A really, really smart friend whom I respect a great deal just posted on Facebook that the President, on one of his sophomoric name-calling jags, had mocked Sen. Ossoff (whom I just posted about today, coincidentally) as “Pinky Herman.” My friend wrote that Trump was obviously mixing up Peewee Herman with Pinky Lee, a vaudeville kids TV star in the Fifties. “More proof of dementia,” my friend wrote.
I never thought of it before, but it seems to me that Pinky Lee might well have inspired Paul Rubens’ decades later kids’ show character. Pinky and Peewee are pretty similar names. Confusing the two is hardly evidence of dementia, unless the one making the mistake is Donald Trump.
But as usual, everyone on Facebook laughs, likes, and acts as if this stupid smear is a profound diagnosis. Fifteen years ago, I confused Aaron Burr and Raymond Burr while teaching a seminar and didn’t even realize it. Another time I said “Helen Keller” when I meant to say “Anne Frank.” I have mixed up my Jacksons on occasion: Jesse, Reggie, Andy, Michael and Stonewall. I assuredly do not have dementia. I think claiming that Trump does based on mixing up two fey comic kids show stars with similar names is more evidence of mental decline than anything either Trump or I have done.
I really detest this stuff. It is so petty, disrespectful, ungenerous and obnoxious. And, you know, Trump might have deliberately merged Pinky and Pee-wee, which would have been clever. Nah, it couldn’t have been that…
I remember Pinky well. I even remember the words to his song:
Yoo hoo, it’s me! My name is Pinky Lee. I skip and run bring lots of fun To every he and she! It’s plain to see That you can tell it’s me! With my checkered hat And my checkered coat, The funny giggle in my throat And my silly dance Like a billy goat!
Clyburn is already presumptively a blight on the body politick since he is widely regarded as responsible for “saving” Joe Biden’s candidacy in 2020. And didn’t that work out well!
Even aside from his role in the Biden Presidency Ethics Train Wreck, Rep. Clyburn has one of the worst Ethics Alarms dossiers of any politician. Most recently, EA noted that Cliburn told the dim-bulb ladies “The View” that Republicans were trying to restore slavery, and that isn’t even necessarily the dumbest thing he has said in public over the years. Cliburn is neither honest, ethical, fair or bright, but he did walk shoulder-to-shoulder with the sainted Martin Luther King in civil rights protests, and that is sufficient justification, according the the Left’s addled value system and his South Carolina district, to guarantee the man a lifetime sinecure in Congress.
Every now and then Clyburn says something so outrageous that it even has to make progressives and Democrats doubt the wisdom of letting the 86 year-old hang around to make Congress dumber. This week, he was asked by a Vox reporter about artificial intelligence and its tremendous influence on the workplace, education, and the economy. Not only did Clyburn answer that he’s never used AI, he admitted that he hadn’t heard of ChatGPT before this month.The exchange in part:
Reporter: “No ChatGPT, no Claude for you?”
Clyburn: “Believe it or not, I didn’t know what that was until about a week ago. ChatGPT, or whatever it is.”
Reporter: “You didn’t know ’til a week ago? Wow. I mean, I’m jealous. You’ve kept yourself in a bubble.”
Clyburn: “That may sound strange to you. I didn’t know what that was.”
…
Reporter: “How do you effectively legislate as a member who is distant from some of those technological shifts that are affecting folks’ lives right now?”
Clyburn: “I have a great staff. I wish I could know everything. I don’t know everything, and I don’t spend my time trying to learn everything. What I spend my time doing is trying to surround myself with people who do know stuff. I know how to legislate. I know how to build relationships, and I hire people to bring knowledge into the game that I can put to practice.”
Give him credit for one thing: Clyburn is at least transparent about how clueless and incompetent he is. He wishes he knew everything? How about knowing that massive technological changes are occurring right now and that the AI revolution erupted in 2024? Clyburn really said that he knows how to legislate while admitting that he doesn’t keep informed of what he needs to legislate about.
Nobody who pays any attention to the news, the culture, social media, the law, education, the economy…anything current, really, could have missed “ChatGPT, or whatever it is.” Ah, but Rep. Clyburn still marched with MLK Jr., and that’s what really counts in 2026.
