Would it be too much to expect all of America’s talented performers to unite in patriotic passion and non-partisan good will to help the nation celebrate its 250th anniversary?
Apparently, yes! As John Lennon would have said if he were possessed by “Bob” from “Twin Peaks”: “All you need is HATE! Bwahahahahahahaha!” Well, hate and stupidity.
Would it be too much to expect that those in charge of organizing such an event to be willing and able to enlist performing artists who are in their primes, widely popular, and invited on the basis of their achievements and skills rather than their political endorsements?
Also, tragically, yes. What drooling yahoos selected that bunch of has-beens, geezers and B acts to headline “The Great American State Fair”? And Milli Vanilli? Is that a joke? Please let it be a joke! Milli Vanilli is to singing groups as Joe Biden was to the Presidency. It was a fake group. It was caught lip-synching on live TV! Quite appropriately, many conservative, Republican and MAGA supporters are disheartened by these bottom-of-the-barrel scrapings, as this selection of tweets highlighted by “Not the Bee” demonstrates:
From the other end, the Left is seeking an encore of their anti-American tantrum in 2017, when any half-decent performer who wasn’t already an outspoken MAGA captive was threatened with shunning by all the Woke and Wonderful if they performed at any of Trump’s inauguration festivities, leaving the President with community theater stars and marginal performers who would only appear at the Grammys if they bought tickets to the balcony. Last week fading country star Martina McBride joined the list of performers backing out of the upcoming “Freedom 250” concerts. Morris Day, Young MC, and the Commodores, also announced they were dumping the gig. The series is being produced by an organization founded by Donald Trump, see, so that means that the concerts are…
There are lively debates among historians regarding who was the best First Lady (I view it as a dead heat between Abigail Adams and Eleanor Roosevelt), but the contest for the Worst First Lady Ever is settled. It’s Jill Biden, easy. Edith Wilson hid her husband’s stroke from the nation but at least she wasn’t complicit in letting an unfit and mentally declining man run in the first place. Woodrow was a terrible human being, but until his stroke he wasn’t an incompetent one. Michelle Obama was and is loathsome, but she didn’t do much substantive damage while she was in the White House. She left that to her husband.
I’m going to give you a gift link to the New York Times’s notably uncritical report on Jill’s new spin on her husband’s crack-up during that fateful debate with Donald Trump, when the mentally declining President descended into authentic frontier gibberish. The Times:
“I don’t know what happened,” the former first lady said in an interview with “CBS News Sunday Morning.” “As I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.’ And it scared me to death.” In a 30-second snippet of the interview, which is scheduled to air in full this weekend, she said that she had never seen her husband have a meltdown like the one she saw when he took the debate stage in Atlanta. Next week, she is releasing ‘View From the East Wing,’ a memoir of her time as first lady.”
I call bullshit, and so should everyone else. There is so much wrong with that fake narrative if boggles the mind:
1. She’s lying. Everyone had seen Biden freeze, become disoriented, mumble and get confused repeatedly for nearly four years. Months before, Special Counsel Robert Hur released a 388-page report on President Biden’s retention of classified material. In opting not to bring charges, Hur said that Biden would appear to the jury too befuddled to find guilty of the requisite intent. “We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur wrote. “Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.” Sure sounds like a man every American should feel secure having his finger on the nuclear button! Yet the Axis chorus of partisan hacks continued to tell the public that Joe was “as sharp as a tack.”
2. After Biden’s embarrassment in the debate, Jill went into full cover-up mode. “You answered every question!” she exclaimed, treating the President of the United States like a second-grader. His gibberish was bad enough that she thought he had a stroke, she says now, but not bad enough to have him checked out. Biden had refused to have a cognition test: after this episode, wouldn’t a caring wife be obligated to insist on a medical examination? Of course she would, except that the reality was that Biden’s debate performance was not out of character at that point. His staff and family were thinking, “Oh no. I was afraid this would happen.” Their response after the debate, joining in the agreed upon narrative that “he had a cold…he was tired….he just had a bad night…it could have happened to anyone…he’s always had a stammer…Trump rambled too!” proves that there was no new concern for Biden’s well-being, only concern that the jig was up.
