From Axios…
Nice.
There have been a lot of iconic or otherwise memorable photographs of Presidents over the decades that placed a sitting POTUS in a positive or sympathetic context. They were all liberally used to promote that President’s leadership and popularity. Such as…
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I could go into an analysis of what was so stunningly dangerous and incompetent about the Secret Service FUBAR that almost got Donald Trump murdered, at this point just about the only way the Democrats would be able to keep the White House. I’m happy to wait for the results of Congressional hearings and the investigation, but as I heard many experts say on multiple networks, you don’t have to be an expert to figure from the time-line and what we do know that the Secret Service was spectacularly incompetent, and that Cheatle’s pathetic explanations (I particularly like “the sloped roof was too dangerous for our agents so we let a gunman use it to shoot Trump”) haven’t passed the giggle test. Her ridiculous statements and the fact that the agents knew an unknown person with a gun was within killing distance of Donald Trump and waited for him to take a shot before doing anything (like, say, keeping Trump off the stage: don’t those little earpieces work?) are res ipsa loquitur, so damning that conspiracy theories are unavoidable.
I watched it last night because there was really nothing else worth seeing on TV, but I hate what the All-Star game has become, and have hated it for a long time. Before inter-league play and huge contracts, the “Mid-Season Classic” was a real game, played as intensely as the World Series, for the honor of the two separate leagues. (Ask Ray Fosse how intensely.) Managers would try to get and keep the strongest possible line-up in the game: it wasn’t unusual for several stars to play all 9 innings. Starting pitchers went three innings, not just one. Players slid into bases and dived for balls. It was a real contest. In ethics terms, the All-Star Game had integrity.
For decades now, it has just been a bunch of rich guys going through the motions, joking with each other, making sure no one got hurt. The obvious objective of the managers is to get all 30 players on the roster on the field if possible, not to win. It’s a parade: viewers barely get to see a player display the skills that made him an All-Star. The event has the seriousness of a celebrity softball game…there’s no tension, no drama.
Above is one of “Cori Bush’s Greatest Hits,” the time in 2021 that she “explained” why she had taxpayers fund a security detail for her so she could advocate de-funding the police. This won her the Ethics Alarms title of “Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month, Year, Decade, Century, And Eon” at the time. Bush, a Democratic House member from the Missouri district occupied entirely by the brain-damaged, isn’t just an “idiot” in the sense that Ethics Alarms usually uses the word. No, the college drop-out and former nurse is a genuine, clinical idiot and an ignoramus to boot. Naturally, she is a member-in-good-standing of The Squad, where being the dumbest in the batch—dumber even than the recently defeated Jamaal Bowman—is quite an achievement.
See, I have a fair amount of sympathy for alcoholics. But the time to check yourself into rehab is before you kill someone driving, before you blow that crucial case for your client, before you leave your scissors in a patient’s stomach after you’ve operated, and, if you are an award-winning Country singer, before you massacre the Star-Spangled Banner at the All-Star Game Home Run derby, like Andress did last night.
Just listen to that caterwauling!
I find the Home Run Derby a bore, so I didn’t hear her off-key, dying-swan version of our National Anthem until the social media complaints about it reached me this morning. Andress’s breathless, lugubrious style, much in vogue these days, doesn’t appeal to me anyway, but that rendition was especially awful even by awful National Anthem standards, a high bar. How could a multiple Grammy-winner be that bad is a public performance on national TV?
I’m going to have to complain to the Politics Gods about their timing: letting the “Oh no! Biden just let everybody know that we’ve been hiding his dementia all this time!,” story, the “Trump only cares about himself but Biden won’t do the obvious responsible thing and step down and a candidate because that will hurt his ego!” and the Trump assassination attempt all overlap each other is just malpractice. It’s especially tough on me as I try in an election year to avoid my ethics blog turning into a politics blog. Hear my plea, ye Gods!
Meanwhile…
1. That graphic above is a screen shot from last night’s live broadcast of the GOP convention. Trump was a prominent audience member, which itself was historically unique: traditionally the putative nominee stays incommunicado until he makes his dramatic entrance to accept the nomination. Well, why shouldn’t he bask in the spotlight? Atheme of my honors thesis in American Government [“The Great Man Theory and the American Presidency”] was that a disproportionate number of our Presidents were “survivors” who lived through dramatic life-threatening ordeals that left them with convictions of their own invulnerability as well as the belief that they were destined to do great things. Trump didn’t fit that template, but he does now. Those death-defying incidents may have made Washington, Jackson, Polk, Lincoln, Teddy, FDR and others very different men, and better leaders, than they would have been without them. It will be fascinating to see if surviving an assassins bullet by a nanosecond has the same effect on Trump.