🚨 WATCH: Chairman @RepTimBurchett exposes the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History Director by playing a compilation of her own remarks implying Americans are illegitimately occupying their own country.
Earlier this week, EA discussed how Rep. Brandon Gill exposed the horrifying wokey nonsense the head of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has inflicted on the museum during her tenure. It turns out that I was too kind, and that this silly, biased and indoctrinated woman is even more intolerable than I thought.
Before she was eviscerated by Gill, Rep. Tim Burchette’s introduction was res ipsa loquitur stuff, so inherently damning that further questioning of Anthea Hartig was unnecessary. The pièce de résistance comes at the 1;35 mark, when we get a montage of Hartig dutifully giving prayer-like “land acknowledgment” grovels to Native American activists. The list is long, but near the top of mockery-requiring leftist rituals that mark practitioners as unworthy of trust, power or responsibility has to be these ahistorical claims that the United States is an illegitimate sovereignty built on “stolen lands.”
It is bad history, bad law and bad logic, transparent virtue signaling to those who don’t know what virtue is. If someone is really so shattered by working and living on “stolen lands” nothing stops such an addled individual from tracking down some member of the Patawippumkokavackimminy tribe and handing over the keys to his or her home. Hartig won’t do that, of course, because she’s either a hypocrite, a pandering fake or more likely both.
Believing it is appropriate for a representative of the U.S.’s national museum to begin every speech or public appearance emphasizing one of our nation’s two alleged “original sins” as if that is the defining feature of the nation should have marked Hartig for swift removal long ago—in fact, how did such a fool get hired in the first place? I can on;y conclude that it is because her political party likes anti-Americanism and wants our country to be seen as a villain, not just by the rest of the world, but by its own citizens.
Another post script on presentation skills: I hate to keep harping on this, but people whose living involves communication have an obligation to learn how to communicate. Burchette is terrible; I found it hard to focus on his content, so annoying was his vocal placement, droning tone and lack of engagement with the camera. Again, this isn’t hard to fix; all it requires is the will to fix it. I resent having to listen to public figures like Burchette. He is either too lazy or stupid to make an effort to help people understand and focus on what he is saying.
The American Bar Association’s own website says, “All of us have implicit biases.” I asked its president which groups she holds bias against. pic.twitter.com/Pebduv8lVL
— Congressman Brandon Gill (@RepBrandonGill) July 22, 2026
“This is embarrassing,” Rep. Brandon Gill said, as Michelle A. Behnke ( from Madison, Wisconsin—of course she is), the president of the American Bar Association (ABA) repeatedly refused to answer direct questions, was infuriatingly evasive and displayed nauseating hypocrisy and dishonesty as Rep. Brandon Gill questioned her regarding DEI, bias and discrimination. It was embarrassing, for Democrats, progressives, fans of permanent anti-white discrimination, members of the ABA (the largest American bar association, which I refuse to join expressly because of the organization’s lack of integrity ) so flamingly displayed by Behnke, and especially all lawyers. How can the public trust a “profession” that allows such a shifty, pusillanimous, dishonest individual to represent it by leading its members’ largest and most prestigious organization?
President Donald Trump had a statue of Thomas Jefferson placed in the Rose Garden last week, bringing to five the number of sculptures he has added this year. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton, and a sculpture honoring Revolutionary War soldiers preceded the one honoring our third President and the author of the Declaration of Independence.
Naturally the Washington Post is sneering at the project, even going to the trouble of finding an expert, Maxwell Anderson, the former president of the Association of Art Museum Directors, to sniff that the statues statues are of “negligible artistic value.” You know, not like the Obama Presidential Library…
…or the obscene thing supposedly representing the Kings embracing
…or the King Memorial, which makes me think of Han Solo hanging on Jabba the Hutt’s wall.
The Jefferson statue is of “negligible artistic value” because President Trump selected it, just as the Reflecting Pool upgrade has to be mocked and sabotaged because it is this President’s project. Trump Derangement is pure Cognitive Dissonance Scale craziness: the President’s endorsement of dogs—fortunately he is the only POTUS in memory who hasn’t put a dog in the White House as a political prop—would have much of the Left siding with Mamdani’s anti-canine Muslims.