I’d say that qualifies as an unethical tweet, wouldn’t you?
It doesn’t matter what the Democratic Party’s social media account was responding to, does it? (Stephen Miller referred to Democratic Party candidate for Texas governor as “trans.” Not that there’s anything wrong with that..) What does matter is that the party that has (often justifiably) condemned Donald Trump for immoderate social media posts, lack of self-control in his rhetoric and an addiction to ad hominem attacks stooped well below anything Trump has ever tweeted with a “Sopranos-esque” “Shut up you ugly fuck!”
That doesn’t mean the President won’t eventually go that low, but for the nonce, I really don’t care to hear anyone from that party (or that pimps for it, like, you know, the news media) criticizing the President for unpresidential language.
The tweet also tells us, as others have, what the character and attitudes of young Democrats are. If you don’t like mis-installed ethics alarms of current Democrats and progressives, just wait for the ones coming up the ranks.
“An alderperson for the City of Waukegan was charged after allegedly mailing in a vote on behalf of her dead mother. Dr. Sylvia Sims Bolton was charged with knowingly falsifying election material, a felony, and disregarding election code, a misdemeanor.The investigation began in March, according to the Lake County clerk’s office.According to election records, a vote by mail ballot for Mary Sims, her mother, was issued and mailed by the Lake County Clerk’s Office on Feb. 5.On Feb. 12, the Lake County Clerk’s Office processed the cancelation of Mary Sim’s voter registration after receiving notification of her death record from the Illinois Department of Public Health.
The ballot was returned on Feb. 26
During a review, election officials identified that the voter’s death record had been processed prior to the return of the ballot. After evaluating the returned envelope and confirming that the ballot had been submitted after the voter’s recorded date of death, the matter was escalated internally and reported to the Lake County Sheriff’s Office for investigation.
Bolton is accused of voting for her mother after she had passed away. She surrendered Wednesday morning.
‘The safeguards and verification procedures in place within our election system worked exactly as intended,’ said Anthony Vega. ‘Our staff followed established protocols, identified the irregularity, and immediately coordinated with law enforcement to ensure this matter is thoroughly investigated. Protecting the integrity of our elections remains our highest priority.’
The investigation did not uncover any facts linking the above allegations to her city duties as an alderperson.”
Gee, I wonder what party the “alderperson” belongs to? Since the media report doesn’t say, I’m assuming she’s a Democrat. (She is.) And how ironic that the only person who uses the mail-in ballot system to cheat happens to be an elected official!
Okay, I’m being arch. The Democratic party likes cheating and gaslighting. Just as Biden’s Homeland Security Secretary said under oath that the Southern border was secure and the entire party (as well as its media enablers) insisted that President Biden was “sharp as a tack,” it has claimed for years now that there is “no evidence” of widespread voter fraud and the more secure election procedures are “a return to Jim Crow.”
Call me sentimental and patriotic, but on Memorial Day 2026, I believe we have better people to remember than George Floyd, and almost anyone is more appropriate to honor.
We can and should blame President Trump, along with the foolish voters of Georgia, for the fact that someone as unqualified and ethically inert as Sen. Warnock is in Congress today and not haunting a ramshackle church somewhere. You will recall that Trump made the two 2021 special Georgia Senate elections into referendums on the January 6 riots and his claims of a stolen election, and managed to snatch two defeats from the jaws of victory.
Still, using Memorial Day to extol a lifetime street punk who was overdosing on fentanyl while resisting arrest demonstrates a special kind of sick priorities. There is literally nothing, zero, nada, to admire, respect or honor George Floyd for. He was in the right wrong place at the right wrong time, and an audacious cabal of race-hustlers exploited his accidental death by bad cop to extort all manner of weak principled businesses and institutions into white guilt seizures, causing extensive, perhaps irreparable harm to the nation, society, race relations, the justice system and more. Poor dumb, useless George wasn’t at fault for any of this, but Senator Warnock and ethics villains like him were.
Ethics villain, Jim Acosta eventually quit CNN in a snit because it began showing a little bit of balance regarding President Trump, but how was such a partisan, biased Axis hack allowed to be CNN’s White House correspondent in the first place? The guy is an A1 Choice USDA -certified ethics villain and, incidentally, an asshole.