18-year-old Sumaya Thomas of North Liberty, Iowa was supposed to go on a blind date with a young man she had met on an online dating app. But by the time her date arrived at her abode to pick her up on the evening of June 16, Thomas had changed her mind. Did she tell him that to his face, like any normal, decent human being, apologizing for wasting his time and dashing his hopes? Oh noooo. Did she text him, the weenie’s way out? No. Did she just leave him on her doorstep, knocking and buzzing while she hid under the bed? No. Did she sneak out the back door? No, not that either.
Instead, Thomas called 911 and said her abusive ex- was outside harassing her because she was seven months pregnant with their child. She said she needed the police to get him off her property as he was threatening to “hit, punch, kick and stab her.”
Nice! A police car was dispatched, and when officers arrived they found an apparently calm, confused young man in the process of walking away. Upon being questioned about the situation, he explained that he had arrived to go on a date with the woman inside the house, and that he had only met her online a week ago.
I saw the NBC poll showing President Biden leading Trump by 3% in a six-way race over the weekend. I thought, “What the hell? This is proof positive that the U.S. public is too stupid to vote, and needs to be put under a conservatorship or something. Had the “Trump is Hitler! AHHHHHHH!” propaganda campaign by Biden, the Democrats and the news media really obliterated the natural implications of facts, like the fact that the President’s mind is falling apart in chunks, and that leaving him in office amounts to surrendering to a Soviet-style shadow collective? As it quickly turned out, no, the demonization campaign probably got Trump shot, but the public as a whole isn’t quite that hopeless.
Oopsie! The network issued a correction yesterday, citing “an error with the original polling documents.” The corrected network’s online article reported that Trump led Biden by 3% in a six-way race including Green Party candidate Jill Stein, Libertarian Party candidate Chase Oliver and independent candidates Robert F. Kennedy, Jr and Cornel West.
AM Golden has delivered a fascinating Comment of the Day describing a phenomenon I was barely aware of: the practice of paying celebrities to attend conventions that have little of nothing to do with what the celebrity does or is famous for.
The COTD was inspired by my commentary on the brain-meltingly stupid anti-Trump “X” screed by one-time Academy Award winning actress Mira Sorvino, now on the shady side of what turned into a disappointing career. (To be fair, she was black-balled in her prime by Harvey Weinstein for not accommodating his sexual demands when he was one of biggest power-brokers in Hollywood.)
Incidentally, appropo of subsequent events, Mira’s polemic proclaimed Trump as the second coming of Hitler and said that if he was elected, it would mean the end of America as we know it. And as it is beginning to look like he will be elected…what is the patriotic thing to do to save the nation, hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm?
But I digress…
The convention practice is clearly a cognitive dissonance scale stunt in part: an organization that sponsors a generally admired and beloved public figure as a “guest” gets a boost up the positive end of the scale. Or the celebrity is more like a freak show attraction: Come meet Joey Buttafuoco! Kato Kaelin! And a convention that features a professional leach like Mary Trump (above)? Don’t expect me to register.
AM’s Comment of the Day is also something of an ethics quiz. Don’t jump to the end: that’s cheating.
Here is AM Golden’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Hello. This Is Mira! She Used To Be A Successful Hollywood Actress Until Trump Derangement Destroyed Her Brain. Won’t You Give a Tax-Deductible Donation To Defeat This Terrible Disease?”
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As Bill Clinton might say, “It depends on what the meaning of ‘qualified’ is.”
The Vice-President has only two clearly defined jobs. The first is to preside over the Senate, and that’s a job even Joe Biden could do in his current state of confusion. The second job is to be the President’s back-up, insurance policy, and stunt-man. That’s a bit trickier, and as Kamala Harris has proven, it’s too challenging for some people. Still, paraphrasing Woody Allen, “Ninety percent of success as Vice-President is just showing up.”
I have this idealistic notion that a VP candidate should be at least minimally qualified to be President, since 9 out of 45 Presidents got the job when the top of their ticket couldn’t perform his duties any more. That’s 20%, one in five. Despite these ominous odds, most Presidential candidates choose their understudies without any concern about their fitness to be President, not to say that most of the choices weren’t at least theoretically qualified. Joe Biden was, in my view, one of the least qualified VPs ever, and look where he ended up.
