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.
I started reading a column in the Huffington Post that Ethics Alarms commenter Cornelius Gotchberg linked to today, and got almost half-way through it before I realized it wasn’t satire. But, horrifyingly, “It’s Time For The Biden Campaign To Embrace AI” isn’t satire. And now we know what kind of ethical limitations Democrats and progressives place on their tactics as they desperately try to save Joe Biden and their own metaphorical necks.
None. No limits at all. By any means necessary. The ends justify the means. In what this dangerous party has become, it’s Machiavelli and Big Brother all the way down.
This explains a lot…
Since there is some reason to suspect that Jill Biden has been doing an Edith Wilson impression for at least some of her husband’s ill-starred term as President, a substacker decided to do a deep dive into Dr. Jill Biden’s dissertation to assess exactly how intellectually qualified she is to be shadow-President. What she found was, to understate it, horrifying….and yet, all in all, not surprising.
To summarize, the doctorate of education Jill received from the University of Delaware in January 2007 was based on a “scholarly” dissertation that was objectively crap. It is riddled with typos, mathematical errors, and horrible writing. Holly Mathnerd (not her real name, presumably) writes in part (this is a huge essay),
If Joe Scarborough had a scrap of decency, an atom of responsibility, or a wisp of the capacity for shame, he would voluntarily end his “Morning Joe” show, retire to private life, and ideally wear a paper bag over his head ’til the end of his days. Of course, if MSNBC was a professional news operation and not a den of hacks, it wouldn’t allow Scarborough back on the air next week.
I nearly posted about Scarborough two days ago, before I saw this clip today. He was featured in the Times piece titled “One by One, Biden’s Closest Media Allies Defect After the Debate.” The main three close Biden “media allies” mentioned were Morning Joe, Van Jones and NYT columnist Thomas Friedman. I was going to write something along the lines of, “Scarborough, Jones and Friedman! Would it be possible to gather an array of less credible, more ethically-revolting weasels? Having allies like them mean nothing, and having allies like them abandon you means nothing. Has the fable of the Scorpion and the Frog ever been more applicable?” Here’s the last addition to Van Jones’ Ethics Alarms dossier: he’s a proven anti-white race-huckster and face-man who cleans up nice for cameras and usually keeps his inner racist at bay so he can keep his lucrative CNN gig. The last time Friedman made the blog was in 2019, when he wrote that President Trump was “protected by big media outlets”! He really wrote that.
Now here’s how the sad Times story begins, talking about Scarborough:
The <gasp!> apocalyptic news was the New York Times posting an editorial board statement telling Biden he has to go “for the good of the country.” Of course, the Times can’t be expected to accept a share of responsibility for saddling the U.S. with Biden by burying the credible account of a staffer who claimed he raped her, hiding the Hunter laptop story until the success of Joe’s basement campaign was cinched, and generally serving as an uncritical Democratic Party cheering section when it counts. The Times also let the completely discredited Lincoln Project take a typical shot at Trump in its op-ed pages. And a silly one: the Project’s mouthpiece said that Trump botched the debate because he didn’t “lay out a positive economic plan to appeal to middle-class voters feeling economic pressure” (Sure he did: get Joe Biden out of the White House! Works for me!) and reverse himself on abortion, saving “young girls” from having to “endure extremist politicians eager to criminalize what was a constitutional right for two generations.” No woman is in danger of ever being imprisoned in the U.S. for having an abortion. Dumb prosecutors will do dumb things, but that’s no reason to ignore the critical issue at the core of the abortion problem: the delicate human lives abortion enthusiasts want to ignore. In the debate, Trump focused on that. It wasn’t a mistake.
As for the Times board, it dutifully parroted the official DNC talking points about Trump’s lies and “lies,” as if Biden wasn’t spitting out whoppers himself when it was possible to figure out what he was saying. The Times also used the latest trope from the Axis: Republicans should consider replacing Trump. Sure, that makes sense. If Biden was a complete vegetable and still beating Trump in the polls, is there any chance that Democrats would replace him as their nominee? Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!
More:
All of the below, from his web newsletter “The Silver Bulletin,” in which Silver reveals what his current system of handicapping elections currently foretells regarding the 2024 election. Nate is supposed to be part of the Left’s pro-Democrat, pro-progressive, pro-Biden propaganda machine, so his usual allies are furious with him for “following the science. He writes in part, explaining the results above,
Well, some, anyway…
Jamaal Bowman (that’s him caught on video setting off a false fire alarm to halt a House vote) lost the House District 16 primary in New York to a veteran Democrat who knows the difference between a fire alarm and and a door. The average IQ of the House just went up several points. The assumption is that it was his aggressive support for Gaza and Hamas against Israel that sunk him; if so, his loss is an example of voters doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. The man is ignorant, dishonest, and dumb as a shingle.