Cheer-leading for Colbert is signature significance, to begin with. Gutfield is correct on the facts: it has been verified repeatedly that CBS was losing millions on Colbert.
Acosta then defaults to the Axis narrative that President Trump got Colbert cancelled. It’s a lie, flat out. “Dear Leader” is a sarcastic name used by the Trump Deranged. This Axis “advocacy journalist” was out to trash President Trump from the moment he was elected,
Then Acosta privets to the “poor fired employees” guilt trip. They lost their jobs because the show they were working for was losing money! It happens to the best of us (and me, several times). That’s how business works in the U.S. Too bad this isn’t the socialist worker’s paradise Acosta and his fellow travelers dream about. And Gutfield didn’t celebrate the staff losing their jobs anyway. He stated that the staff was ridiculously huge, which it was.
[I will link to Jim Acosta’s ugly EA dossier when WordPress is functioning better, which it currently is not, and its “Happiness Engineers” (Yuck!) have been useless.]
He’s an Ethics Villain. When people complain about Trump calling the news media the “enemy of the people,” Jim Acosta is Exhibit A in the President’s defense.
Note: Exhibit B could be Dana Milbank, whom the Washington Post finally jettisoned as one of its partisan columnists after years of Axis hackery. Today on ABC he cited as one of the three reasons Kamala Harris lost the election was “the backlash against a black woman being the Democratic nominee.” Just thinking that, never mind saying it in public, disqualifies anyone as a serious and trustworthy analyst. Milbank was a political reporter and columnist for the Washington Post for 25 years.
I always thought of the Amish as a devout religious sect with thee courage of their faith’s convictions, notably that technology is a tool of Satan, and the way to be closer to God is to eschew the modern developments that slowly but surely corrupt us all. That describes an ethical culture to me, if one that I personally find extreme and illogical. Google tells me that “The Amish are a traditionalist Christian group of Swiss-German Anabaptist heritage known for their pacifism, simple living, plain dress, and reluctance to adopt modern conveniences. Numbering roughly 411,000 across North America, they primarily reside in rural settlements in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana.” That’s nice. I’ve seen “Witness” several times, and assumed that Harrison Ford film more or less accurately portrayed Amish society.
I was also vaguely aware that there were variations withing the sect, based on, to some extent, relative isolation because of the general rejection of modern communication methods. Every local congregation operates under an unwritten set of rules called the Ordnung. These dictate daily life, acceptable technology, and community standards.
Today I realized that the Amish are not, in fact, a conservative religious sect that believes it can best maintain traditional values by rejecting technology. It is, in fact, a cult without integrity regarding technology. The Unabomber had more integrity.
According to New York Magazine (Stipulated:I am relying here on a source that I have found to be unreliable before, but unless the piece by Eric German is a flat-out lie as well as an attempt to defame the Amish, I believe it is trustworthy.), “The Amish Are Falling in Love With AI: Cars and TVs might be banned, but some sects are all-in on ChatGPT.”
“Holmes County, Ohio, has the highest concentration of Amish people of any county in the U.S. Visitors expecting to see traditional horses and buggies, bonnets and Abe Lincoln beards, won’t be disappointed. Still, they’ll find Amish entrepreneurs plugging into the digital economy and one clan of early adopters weaving generative AI into their knowledge work without much hesitation. Of course, none of this sounds like the tech-shy Amish life in the popular imagination. However, there’s no such thing as a single Amish approach to technology. There are some 2,600 Amish churches across the country, and each makes its own, separate decisions about what sorts of new hardware and software church members can use. The Wengerd’s church is Old Order Amish. Its married members dress plainly, don’t drive cars or own TVs, and don’t connect their homes to the electrical grid….Daniel is a minister in his church and has played a role in the congregation’s collective decisions to interdict smartphones and social media but to allow e-bikes, flip phones, solar-generated electricity, and religiously curated internet access. “I don’t want to paint a picture that we’re pushing for new technology and we don’t have respect for our traditions and our values,” he tells me. “We’re not just opening the door to anything.”
