Once again, I find myself asking, how can an alleged opinion writer issue utter crap like this and live with herself? How can a newspaper justify publishing it, or pay someone so dishonest or rock-dumb to write it? How can anyone with two brain cells to rub together read it and say, “Duhh..yup! Sound’s right to me!“?
This fraudulent authority is a trial lawyer who claims to specialize in First Amendment cases, though her screed here tells us that she doesn’t get that free speech thingy. Sabrina is also a failed Democratic candidate for Congress. Her essay is called, “Trump didn’t win; disinformation did.” If I didn’t write an ethics blog, that headline alone would be sufficient for me to eschew the pleasure of reading it.
For once, the over-the-top criticism of a Trump decision is completely justified, and maybe even understated. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), just nominated by the President-Elect to be his Attorney General, has no legitimate qualifications for the job at all, which requires managing a 115,000-person agency. He has no management experience. He has no prosecutorial experience. He is a licensed lawyer, but has very little legal practice experience. No previous Attorney General, going back to Edmund Randolph, Washington’s first AG, had such a sparse legal resume. Randolph had been governor of Virginia.
I am more qualified to be the Attorney General than Matt Gaetz, and I can think of many personal friends and colleagues who are more qualified for the job than I am. If I threw a rock into a cocktail reception at the D.C. Bar, I would hit a more qualified lawyer.
Oh, I get it. Trump ran through six Defense Secretaries in four years (a record) and had an adversary relationship with the Pentagon. As with so many other Departments, entrenched resistance to Trump’s leadership flourishes there, and there are cultural issues as well.
The sort-of new President has learned a hard lesson, and wants a loyal outsider to tackle the Defense Department. Harry Truman once described the department as a feather bed where you punched a problem in one part of the bed and another problem would pop right up.
DOD is huge, a labyrinth of interlocking bureaucracies, and managing it requires superb leadership skills, diplomacy, organization and more. There is no reason to believe that Pete Hegseth possesses any of these.
“I think our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done.”
I can’t find the date of that speech or the context of the quote, but what possible context could justify it? If that isn’t pure Big Brother, what is? “Can’t let the truth get in the way of progress!” This is the totalitarian mindset that (I hope) was one of the things enough voters rejected a week ago. This is the ends justifies the means ideology embraced by the Axis of Unethical Conduct, including the news media that lied, dissembled, covered up and broadcast false narratives during the campaign and, of course, long before.
Odd. One would think that the editor of a (once) respected science magazine would not resort demonology to explain her own conduct. Indeed, one would think that such conduct would disqualify said editor from continuing in her position.
Laura Helmuth, a woke activist who has destroyed the credibility of Scientific American by politicizing its content, went bonkers after Trump defeated Kamala Harris and tweeted,
How professional! How trustworthy! How scientific! Who wouldn’t trust the analysis of a science magazine edited by someone who makes such declarations in public?
Jed Handelsman Shugerman is a renowned and respected law professor at Boston University. A credentialed legal scholar specializing in constitutional law and governance, he is a co-author of “Amicus briefs on the history of presidential power, the Emoluments Clauses, the Appointments Clause, the First Amendment rights of elected judges, and the due process problems of elected judges in death penalty cases,” among other publications. Yet the professor is apparently a Trump-Deranged, woke bigot no longer capable of rational and objective analysis.
Observations:
1. This guy blogged on Election Day that Harris would win easily. Such a declaraion was the result of inexplicable delusion for a government scholar, unless the explanation is that he is a fraud with no business teaching anyone. I regret my decision not to be more emphataic in my learned and informed conclusion that Trump would win the election and quite possibly in a landslide. I hinted at this belief in many comments, but never stated it in a post. I was discouraged from my previous failed predication that Mitt Romney would defeat Barack Obama. I shouldn’t have been: I was a weenie. I was much more certain that Trump would win than of my prediction in 2012. Romney was running against Obama, a skilled campaigner and incumbent President; Trump’s opponent was a terrible campaigner and a Vice-President. Romney was knee-capped by the biased news media, but its power and credibility was much stronger then. Romney never had enthusiastic support from conservatives, who rightly regarded him as technocrat with flexible principles. Not being willing to come out and predict that Trump would defeat Harris was wrong, but anyone stating from a position of authority that Harris would win is unforgivable. The polls that showed a dead heat made no sense, as many pointed out. Trump was running confidently, while Harris was running a desperation campaign, and running it badly, depending on voter amnesia and gullibility. By any objective observation and unbiased analysis of the issues around the election, the conclusion that Trump was a likely victor was unavoidable if one had to choose one result or another to predict. Predicting that Harris would prevail demonstrated an “It isn’t what it is” mindset and an abuse of authority by a presumed “expert.”