The statues are also irritants to the Axis and pals because the Rose Garden sculptures that arrived before Tom’s are on loan from Harland Crow, the conservative billionaire who has lavished gifts on Clarence Thomas. That’s also cognitive dissonance at work where it doesn’t belong. The owner of artwork has no relevance to the quality of the art, just as the character of the artist is irrelevant to any assessment of the artist’s work. There should be nothing controversial about the White House honoring patriots and Founders on its grounds, and there isn’t. No Chief Executive in our history has been so absurdly attacked over non-substantive matters. President Trump’s real offense is that he dared to persevere into the headwinds of presumed leftist dominance and prevailed. How dare he?
Today Stephen Kruiser, a conservative gadfly, began his daily with “The GOP Midterm Theme Should Be ‘Joe McCarthy Was Right'” and later writes, “Democrats and their flying monkeys in the mainstream media are… still badmouthing Joe McCarthy after seven decades and he was right about everything.”
That is offensive and ignorant. Ann Coulter has made similar claims over the years. Joe McCarthy was right about just one thing: there were Communists and communist sympathizers in the U.S. government then and there probably are now. He was wrong in his methods, he was dishonest in his tactics, he was hostile to freedom of speech and freedom of thought, he was an anti-Semite and an anti-gay bigot, he weaponized guilt by association, and his response to criticism or opposition was exactly the same as so many minority politicians and women like Kamala Harris, Jasmine Crockett and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reflexively respond to opposition today. They cry “Racist!” or “Sexist!” Joe cried “Communist sympathizer!” It’s the same tactic.
Senator McCarthy waved papers in the air that he said contained confirmed Communists, but never revealed the names. The consensus is that the papers were probably blank. He wanted all homosexuals fired from sensitive positions because they were, he said, vulnerable to blackmail by Communist agents seeking to recruit them to undermine the United States. (So was being an alcoholic, like Joe.) He cynically exploited Cold War tensions to build his political influence and power, and aligned himself with the same forces in the nation that created blacklists.
McCarthy was the epitome of the patriotic demagogue. “McCarthyism,” which denotes the practice of wielding unsubstantiated accusations and the defamation of political opponents through calculated fear-mongering, was a fair description of the Senator’s methods, and is a perfect description of what the Left’s Axis of Unethical Conduct has been practicing since 2016. You know, like…
Extolling Joe McCarthy, an all-time Ethics Villain and a blight on our political history, is as repulsive as defending Graham Platner, Tim Walz or New York’s Mayor Mamdani. It is historically and ethically ignorant.
Post Script: As much as I view “iconic” Washington Post cartoonist Herb Block as an over-rated partisan hack, he certainly had Joe McCarthy pegged early on. “Herblock” habitually portrayed McCarthy with a bucket of tar and a dripping paint brush, a vivid image of his methods.
The ethics in the now viral incident at the start of a Chicago Cubs baseball game are clear as a mountain stream. A Gen Z slug was ignoring the National Anthem, a Vietnam vet sitting behind him took offense and demanded that he stand, and when the kid resisted, gave him a sharp slap “upside the head.” Then the young fan finally stood up.
The online debate is contrived. Of course…
…the young fan was being disrespectful and deserved the rebuke
…he was also being ignorant, forgetting that there are a lot of veterans who take loyalty and reverence to the nation they served very seriously; my father would have said something to him
…he still had a right to sit if he chose to, though doing so was unethical,
…hitting the kid was indefensible, even if the contact was light and more symbolic than serious, and
…the young fan showed good judgment by capitulating and not allowing the conflict to escalate.
Further observations…
1. To his credit, the slapper says that he regrets the slap.
2. He also says he and the kid shared a beer at the game. That speaks well of the young man. It is also very typical of the kind of human comradery I have witnessed at baseball games many times over the years. Everyone there has a bond with everyone else—they are baseball fans and usually fans of the same team.
3. Lots of the critics of the veteran remind us that the slap was battery. No, it wasn’t assault: assault is when the victim is placed in fearful anticipation of unwelcome contact; battery is the contact itself. Since the slappee was hit from behind and didn’t see it coming, there was no assault, just battery.
4. Though technically a tort and a crime, the chances of either getting substantive legal redress is about zero. De minimis non curat lex.
5. If the slapper was the kid’s father, mother, or sibling, we never would have heard about the episode
5. Questions: would the veteran have handled the situation the same way if the kid had been black? Female? A Muslim? My guess: no, no, and no.