Sure they are. In fact, I can see no legitimate argument that a sect that embraces artificial intelligence can be taken seriously when it simultaneously rejects standard electricity, television and automobiles. Ethics is based on integrity, and requires holding to consistent standards subject to continuous testing and re-evaluation based on observed experience. Morality, in contrast, requires obeying clear rules of conduct that will be enforced by an authority, in the case of religion, God. The Amish appear to have neither a moral code nor ethical principles regarding technology. “We believe modern technology is a corrupting force in modern society and that it is not sanctioned by God, unless the technology is really cool and can save us time, like chatbots” is not a coherent code of conduct.
This is religion as Calvinball, the satirical “Calvin and Hobbes” game where the rules are made up as you go along. In Mark Harris’s novel “Bang the Drum Slowly,” a team’s baseball players fleece gullible fans by luring them into a gambling card game called “Tagwar.” It’s an acronym for “the amazing game without any rules.” It’s cheating.
If you can process this whole astounding ethics debacle and come out anything but but disgusted and disillusioned, you apparently are capable of rationalizing anything.
Hint: This is not a good thing.
In this post, I wrote about the gob-smacking, unprecedented settlement of President Donald Trump’s lawsuit over the leaking of his tax returns. My conclusion yesterday: “[T]his deal stinks, and should be challenged ethically if not legally. The whole Justice Department and the Treasury Department too had irresolvable conflicts, and should not have been allowed to make a settlement with their own boss.”
I learned of this revolting development two days ago, when a Trump Deranged relative asked me why my ethicist head wasn’t exploding over “Trump’s corrupt deal with the IRS that gave him a billion dollars to pay his militia, the J-6 rioters.” I had no idea what she was talking about. See, she only watches MSNow for news, and of course they were all over the story, as were all the Axis news platforms. The last few days I have been less than diligent in my bi-partisan news searches, mostly checking websites. However, that potentially exaggerated description of what two Executive cabinet departments and their employees who Trump can fire at will agreed to in settlement of a lawsuit that almost certainly would have been tossed by any judge who could beat Justice Jackson in Scrabble turned out to be shockingly accurate.
Now we are learning that the deal is even worse than it first appeared to be. This account is straight from Politico. I will not make a habit of the lazy Instapundit-Althouse blogging practice of posting a long quote or article and asking readers, “What do you think?”, but the ethics horror here is pretty straightforward, and I would just be rewording the item unnecessarily:
I would’ve come out sooner, but I had to call my opponent and concede. And it took a while to find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv.”
—Rep Thomas Massie, (R-Ky) after losing his primary against a Trump-endorsed candidate.
I would have more respect for Massie if he just came right out and called his opponent a “Jew-lover.”
Nothing could more emphatically validate President Trump’s decision to oppose Massie, who has cemented undying infamy at Ethics Alarms by insulting a victorious opponent in his concession speech. Such lack of civility, respect and decorum only exacerbates the decline of civic comity in Washington, and there is no excuse for it. Being a poor loser shows poor character, and an inability to meet one of the key markers of virtue in Rudyard Kipling’s “If”: “Meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.”
Naturally the Washington Post lionizes Massie in defeat, saying his lost primary was because of his “consistent unwillingness to go along to get along,” and that “Massie’s independence earned the enmity of President Donald Trump, who deployed his political machine to crush Massie and recruited primary winner Ed Gallrein. Yet the quixotic congressman, for better or worse, always seemed more driven by ideas than personalities.”
Yeah. One of those keen “ideas” was anti-Semitism. Burying the lede, the Post’s long sigh regarding Massie’s loss culminates in this admission:
“He was the only House Republican to vote against a resolution condemning antisemitism. Reasonable people might oppose U.S. aid to Israel, but Massie too often did so with over-the-top, even conspiratorial, rhetoric.”
Well nobody’s perfect.