2. Blaming Harris or Walz for the most incompetent campaign in modern Presidential history is “missing the point”? It’s the only point anyone needs. The partisans who defend that campaign, with Walz being a walking, talking joke except that opposing free speech isn’t funny, and Harris resolutely refusing to answer direct questions directly while “protecting democracy” by using fascist tactics against her opponent can be fairly described as gaslighting.
3. Back to Romney in 2012: I predicted Mitt would win because, I wrote, Americans want strong Presidents. Obama was weak and feckless, but he played strong well. American still want strong leaders. Both Harris and Walz projected weakness. Indeed, the whole woke movement embraces weenyism. Strength is bad, toxic. Men tend to be more assertive, confrontational and agressive than women, so being a male is toxic. The United States was founded on risk-taking, defiance, strength, confrontation and willingness to fight for principles, so the United States itself is toxic.
Well…WRONG. These qualities have made the nation what it is, and what it is is brash, cocky, intolerant of weakness and anti-weenie. it’s a guy thing, but that doesn’t mean women can exhibit the same essential leadership qualities. There is a lot wrong with Hillary Clinton, but being a weenie isn’t one of them. “Toxic masculinity” is nothing better than a pejorative way to describe the unique character of the nation. I prefer American exceptionalism, and weenies need not apply. John Wayne lives, metaphorically of course. Good. Shugarman doesn’t understand or like his own country: why is he a professor anywhere?
4. Oh, fine, here it comes: “white supremacy.” Wouldn’t you think a scholar could come up with something more original (and true) than racism to explain Harris’s defeat? It’s insulting, but worse, it’s stupid. If Trump ran a campaign like Harris, ducking all substantive questions, basing his election on how bad Harris was rather than on what he wanted to do, he would have lost. If Harris hadn’t insulted young men, had she taken the interview with Joe Rogan, were she able to speak off scripts without sounding like Gabby Johnson, she would have won the election. If everything else were the same, but Trump were black and Harris was a white female weenie like, say, Amy Klobuchar, do you think the result would have been any different? I don’t.
5. This is a useful tweet, simultaneously indicting the competence and trustworthiness of academia, lawyers, law professors, law schools, Democrats and progressives.
In the scene above, which has already made it onto many lists of American cinema’s best ending scenes, Michael Clayton, a law firm fixer who has survived a murder attempt paid for by the general counsel of a chemical company that presents its products as boons to civilization but which is really covering up a massive pollution scandal, confronts the general counsel with his survival, knowledge of her and her company’s crimes. Unknown to her Clayton is wearing a wire, and her incriminating responses to the confrontation will bring down the company. Arthur, Clayton’s friend whom he refers to, was the whistle-blowing lawyer that the general counsel had murdered to prevent him from revealing the smoking gun company document Clayton is holding, evidence of the company’s knowing contamination that harmed or killed millions.
It is ironic that George Clooney, in what is easily his best movie and best performance, played a central role in the failed Democratic Party palace coup that resulted in the disastrous campaign and defeat of Kamala Harris. The unhinged and folish reactions of the now re-loading “resistance,” Democrats and their corrupt media allies (“The Axis of Unethical Conduct” in Ethics Alarms parlance) brought this scene to mind. You should show it to your deranged Facebook friends and relatives, but here’s a guide for you to use if they are incapable of grasping the lessons it holds…
Hack American University historian Allan Lichtman could have chosen to enlighten his audience with genuine perspective on why the 2024 election didn’t fit in his little election-predicting formula. Instead, as I’ve written about here, here and here, he chose to parrot partisan talking points and excuses because, sadly, he is a biased, publicity-seeking hack. Thus I’m forced into doing his work for him. Well, that’s okay. I’m qualified, and unlike him, I have integrity.
Let’s begin with this fact nobody has mentioned: only three men before Trump were elected President after losing a Presidential election. Three. Andrew Jackson was the first, but he gets an asterisk: Andy won the popular vote when he ran the first time but lost to John Quincy Adams in the House of Representatives. Like Trump, he said the election had been stolen from him. The second time a defeated Presidential candidate came back to win was in 1892, when Grover Cleveland, like Trump, ran again after losing his first bid for re-election to win the White House back, thus becoming the 22nd and 24th President. He has the same asterisk as Jackson, however. Grover the Good (in truth, he wasn’t all that good) never lost the popular vote: Benjamin Harrison defeated him with the first fluke Electoral College victory (Rutherford B. Hayes doesn’t count, but that’s another story.) So Cleveland won the popular vote in all three of his Presidential elections.