To temper one’s joy at this development, I must note that Lauren Boebert, one of the more embarrassing members of the House from the other side of the aisle, won her primary in Colorado’s 4th District.
Meanwhile, in the special hypocrisy category, John Avlon won the Democratic nomination for the U.S. House in New York’s 1st Congressional District. Avlon, a former CNN commentator and a columnist for The Daily Beast for years, was an early target of Ethics Alarms for his promotion of a “No Labels” movement, which was really a “Democrats who want to pretend they aren’t partisan who use labels like ‘wingnuts’ against conservatives while accusing them of engaging in name-calling.” He’s a phony, but, to look on the bright side, he’s smarter than Boebert and Bowman would be if you soldered their two brains together. And, true to form, he was happy to take the label of “Democrat,” when it suited his purposes, not that his “No Labels” posturing fooled anyone.
Sorett has revealed himself to be the most despicable, incompetent and untrustworthy leader of a prestigious U.S. college, an astounding achievement when you consider the competition.
Silly me, I thought the original story was as bad as it could get. How wrong I was. To recap this post, during a Columbia panel on the campus’s anti-Semitism, Sorett, the Dean of Columbia College, exchanged mocking and derisive texts about the panelists statements about how the pro-Hamas protesters had poisoned the educational environment for Jewish students with the vice dean and chief administrative officer of the college, the dean of undergraduate student life; and the associate dean for student and family support. Unfortunately for all of them, another attendee behind one of the texters took incriminating snap shots of the cell phone screen that revealed the dismissive texts.
After being busted, Sorett tried the Pazuzu Excuse (‘what I said or did wasn’t really me!’) which is bad enough, but “the rest of the story” is worse. This creep fuzzed over the fact that he was part of the texting orgy in his original statement after the texts were revealed, and then put the other three administrators on leave! Nice. The least he could have done was show some solidarity with his fellow anti-Semites and suspend himself. As the highest ranking member of the gossip group, a strong argument can be made that he ratified and enabled the offensive discussion. In fact, I’ll make it: he was more accountable than the three administrators he punished.
Stephen Colbert is really is beneath contempt. His late night show proudly promoted the guest appearance of Anthony Fauci last week, which is roughly the equivalent of cheering for the Sackler family. This is one of the subtle ways—not so subtle, really—that the media pimps for Democrats and the party’s agenda (“The Government knows best, proles!”) Colbert only has guests that align with the Axis; Nancy Pelosi was another recent guest, and the producers obviously have no interest in presenting anyone who isn’t fully part of the “team.” They also don’t have any interest in entertaining audience members who, having paid attention and having not been brainwashed, know the likes of Pelosi and Fauci for what they are.
Fauci, however, is a far more nauseating and unforgivable object of fawning idolatry than even Pelosi. He’s a certifiable, no-contest ethics villain: incompetent, irresponsible, dishonest, hypocritical, an abuser of power, position and influence, and the perfect poster boy for the fake “Trust the science!” mantra that the Left has weaponized for political gain.
––Ethics Alarms troll “David” signing off after being banned
Why is this just an “ethics quote” instead of an “unethical quote”? I chose that designation because the line is invaluable information, revealing the crippling delusions at the heart of the implacable Trump-deranged that swarm around us.
“David” entered the fray here demonstrating some rhetorical ability and intelligence. It became clear, however, that he was here only as a hostile adversary and an advocate, not to explore ethics issues but to confront those whose analysis didn’t mesh with his pre-determined ideological and partisan biases, which proved unshakable. They also manifested themselves in trolling and sealioning tactics to relentlessly push a single narrative, the one that the news media, the resistance, Democrats and, to significant extent, Trump himself has fostered by his own incurable trolling habit.
The sequence that produced that quote goes like this. Trump is a bad person, and thus anything he is accused of, anything harmful that is predicted about his future conduct, any malign motives or intent that is attributed to him. must be true regardless of the sources and irrespective of facts. The confluence of these presumed vile acts, confident predictions and bad motives and intent points to racism, lust for power, instability, a thirst for revenge, and determination to topple the democracy. This, in turn, “proves ” that Trump is a super-villain out of Marvel Comics, and driven by fascist aspirations.
Ethics Alarms 