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?

Poor Mira Sorvino. She won an Academy Award once, but her career as an ingenue stalled and she’s 56 now: she’s officially on the celebrity has-been list. But that’s not what makes her epic post below on “X” memorable. It should be studied as a tragic example of what relentless Big Lie propaganda from the mainstream media and progressives, which are pretty much all Sorvino has been exposed to in Hollywood for at least three decades, can do a mind that was once capable of critical thought.

As you will quickly see, the late Paul Sorvino’s daughter is Trump-Deranged to a crippling degree. She’s not stupid, far from it; at least she didn’t used to be. She graduated from Harvard with honors back when Old Ivy was closer to being a respectable institution than today, and didn’t major in “Women’s Studies” or some other wokish area, but East Asian Studies after spending a year abroad learning Mandarin Chinese.

When you wonder how it can possibly be that so many people won’t abandon their determination to vote for Joe Biden even as the evidence becomes indisputable that one might as well elect a quahog as President, just reflect upon Mira’s lament below. She was willing to publish this, publicly, even though, to a functioning mind, doing so would be the equivalent of wearing a neon sign flashing, “I am a cabbage.” It’s sad. It’s tragic. But it shows what nearly eight years of being bombarded with lies and fearmongering can do.

I’ll interject periodically, as is my wont. Heeeeeere’s MIRA!

Continue reading →

An “Enemy of the People” Indictment

Over at PJ Media, conservative writer David Strom provides a vivid overview of just how complicit the mainstream media has been in assisting Democrats and the White House as they deceived the public, both to elect Joe Biden President and protect him from suspicions that he was not able to do his job. “A Short History of the Coverup” should have been published in the New York Times; if that paper were a serious pursuer of ethical journalism and “all the news that’s fit to print,” it would make a thorough investigation of this scandal its top priority. It didn’t and it won’t, however, because that would involve implicating itself.

Strom writes at one point, “We can’t let them off the hook. We need America to face the fact that the media really IS the ‘enemy of the people.’ I hated that phrase in 2020; I think it is 100% true now. I was wrong.” Good for him; at least he admits it. This comment of Trump’s, one of his most important, is regularly used by the “Trump is Hitler” chorus to show that he’s an enemy of democracy. To the contrary: the enemy of democracy’s enemy is democracy’s friend. Ethics Alarms flagged Trump’s undiplomatic remark as spot on immediately, I will point out, patting myself heartily on the back.

Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Month: Mark Judge

“The media are not trusted, and all the conferences and articles in the world are not going to help them out of their hole. What will help is if the media industry learns to do what it once did with some honor: Apologize for mistakes.”

—–Mark Judge, reflecting on the current Joe Biden cover-up disaster that has implicated the mainstream news media and lowered its already abysmal level of public trust even further

Judge makes a profound point. If reporters, journalists, publishers and editors acknowledged their mistakes, ethical lapses and instances of incompetence, bias, dishonesty or worse, there would be at least some sense that they recognize their deficiencies and are committed to correcting them. Judge writes,

Continue reading →

Stop Making Me Defend George Clooney!

In a typical ad hominem rant on Truth Social, Donald Trump attacked George Clooney, who recently joined the “Dump Biden” team with an op-ed in the New York Times calling on the President to step aside.

“So now fake movie actor George Clooney, who never came close to making a great movie, is getting into the act,” Trump wrote. “He’s turned on Crooked Joe like the rats they both are. What does Clooney know about anything?….Clooney should get out of politics and go back to television…Movies never really worked for him!!!”

As is so often the case, the former President doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Clooney can legitimately be criticized for his part in deceiving the public about Biden’s disabilities; as Christian Toto recently pointed out, Hollywood power-players—like Clooney—were despicably complicit in hiding Biden’s real condition from the public. However, claiming the Clooney “never came close to making a great movie” is unfair, uninformed and ignorant, and saying that “movies never worked for him” is just silly.

Continue reading →

Here’s the Latest Desperate Rationalization Democrats Are Floating For Why Biden Is Still Fit To Run and Serve…

Wow, is this stupid. Yet I have started seeing it all over social media, and it’s being posted by previously intelligent friends, Democrats all.

Never mind the fact that most of those on the list are not working (some have very publicly retired) unless you call sitting down for an interview every year or so or “appearing” on a podcast “working.” The main reasons this argument is idiotic are that:

1. The fact that someone else is Joe Biden age and is not senile proves nothing about Joe Biden.

2. These are all entertainers and artists. What is expected and required of entertainers and artists is completely different from what is expected and required of world leaders. There is literally no valid analogy there. None.

3. If Paul McCartney blanks while singing “Yesterday” in a concert, he stops, starts the song again, and there is no harm done. A President whose attention and alertness is absent during a crisis can make an error with terrible consequences for the whole nation, and there is no do-over.

4. The list is cherry-picked. Notable for his absence, among others: Bruce Willis, whose family stopped him from performing because of progressive dementia. Willis is 69.

The Democrats, now in “Try anything! Say anything!” panic mode even beyond what I expected before Biden’s debate collapse, are literally tossing out every deflection and rationalization they can think of, hoping to salvage the votes of as many gullible half-wits as possible. If there is any justice, this dishonest tactic (and the increasingly desperate ones to come) will lose them at least as many votes as it preserves, because they are proving how untrustworthy and Machiavellian they are.

