and 26th amendments passed that way. In all three, a convention of states was less than 3 states away when Congress relented and passed them.
How do I see this working? Point out to legislators of the respective states that they have a near zero shot because their state’s representatives and senators stay for many decades. Force some turnover and many more get the chance.
I don’t disagree about some sort of age limits. But like term limits it would take an amendment to the Constitution and I cannot see that happening. The Republican might be somewhat amenable to it, but the Democrats are all into seniority, at least at the federal level. If seniority is your holy grail, term limits and age limits are not going to fly.
One might thing that the voters, having experienced Biden, would remember that when asked to vote for a 75 year old prospective president. Except — what his spokesmen said about Biden being energetic, alert, challenging them etc? That actually does seem to be true about Trump, he’s like the Energizer bunny. And he’s darned near as old as Biden.
When we say, well, people tend to decline in their 80s, but this relative of mine was still sharp at 85. Well, Trump is that relative.
As I said, my mother was that relative at 88. Trump may be that relative at 79. And perhaps Biden was that relative at age 78 when HE took office. All of those relatives are subject to age-related decline over the course of a few years — it was true for my mother and for Biden, clearly. Will Trump be as sharp mentally in 3 and a half years as he is now? Maybe yes, maybe no. Would those around him let us know that he is slipping if he goes the way of Biden, rather than covering for him/manipulating him to pursue their own agendas? Possible…. but I doubt it.
This is like the King Lear dilemma. The part is a killer, but if an actor has the stamina to perform the role, he is too young to understand it. If the actor gets the essence of the part, he’s too old to endure the ordeal of playing Lear on stage. Leadership is like that too. We’ve had a few Presidents who were just natural leaders, who knows why: Washington, Lincoln, Truman. Most of the rest of the good ones had to learn through long experience and many mistakes, like Trump. The rest, like Obama, JFK and Clinton, didn’t know what the hell they were doing.
I’m going to remember this King Lear analogy, thank you!
With people generally living longer now, there SHOULD logically be more people in that sweet spot of stamina + wisdom gained through experience.
Unfortunately our political system doesn’t seem at all good at elevating leaders who ARE in that sweet spot… perhaps because of the “play to the base” + focus group problem Old Bill mentioned in his comment.
Of course real leaders should have the fortitude to resist the nattering advisers and continue to articulate and run on / govern by their vision, which is what I so admired in McCain’s first run. It was SO disappointing to see him pivot to focus groups / pandering to base (Sarah Palin!) etc. in his disastrous second run against Obama…
When I directed “King Lear,” I found an 80 year old retired professional actor to cast in the part, and he had played the role in his 40s. He was wonderful, except he couldn’t remember his lines…
I believe from a biblical perspective they are a symptom of the same problem. Too many active in politics treat their preferred party similar to a religion. The words dogma and false idols come to mind.
Let me be cynical here; the chance that any of the Obama administration (Brennan, Clapper, Comey) or the Biden administration will be convicted is null, as all of these will take the fifth and stonewall, and you will not find a jury to convict. Some of them have committed perjury during congressional hearings in the past (Clapper) without any legal and professional consequences. The best you can do is have hearings in congress to get to the truth, J6 committee style, which will then ignored by most of the mainstream press except Fox News and papers like the New York Post.
In the mean time real harm has been done to the fabric of the nation, and the standing of the USA.
This is a 60-plus year process in the making. Barry Goldwater ran a fairly incompetent campaign but he absolutely had the news media biting at his heels the entire time. They gushed about Bobby Kennedy in ’68, they took potshots at Nixon. By the time Reagan came along, he faced hostility from a large segment of the press and Hollywood. In the meantime, Brain Trusters infiltrated the universities and encouraging the student protest movements instead of explaining how our Constitution was designed to work, culminating in a culture 50 years later that understands its country so poorly that it gets its news from Jon Stewart who is able to ignorantly proclaim that the Constitution doesn’t say that protests have to be peaceful.
In the election of 1992, Arsenio Hall ranted in his monologue when President George H.W. Bush said he probably wouldn’t appear on Hall’s show after Gov. Bill Clinton did, yelling about what made Bush think Hall wanted him on his show. Open hostility over who may or may not be a guest on his show paved the way for the venom spewed on every Late Night show today.
Believe all women? Not if they accuse the first “black” President, Bill Clinton, of sexual harassment and even rape. Anyone can drag $100 through a trailer park, right? He was caught with his pants down and allowed us to be caught with ours down on 9/11/2001 when he blew off an offer to hand over Osama bin Laden. Meanwhile, the culture wars were heating up and Americans were becoming concerned about the country’s direction.
George W. Bush – faced with a supremely hostile news media and entertainment industry – endured screeds about stolen elections, fake Presidencies and two mocking cable television shows (“That’s My Bush!” and “Lil Bush”) before he gained some momentum after 9/11, but never really got the credibility he deserved. In pop culture, far too many Bush-deranged Harry Potter fans believed they saw the myopic Ministry of Magic’s denial that the evil Voldemort had returned in the efforts by the Bush administration to urge vigilance in watching out for terrorists. Ah, remember when J.K. Rowling was the voice of truth? Damage to the population’s understanding of the Constitution, particularly the Judicial branch, continued.
Bob Dole and John McCain were treated as racist, sexist old men who would put this country into a Nazi theocracy; Mitt Romney was treated as a racist, sexist young man who would send this country into a weird Mormon Nazi theocracy. They were all virtually Hitler.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama was the be all and end all of existence. He who could do no wrong and could not be touched because he had black skin and anyone who criticized him was a racist took full advantage by damaging America on the world stage and inciting racial divisiveness that hadn’t been seen in 50 years.
