I gave the President a Julie Principle pass last week by not highlighting his hilarious open mic comment calling for Israel to have a “come to Jesus moment,” but I can’t let this one pass:
“I shouldn’t have used ‘illegal.’ It’s undocumented. When I spoke about the difference between Trump and me, one of the things I talked about in the border was his, the way he talks about vermin, the way he talks about these people polluting the blood. I’m not going to treat any of these people with disrespect. Look, they built the country. The reason our economy’s growing.”
The statement is by turns incompetent, irresponsible, and dishonest; in non ethical terms, cowardly, offensive and idiotic.
I’m trying to find out the name of the guy (it is a guy) above, but not too hard, because his name doesn’t really matter. Like a good and concerned citizen, he signed up and testified before the Missouri House against HB1650, a bill that would ban drag shows for audiences of children. The worth of the bill isn’t what I’m interested in right now, nor are the arguments for or against it. My concern is the demeanor of the testifying citizen, who was, I’m sure you will not be shocked to learn, on hand to show his opposition to the bill. As far as that goes, good for him. He is participating in the democratic process. He is civically engaged. I listened to some of his remarks; they seemed sincere, articulate, and thought out, if, in my view, misguided, but again, that’s not the issue.
The issue, an ethics one, is this: what THE HELL did he think he was doing showing up to testify dressed like that?
My beloved Grace was a World War II history fanatic. She died on the day this spectacularly offensive memo was released. If she had been in perfect health and read the swill above, it very well might have killed her.
All to see, that is, except those whose eyes have been so jaundiced by hate, indoctrination and lies that they are blind.
A 9-0 decision by an ideologically fractured U.S. Supreme Court, rejecting a cherished partisan fantasy devised to hold on to power that one party has empathically shown that it is unfit to possess, should logically result in frank admissions of error, bias, foolishness and confusion by those who insisted that the tactic thus condemned was correct, legal and wise. But today’s progressives are not logical, nor are they self-aware or particularly smart. The reactions from pundits, left-warped lawyers and others (what are the creatures on “The View”?) really should be viewed as a gift. They are telling us what they are, admitting what they are. It’s ironic: the first post of the day was titled, “Will the Disastrous Results of The Great Stupid Result in Learning, So Behavior Changes, or Will the Fools Responsible Keep Trying To Govern On Dreams Rather Than Reality?,” but it wasn’t about the Trump-Deranged learning from their absurd and intellectually indefensible embrace of the 14 Amendment Trump disqualification plot. The SCOTUS decision hadn’t come down yet. Nevertheless, the headline is apt in the aftermath of the decision and the Axis’s embarrassing tantrums. They won’t learn because they can’t learn, even though refusing to admit their mistakes makes them ridiculous, untrustworthy and unpersuasive.
Here are the kinds of people who have been running our government, journalism, entertainment, law schools and universities:
Earlier this week former New York Times editor Adam Rubenstein published a tell-all about his experiences at the paper in “The Atlantic.” His theme: the oppressive progressive bias that made him feel like an outsider.
Rubenstein related a minor incident when he was criticized for saying that Chick-fil-A’s spicy chicken sandwich was his favorite after being asked about his sandwich preferences at his orientation. Rubenstein wrote that an HR rep replied, “We don’t do that here. They hate gay people,” and the other Times employees signified their approval of the rebuke by snapping their fingers.
President Biden went on Seth Myers’s late night show this week to bask in a fawning interview by a partisan supporter who wouldn’t ask him any questions harder than “What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream?,” and still managed to screw up.
After the show’s taping, Biden was confronted by reporters while licking an ice-cream cone and asked when a Gaza ceasefire might occur. “I hope by… the end of the weekend,” Biden answered. “My national security advisor tells me we’re close. We’re close. It’s not done yet. My hope is by next Monday, we’ll have a ceasefire,” Biden said. That was great news for anti-Israel progressives, and right before the Michigan primary, where Biden was likely to face Arab protest votes against his re-nomination.
Why, that is, other than the fact that the UK has been lobotomized by The Great Stupid even more than the U.S. has.
Do you know what was “offensive” in one of my all-time favorite movies without cheating? Think, now…
Time’s up!
It’s this: Admiral Boom, a senile neighbor of the Banks family whose sole purpose in the plot is to set up a running gag showing how the Banks’ and their servants routinely deal with his shooting off a cannon (the house shakes, furniture slides around, things fall off shelves, hilarity reigns), twice refers to “Hottentots.”
The British Board of Film Classification announced that the film was resubmitted for a rating this month in preparation for a theatrical re-release. The Borad reclassified if from “G” to “PG” for discriminatory language, a spokesperson explained. “Mary Poppins (1964) includes two uses of the discriminatory term ‘Hottentots’…While “Mary Poppins” has a historical context, the use of discriminatory language is not condemned, and ultimately exceeds our guidelines for acceptable language. We therefore classified the film PG for discriminatory language.” The term was once used by the British to describe the Khoikhoi and San nomadic tribes in southern Africa—surely you remember them?
I decided that we don’t need to see Bushnell’s last act, setting himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in D.C. You can find the video if you look. Publicizing that pointless suicide only gives some small purpose to a deranged stunt that doesn’t deserve the attention.
The 25-year-old a cyberdefense operations specialist with the 531st Intelligence Support Squadron at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland in Texas self-immolated Buddhist-style two days ago, dousing himself with gasoline and saying on the scene, “I am an active duty member of the US Air Force and I will no longer be complicit in genocide.”
” I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest,” he continued, “but compared to what people in Palestine have been experiencing at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all.”
“This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal,” he added, and shouted “Free Palestine!” in flames as his last words.
On today’s CNN’s “AC360,” host Anderson Cooper described the “horrifying” details of student Laken Hope Riley’s murder on the University of Georgia campus last week, then quickly pivoted to spinning that “the revelation the suspect was in this country unlawfully” had caused the murder to be “politicized.” Earlier, CNN’s Jake Tapper similarly adopted the “Republicans pounce!” tactic, saying “They’re seizing on this as an example of Biden’s failure to protect the American people and secure the border.”
Damn right, because that’s what it is. This death should be politicized: it’s Willie Horton all over again, except that Biden and the open-borders Democrats didn’t just goof by releasing one dangerous criminal to prey on the public, they have released many, and are releasing many more. Trump on Truth Social said the obvious, that Riley’s murder should’ve ‘never happened.’” Of course it should never have happened. Illegal immigrants shouldn’t be allowed to roam free, and this one had already been arrested more than once.
Interjecting itself before my planned first post this morning is the latest installment of the Ethics Alarms series in which your friendly neighborhood ethicist examines the biases that may make him (that is, me ) stupid, or not. At my local 7-11 just now on an emergency errand, I spied one of my next door neighbors purchasing lottery tickets. I have long suspected that he is an idiot, and this pretty much locked down my diagnosis.
Ethics Alarms has covered the issue of state lotteries extensively; you can see most of the results at this depressing tag. The most recent piece was in 2022, reacting to a CNN segment that declared state lotteries to be racist because a disproportionate percentage of the players are black. I believe that CNN’s analysis is racist, and I ended the post this way…