Richard Nixon is the third member of this odd club. He lost a squeaker to JFK in 1960 ( or maybe he didn’t, but unlike Trump, Nixon refused to challenge the result “for the good of the nation.” If Trump had only followed Nixon’s example, he would have won a real landslide this week), and then came back eight years later to defeat Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace to finally win the Presidency.
When we last left American University Allen Lichtman, he was smarting from his obviously incompetent and biased prediction that Kamala Harris would defeat Donald Trump proving to be spectacularly wrong. On Wednesday after Election Day, Lichtman told USA TODAY, “Right now after a very long night I am taking some time off to assess why I was wrong and what the future holds for America.” That was enough for me to enshrine him in the “Bias Makes You Stupid” Hall of Fame.
So Lichtman thought and he thought, and he reviewed his over-hyped formula that had delivered 9 out of 10 correct predictions in races that anyone could have predicted with no formula at all (Lichtman’s: go with who looks like the obvious winner, and when in doubt, pick the Democrat), and he applied his training and skills as a an American Presidential historian, and guess what he figured out! No, really, guess. I’ll give you time to think…
Ready?
On his YouTube channel, Lichtman that voters were not “rational” or “pragmatic,” succumbed to “disinformation” and Trump’s promotion of “xenophobia,” “misogyny” and “racism”!
Gee, the Ladies of “The View” came up with that, and they’re all biased, Trump Deranged morons. The voters were stupid, the brilliant Democratic message was muted by social media lies, and half of all Americans wouldn’t vote for a black woman as President because of bigotry.
I think the professor should have “assessed” a teeny bit longer. But it probably wouldn’t have done any good.
“I think two things this year, and maybe going forward, broke this premise of a rational, pragmatic electorate, and these are trends that are not new but have exploded this year beyond anything we’ve ever seen before. First is disinformation,” this clown said. “Always had disinformation, but we’ve never had anything remotely on this scale, where billionaires — I don’t know how much Elon Musk is worth, I’m sure more than a hundred billion dollars — who control critical sources of information for the electorate. I mean, Elon Musk owns X, and I’ve seen reports that his disinformation that he’s put out, has been viewed by two billion viewers, vastly more influential than New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, CBS… the incredible explosion of disinformation…makes it very difficult for a rational, pragmatic electorate to operate.”
“Then add to that that we’ve seen Trump and his allies exploit, far more than ever before — even 2016 and 2020 — trends that run deep into American history and still resonate at this time: xenophobia, fear of foreign influences … We have never seen, in recent history, xenophobia to this level, and it digs deep into a trend in American history. It’s not something brand new, and it’s not just white people, you know?” Lichtman said. “People of all races and ethnicities can be subject to xenophobia. And finally, there’s racism, one of the deepest, most pervasive trends in American history. And we have seen, just as Trump and his allies have brought misogyny and xenophobia to a new level, he’s also brought blatant racism to a new level … So we see then the explosion of disinformation and these three dark trends from American history, and that calls into question the whole premise behind the keys of rationality and pragmatism.”
Wow. What a hack!
If I had a son at American, this would be sufficient to have me seek another school to send him to, because such a complete lack of perception, analysis and accountability shouldn’t be permitted on any faculty, in any department.
“Experts” like Lichtman will now validate the fact-free rationalizations of the current Trump-Derangement victims and Democratic Party leadership seeking ways to duck responsibility for running a terrible candidate (whom everyone paying attention knew would be a terrible candidate before she was “selected). He blames Elon Musk? Did Musk magically make Harris sound like an evasive, babbling phony who couldn’t function without a script or a teleprompter? That’s a neat trick! Isn’t part of a college education to learn the life skill of recognizing when you’ve screwed up and learn from the mistake? Clearly Lichtman won’t teach his students that.
Small wonder that Lichtmas thinks Harris was the “rational” choice for President: he’s almost as much of a phony as she is.
Jeez, somebody tell her! Nobody believes this myth any more. That she would even say that on national TV justifies the public’s lack of trust in the mainstream media, the Post, and Rampell. Props to Jennings for not falling off his chair in helpless laughter and rolling on the floor.
Ethics Alarms 