Post Script: You want unethical “advocacy journalism”? Read the MSNow spin on Massie’s loss. Trump’s “revenge,” “a huge cost,” the whole event is presented as a platform for more Trump-bashing. No mention of Massie’s anti-Semitism, which all by itself justifies, indeed mandates, his loss. But then the MSNow gang is angry about all those dog-rapes…
I checked to see if Ethics Alarms has ever had a post about the Congressional Black Caucus, and there have been many, that didn’t indicate an an unethical culture embedded in the group like a tic.
No.
So I suppose the recent example shows that at very least, the CBC is consistent.
For over six years now, the NCAA and other collegiate sports organizations have been asking for Congress to reform college sports, which has been confused and chaotic since schools were told that they had to treat college athletes like mercenaries rather than students. The SCORE ACT is sorta kinda such legislation, and was was supposed to come up for a vote in the House of Representatives this week but was pulled from the floor at the last minute.
A few hours before the vote was again postponed indefinitely, the bill slammed into a roadblock when the Congressional Black Caucus and its 54 voting members in the House announced unanimous opposition to the SCORE Act, not because of anything the bill contained or ignored. The CBC announced that it would oppose the law until the SEC, ACC, and NCAA started protesting state gerrymandering and redistricting that didn’t benefit black Democrats. In other words, the CDC is practicing extortion. It is telling sports organizations that they must endorse the “good discrimination” against whites that the Supreme Court just declared illegal and unconstitutional (because, you know, it is), and if they don’t, well, the CBC will just refuse to vote for laws that have nothing to do with race, redistricting, sports or college. Neener neener!
Kudos to Ann Althouse: she flagged the use of the old chair dominance trick by Xi to make sure he appeared higher in his chair than President Trump.
Ann’s sketchy popular culture literacy was also exposed again: most normally-acculturated Americans would immediately think of the famous scene in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” where George Bailey (James Stewart) bargains with town bully Mr. Potter in a chair that reduces him to the stature of a child. Ann’s mind went instead to the scene in “The Great Dictator,” a far less well-known Chaplin film, where satirical versions of Mussolini and Hitler (Chaplin) keep raising their chairs’ heights during a meeting. Ann’s choice makes the point better, but she often posts about not having watched a lot of old movies, and it shows. (I have watched too many old movies, and it also shows.)
But kudos to Ann again for tracking down a December 2, 1987David Letterman show when a young Donald Trump called out Letterman for having his guest chairs lower than the host’s, complaining, “How come this seat is at such a low level? You know, I’m looking at him. He’s got this stage rigged, folks…. That seat is a good six inches higher than my seat.”
Notes:
In law school I took a negotiation course from Adrian Fisher, then the Dean of Georgetown Law Center and known as a key U.S. negotiator in both SALT Treaties. Fisher had an exhaustive knowledge of negotiation mind games, and mentioned the chair trick as such a well-known and devious tactic that attempting it would be regarded as an insult by professional diplomats.
Trump had the good sense not to mention his annoyance with the chair trick in China. This indicates to me that he is capable of self-restraint when he chooses to exercise it, which is, obviously, not nearly enough.
Read (at Ann’s link above) the exchange between Letterman and Trump from 40 years ago. I detect no difference in Trump’s discourse from what we are used to today. One of the more irritating Big Lies the Axis (including my Trump Deranged Facebook friends) keeps pushing is that Trump’s rhetoric indicates cognitive decline (so he should be removed via the 25th Amendment.) He’s always talked this way.
Letterman has also always been an asshole. And a liar. When Trump points out that Letterman’s chair is “a good six inches” higher than Trump’s chair, Letterman says “And so am I” suggesting that it’s an illusion because he’s taller than Trump. Letterman is (or was) 6’2″ and Trump is (or was) an inch taller.
I blame Letterman for late night TV turning into the all-partisan-propaganda-all-the-time blight on society epitomized by Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert. He’s an Ethics Villain.
Trump proved in that exchange that he, like Fisher, knew the negotiation game well.
Note also in the transcript how a Trump was talking about the same international trade grievances in 1987 that he has tried to address in his second term.
Letterman meanwhile, like any good class-obsessed left-winger, keeps trying to bring the discussion around to Trump’s wealth because, after all, as AOC tells us, billionaires are the cause of most of America’s problems.
Letterman’s wealth is estimated to be only 400 million.
Ethics Alarms 