When Donald Trump was campaigning in 2016, the news media covered him incessantly. It now appears that they wanted him to be the nominee because, in the words of Stephen Colbert on the day my family and I sat in his audience in NYC on a hot July day as he did a riff on how corrupt Hillary Clinton was, “Hillary so corrupt the only candidate she can beat is Donald Trump!”
It turned out she couldn’t even do that.
So the forces that had been coming together for 60 years: the news media, the entertainment industry, academia and other elite professions coalesced into a single so-called Resistance Movement. Trump says people coming through our border with Mexico aren’t all angels, they accuse him of saying all immigrants are criminals. Trump says not everyone protesting in Charlottesville was a racist Nazi, he’s accused of “bothsidism” and pestered endlessly about condemning white supremacy even though he did condemn it. He is falsely accused of colluding with a foreign power, leading a big chunk of the population to believe his Presidency is the result of another stolen election. These narratives are repeated ad nauseum long after they are proven false and still persist to this day. There are efforts to bribe and threaten electors to change their votes, celebrities are threatened with cancelation if they appear at his inauguration, competent politicians are threatened if they join his administration. Members of Congress treat him with open derision, argue for impeachment because they have the number of votes to do it and arrange two contrived impeachments just because they could. The news media treats gossip as fact, reports rumors based on anonymous sources and makes sure to flood the internet with articles criticizing the way the President walks, talks, dresses, looks, eats, drinks from a bottle of water and, yes, compares his wife’s choice of Christmas decorations to Nazi Germany. They call him antisemitic even though his son-in-law is Jewish, his daughter converted to Judaism and they’re raising his grandchildren as Jewish. Even though he declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel.
In the meantime, Late Night TV and, well, let’s face it, all of mass media go on the warpath. Conservative celebrities are fired for comparing abortion to the Holocaust while liberal celebrities get away with comparing the detention of illegal immigrants to the Holocaust. Fictional antagonists and villains are made into Trump avatars so the audiences can nod knowingly (Pedro Pascal’s character in “Wonder Woman ’84” was so obviously based on Trump, it was a huge distraction).
Every Trump victory in the SCOTUS is treated as a sign of the apocalypse. The decades-long attempt to make Americans ignorant of their form of government and their founding document is nearly complete.
I still cannot pick up a book written after 2016 without getting anti-Trump propaganda. Case in point: I started reading “True Believer: Hubert Humphrey’s Quest for a More Just America” by James Traub today (published 2/2024). I got three page in before running into this: “In 2016, the United States elected its first avowedly illiberal president; Donald Trump treated tolerance, compassion for our fellow citizens, and faith in an active government and the liberal world order as laughable. Despite his loss in 2020, Trump left behind a poisonous contempt for all those who do not share his view.”
And…AND…the next paragraph goes on to read, “Yet liberalism is not dead. President Joe Biden, who overlapped for a term in the Senate with Humphrey, shares the liberal temperament as well as much of the liberal agenda both at home and abroad.”
Fantastic.
And now we have citizens who are boycotting CBS, not because it tried to help its favored candidate, but because they think Trump sued it for interviewing his opponent and CBS caved by settling and and because a show bleeding money is being cancelled with a year to go.
Remember when Roseanne, hopped up on pills, called Valerie Jarrett a monkey and got her show cancelled within hours?
We have citizens who watched the Democratic party use every trick in the book and then some to keep Trump from running for office, much less winning re-election, and yet somehow believe he’s on a client list of a sexual predator – a client list that somehow never managed to get leaked, to say nothing of being gleefully revealed with glee at any point during the Biden administration.
Remember all the leaks during the first Trump administration? They didn’t have enough Dutch boys to plug them.
No Trump on a client list when Joe Biden crashed during the debate? After Trump survived an assassination attempt? When Kamala Harris got put in the magic slot without a single vote? The best they could do was beg Hollywood celebrities to endorse her and let CBS chop up her word salad into a side dish?
We have unreconstructed Hippies in academia encouraging students to riot, vandalize, and attack anyone who disagrees with them and, like their predecessors 50 years ago, don’t understand or appreciate their system of government. They’ve been indoctrinated to hate America, its history, its culture, its achievements and its traditions. They are clueless about how our system of government is supposed to work and, even when they’re told, they don’t care.
That’s why nothing will happen to Obama. The King’s Pass rules, he’s black, Clinton is a woman, Trump is petty and vindictive, the news media and the other Democratic party allies are in their pocket so the Democrats will just try it again with the next Republican. After all, isn’t the narrative that Republicans are Nazis? When all of them are Nazis, the identity of Hitler is fluid and applicable to the party’s leader, whoever that may be at any given time, which means any means necessary can be employed to stop them.
Epic historical ethics post, AM. Terrific, and Comment of the day. The only thing you omitted was the news media scorching Sarah Palin as being unqualified for the Vice Presidency (she was a mother of a special needs kid: no time! She had only been a mayor and short-time sate governor!) while their favored candidate for President had even less executive experience, and his running mate was widely known a s a dolt—and the allege feminists in Obama’s party stood by and let Palin be smeared.
Thank you. I left out so much more, though. I was too busy seething after Traub called Trump a proto-George Wallace on page 8.
I think from here on out, comments of the day should be called “Golden Comments.”
Yeah, that sort of thing is just maddening. It is perhaps just as well that the last couple military history books I’ve read were pre-Trump.
I’m going to say that I see a somewhat similar phenomenon on the Quora forums when there is a Lost Cause supporter talking about the Civil War. Grant is a drunken butcher, Lincoln is an evil tyrant — and they’ll drop a 4 screen screed at the drop of a hat. On the other hand, when you’re in the right frame of mind it can be fun to needle them with some facts…..
Tour de Force!
One more thing:
PWS