Rob Reiner has puzzled me for a long, long time. He can’t be stupid; his father Carl  was a brilliant writer and comic, quick on his feet, witty, and able to hold his own with Mel Brooks, Woody Allen and Neil Simon. Rob was once an excellent film director: “This Is Spinal Tap (1984), “The Sure Thing” (1985), “Stand by Me” (1986), “The Princess Bride” (1987), “When Harry Met Sally,” (1989), “Misery (1990), and “A Few Good Men” (1992). I’m also an excellent director, so maybe I’m inclined to assume that talent is linked to intelligence. But Reiner’s success in Hollywood has crashed as his partisan progressive fervor has slipped into fanaticism.

His Ethics Alarms dossier is frightening. In 2022, he actually tweeted this,

and didn’t expect to be laughed at. His Trump Derangement worsened, resulting in this tweet

and later, when he denied on Bill Maher’s HBO show that the press buried the Hunter Biden laptop story and then deflected to, “You know it’s not justified? Using armed violence to try to kill people in the Capital. That’s not justified!” I wrote at the time,” So many once intelligent people are like Reiner now. Isn’t that frightening? Don’t some Americans, the ones who aren’t too far gone, hear a celebrity talk like that and think, “Wait…I’m on the same side as that guy? Do I sound like that? What’s happened to me?”

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Is the New York Times really so desperate for anti-Trump, “let’s kill all the unborn babies” screeds that they have to dip into the high school newspaper pool? I saw this op-ed by a 16-year-old girl in The Salt Lake Tribune, which picked it up from the New York Times. There is no excuse for it. Titled, “I’m 16. On Nov. 6 the Girls Cried, and the Boys Played Minecraft,” the piece is irresponsible to publish for many reasons:

• I don’t believe that it is likely to have been the 16-year-old’s work alone. I believe it was influenced by adults, and that they used her to promote their views, on the theory that “out of the mouths of babes” would have more persuasive power than “out of the mouths of pro-abortion extremists who believe nothing is more important than allowing mothers to kill unborn children.
• The named author, whose name I will not mention here so as to in some tiny way mitigate the harm this publicity is likely to inflict on her, is too young to give valid consent to being exploited in this manner. The op-ed is forever. She isn’t out of high school. She shouldn’t have to begin adulthood already branded as self-branded bigot, sexist, demonizer of a President and abortion activist.
• It would be a poor op-ed unworthy of publication if it were written by an adult.

Here are just a few excerpts to give you the spirit the thing: Continue reading →

“The Simpsons'” Nelson Muntz has been getting a workout on Ethics Alarms lately, because the Trump Deranged and the Axis totalitarians have been falling flat on their faces in their own filth with hilarious regularity.

On a recent episode of “The View,” the all-woke, all Trump-Deranged, all-too-dumb-to-breathe panel attacked President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks and Matt Gaetz’s nomination in particular, as former prosecutor Sunny Hostin, who thinks that earthquakes and eclipses are proof of cliamte change, expressed horror that Trump could nominate the former Congressman with such damning “allegations” having been made against him. Wow, she must have been some prosecutor with that attitude toward unproven allegations!

Three minutes after Hostin’s unethical diatribe, Whoopi Goldberg interjected, “Sonny, you have a legal note.” You see, Donald Trump is suing ABC for defamation. It’s a doomed suit I think, but ABC’s lawyers, being lawyerly, don’t want to take any chances. They heard Hostin’s rant and quickly rushed on the air a legal disclaimer that–Haha!—Hostin was ordered to read. Which she did, with the facial expression and tone of a North Korean-held American prisoner of war being forced to read a “confession”:

“I do have a legal note. Thank you, Whoopi,” Hostin replied. She continued,

“Matt Gaetz has long denied all allegations, calling the claims, quote, ‘invented,’ and saying in a statement to ABC News that ‘this false smear following a three-year criminal investigation should be viewed with great skepticism. The DOJ investigation was closed with no charges being brought.”

Whoopi then sent the show into a commercial. I’m surprised the network’s lawyers didn’t make Hostin recite, “ABC also wants to assure readers that I am an idiot, and what I say, as with all the other members of ‘The View,’ should never be taken seriously.”

To be clear, the position here is not that Gaetz should be rejected as Attorney General because of the allegations against him, but because he is not only unqualified to be a U.S. Attorney General, he’s unqualified to be a member of Congress. He’s untrustworthy, and based on his legal experience as well as his mass of outrageous statements, I wouldn’t hire him for any legal task I can think of. Trump obviously intends the nomination to demonstrate his contempt for the Justice Department under Merrick Garland, a sentiment that is understandable and justified. If that is the message he wants to send, however, he should have just nominated a baboon and avoided any ambiguity.