What’s a Petard? These Are Petards….

A petard is an archaic word for a bomb, before bombs were as big and destructive as they are today. The term “hoist by his own petard” means literally that some idiot blew himself up, kind of like this guy, except that in the classic example the bomb-wielder intends to damage something or someone else. The phrase is used to describe George Will’s condign justice,” meaning that a miscreant has reaped what he has sowed, received his just deserts, and “got what was coming to him,her, or it.”

In the future, when a nubbin asks, “Daddy, what does it mean to be ‘hoist by one’s own petard’?” the most vivid possible answer might be what is happening right now to the corrupt and Machiavellian Democratic Party and its corrupted allies. Exploding or soon to explode petards are everywhere.

An inventory (so far):

Continue reading →

Oh, Just Shut Up, Professor Lichtman…

OK, I should get this out of the way up front: I’m unalterably biased against any 77 year old man who wears his hair like that, if indeed that is the professor’s real hair, which I doubt.

Then there is the fact that a vast majority of historians are Trump Deranged or have otherwise migrated into the progressive propaganda camp. Presidential historians are particularly shameful in this regard, and one of the worst is American University Professor Allan Lichtman. He was all over the TV this weekend, chasing another 15 minutes of fame as a commentator on the Democratic Party’s Joe Biden problem from an alleged historical perspective. The Big Whoop about Lichtman is that he has developed a formula that predicted the results of nine of the 10 most recent presidential elections, so that is supposed to make him an expert. It doesn’t. To begin with, his system doesn’t have “the incumbent can’t think or talk clearly any more” feature.

Continue reading →

Ann Althouse Jumps the Ethics Shark!

Oh-oh. This is more depressing news.

Althouse’s shtick is beginning all of her blog posts with a quote from another article, then she weighs in. Let me start this post the same way: here is part of what Ann writes regarding the news media’s rapid rush to condemn President Biden’s debate performance, what she calls ” a stampede.”

I’d really like to know who decided a stampede was the right approach and unleashed it while the President was still on the debate stage. Immediately after the debate, CNN’s John King was cued up to describe a stampede already in motion…As King described it, it’s hard to see how they even watched the debate. They seem to have gone into cabal mode to capture the post-debate narrative. Was it — to use Solnit’s phrase — “a sort of insider coup”? Who did this without knowing that they could — via stampede — drive their own candidate out of the race?…I want to know who led the “deep… wide… very aggressive panic” that “started minutes into the debate” and communicated it to John King and motivated CNN to present this as the narrative, right after the debate, preempting any normal post-debate analysis and throwing the Democratic Party into chaos. Did someone decide to risk everything to shock and awe Joe Biden into submission? Who could do that? Who would do that? And how did that old man — that supposedly broken down hopeless old man — resist? How could he resist? Who’s helping him with his hero story, which is going strangely well against the deep, wide, aggressive panickers… whoever they are?

What the hell?

It must be hard being a relentless contrarian, which is Althouse’s brand There is an obvious peril in working to say the opposite of what the conventional wisdom is, which is that occasionally the conventional wisdom is right, and a contrarian looks ridiculous. I hope that’s the explanation for that passage; if not, one of my long-time favorite bloggers has lost her frick’n mind.

What led her into this morass was an essay at The Guardian titled “Why is the pundit class so desperate to push Biden out of the race?”

It’s a dumb article by a climate change activist (among other things). Maybe Ann was having trouble finding blog topics; it’s happened to me. But come on: isn’t it clear why anyone with eyes, ears and a brain would be desperate to push Biden out of the race? He’s sliding into full dementia, that’s why; it’s been obvious for a long time, and dementia-sufferers shouldn’t be President of the United States!

The “pundit class” has another very good reason to “stampede”: trying to somehow salvage a scrap of public trust after being exposed as fully complicit in the Democrats’ Soviet-style cover-up. Is this so difficult to figure out? For Althouse? A lawyer, social critic and law professor Emeritus?

Apparently it is. Althouse’s commentary quoted above is at least as laughable—and ethically warped— as the Trump-Deranged Guardian article that inspired it:

Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce and Unethical Quote of the Month: NYT Columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom

Once again we are faced with the despicable ethics violation of an alleged authority making her readers dumber and more ignorant. And, once again, the example falls in the category of someone unqualified to read a Supreme Court opinion declaring what the holding means without understanding it.

Tressie McMillan Cottom is a 2020 MacArthur “genius” grant recipient who opines in the Times and elsewhere on culture, “higher education, work, media and inequality”(she is black, so I guess that’s mandatory). Her credentials do not justify her writing this in her latest essay:

“[T]he Supreme Court finally weighed in on presidential immunity. There is no other way to read its decision than as a signal that whoever owns the Republican Party also owns the power to break the law.”

That’s funny, because there is no possible way to read that ridiculously misrepresented decision to mean that at all. If she’s read the decision, then she’s lying or incompetent. If she hasn’t read the decision, then her ethical breach is worse. Continue reading →

Unethical (and Pathetic) Quote of the Week: President Joe Biden

“No one said I had to.”

That was the President of the United States, not just a grown man but the democratically elected leader of our government, in response to the question posed by George Stephanopolos last night in the interview designed to calm American fears that Joe Biden is not capable of doing his job.

How diminishing, damning, desperate and depressing.

Continue reading →