6. If the kid was with a group of peers, would he have stood? Would the vet have confronted him if he were with friends?
7. Would a black fan have behaved the same as the white kid? Maybe. If not, however, the incident would be characterized as a racial clash by the media.
“Vang’s actions 20 years ago were awful, but so were the violent protests at the U.S. Capitol on Jan.6, 2021, and those folks received Presidential pardons.”
—–The Minnesota Star, cheering on Gov. Tim “Knucklehead” Walz’s sick decision to pardon a serial child rapist in an attempt to foil efforts to deport him.
No one can trust a news source capable of putting such illogical, unethical garbage in print. Defense by non-sequitur! “Sure, he raped a child repeatedly for years, but Jeffrey Dahmer ate people!” There is no basis for comparison between the J-6 rioters, all citizens and jailed, some for a couple of years, for a single act, and a non-citizen who never spent a day in prison despite pleading guilty to multiple child rapes. The Star’s bizarre logic doesn’t even rise to the level of the worst of all rationalizations, Rationalization #22, The Comparative Virtue Excuse, or “There are worse things.” Is the idea that Walz trying to let a child molester stay in his state is good because Trump’s pardon of the rioters wasn’t? What is the Star trying to say? Do the editors even know?
Then the Star’s grand finale is to quote with approval another one of Walz’s idiotic outbursts. “Taking them out with no due process”? Vang received a final order of removal in October 2006! There was due process to spare.
Not for the first time, I find myself wondering how the once great state of Minnesota came to such a precipitous decline in values and common sense. Once represented by the likes of Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy, it is led by a principle-free, incompetent fool, with an addled newspaper like the Star warping the news to disguise his incompetence. Minnesotans used to be smart, creative, rational. They had standards, they had pride. What happened? Now they are sitting by while their state’s #1 paper applauds their Governor for pardoning a child rapist, and one who made it clear that he doesn’t think raping children is anything to get upset about. Americans are just weirdly prudish about such things!
So the citizens of Minnesota just nod their heads as their governor first pardons the man who rapes little girls and pays them to keep quiet, because Kamala choice’s to be VP wants to foil efforts to remove criminal non-citizens. They keep nodding as that governor describes years of multiple rapes as the rapist’s “worst day” [Vang didn’t think they were bad days at all], and nod some more as the Star calls Walz a hero for trying to inflict a sexual predator on their state permanently.
Several Ethics Alarms reader alerted me to this gobsmacking story, further evidence that the political left in this country is in the process of suffering a nervous breakdown. I am still not certain I am glad they did.
The court alluded to in the title is the Hawaii Supreme Court. That state needs to be given a bit of leeway for its excesses and delusions: Hawaii, even after more than half a century as our 50th state, is still a very different culture from the other 49. That’s part of its charm when you visit there, but it also has allowed a problematic mindset to linger. Hawaiians just don’t think the usual rules should apply to them, even in relation to the Constitution. Two years ago, in State v. Wilson, the Hawaii Supreme Court wrote that “[t]he spirit of Aloha clashes with a federally-mandated lifestyle that lets citizens walk around with deadly weapons,” and that Hawaii would read the Second Amendment “differently than the current United States Supreme Court.”
Oh. Except that a state can’t do that.
More recently, the same justice who wrote that defiant legal nonsense authored a full-on attack on the U.S. Supreme Court, tacked onto a rather mundane case about prosecutorial misconduct. I will re-publish the whole amazing section below, but KABOOM! It is head-exploding. The diatribe, because that’s what it is, covers voting rights, campaign finance, abortion, religious liberty, the Second Amendment, the major questions doctrine, Chevron deference, the spending power, the removal power, and birthright citizenship, while accusing the Roberts Court of being racist.
Such tangential rhetoric is known as dicta, parts of a legal opinion that carry no substantive legal weight at all since it is pure opinion without definitive case authority. Even dicta, however, is subject to certain professional and ethical constraints. The Hawaiian Supreme Court rantis a bright line breach of several tenets in state’s Code of Judicial Conduct.
Canon I states, “A JUDGE SHALL UPHOLD AND PROMOTE THE INDEPENDENCE, INTEGRITY, AND IMPARTIALITY OF THE JUDICIARY AND SHALL AVOID IMPROPRIETY AND THE APPEARANCE OF IMPROPRIETY.“
Under that banner are three mandates: Rule 1.1. Compliance with the Law, Rule 1.2. Promoting Confidence in the Judiciary, and Rule 1.3. Avoiding Misuse of the Prestige of Judicial Office. A statement that announces that a judge does not feel bound by U.S. Supreme Court decisions violates Rule 1.1. A judge attacking the integrity and motives of the U.S. Supreme Court undermines confidence in the judiciary, as prohibited by Rule 1.2. A judge using the prestige of his office to impugn a higher court is by definition an abuse of office, breaching Rule 1.3.
But wait! There’s more!
Canon 2 states, “A JUDGE SHALL PERFORM THE DUTIES OF JUDICIAL OFFICE IMPARTIALLY, COMPETENTLY, AND DILIGENTLY.”
The anti-SCOTUS section shows a judge giving priority to his partisan and political beliefs over his duties as a judge, violating Rule 2.1. His unhinged attack on past SCOTUS jurisprudence indicates that he is incapable of “upholding the law,” and that he is also incapable of “impartial” conduct. Moreover, the opinion constitutes a flagrant bias based on political affiliation, breaching Rule 2.3.
The outburst is even worse than the many rules violations suggest. The logic is tortured, the law is bad, and the arguments are hysterical as well as not based in reality; worst of all, the Hawaiian judges appear not to understand how SCOTUS fits into the Constitutional governance formula. The core goal underlying the tantrum is an arrogant belief in judicial activism and judges usurping legislatures, as the Warren court did habitually.
As a final rotten cherry on this putrid sundae of unethical judicial conduct, The National Review noticed that a bot probably wrote the text. Nice. My position is that judges using AI to write their opinions is impeachable conduct, but then so is issuing such an attack on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Here is the section, and I must add, having just read it through again, the naked Trump Derangement and partisan extremism is shocking. This isn’t just unethical. It is judicial insurrection. Luckily, progressives don’t read court opinions…
Following a theme that began with this morning’s ethics quiz, we now have the viral controversy over the obnoxious Lake Aswego (Oregon) Theater and Cafe marquee for “The Odyssey.”
On social media (and elsewhere), the theater’s owners are being accused of “disgustingly blatant antisemitism” as Hen Mazzig, an Israeli writer and senior fellow at the Tel Aviv Institute put it on “X.” I’m sorry I haven’t kept up on Lake Oswego movie theater marketing trends: apparently this one makes a habit of cheeky, politically provocative or otherwise controversial marquee messages. In February, for example, the theater’s message promoting “Melania,” the Amazon MGM documentary about First Lady Melania Trump, read, “To defeat your enemy, you must know them. Melania starts Friday.” Amazon pulled the movie from the theater, and the proprietors reacted with a “Who, us?” shrug.
That example is not irrelevant: Lake Oswego is heavily Democratic, reliably voting for Democratic candidates for all federal and state offices. The last time a Republican was favored by voters was in 2016, when it narrowly favored Republican Secretary of State candidate Dennis Richardson while the city and the state went into Hillary Clinton’s column in the Presidential race. Lake Oswego is in Oregon, one of the most fanatically progressive, Democratic and woke states in the union. 80% of Democrats, the Pew Research Center says, hold “an unfavorable view of Israel” as of June 2026, an 11-point increase from 2025.
How likely is it that the marquee in a place like Lake Oswego, was deliberately praising “the Jews” (You know, as in “the Jews made a heroic odyssey”to Canaan”) as opposed to cheekily denigrating them? Not bloody likely at all. Is the message an innocent comparison of the endless warring between Israel and Palestinians to the Trojan War? If so, then why only mention “the Jews”?
The online debate has seen a suspicious effort to deflect the real issue by arguing over whether “the Odyssey” was really before “the Jews.” Does the theater mean the actual voyage (there probably wasn’t one), or Homer’s poetic description of it? That’s not the real issue, and the debate over it is pedantic sophistry. The issue is whether the marquee is anti-Semitic, designed to appeal to anti-Semites (you know, progressives and Democrats), and cleverly composed to do so while giving the theater and fans of the smear plausible deniability.
