—“Clown nose on/clown nose off” Comedy Central comic Jon Stewart, in the course of blaming the Founders for the current Democrat Party shutdown of the Federal government.
Imagine: a large proportion of young Americans look to this fake authority for their news and political analysis. True, they could do even worse: Kimmel or Colbert; MSNBC, NPR, you know, what Capt. Renault in “Casablanca” would call “the usual suspects.” This latest outburst from the smug, intermittently witty know-it-all, failed actor (like Bill Maher), however, may represent his absolute low point, and he has had many previous stinkers.
But with his latest rant, we can see just how useless, ignorant and incompetent Stewart is when he isn’t mugging or being funny. At the end of the latest “The Weekly Show” podcast, Stewart was asked who to blame for the government shutdown. Of course he wouldn’t say “The Democrats, dummy!” though that is the only factual answer. Instead he blamed the Founders. Here’s his “hilarious” answer:
“Who is responsible for the government shutdown? I’m gonna go with the Founders, who came up with this fucking fakakta, overly complex bureaucratic web of nonsense that it takes to get anything done, and I think it’s very difficult when one political party that represents 75 million voters has zero say, authority, heft, and in a functioning political environment that isn’t a zero-sum game, there would have been conversations up until now that took some consideration. Some, I’m not saying a lot.”
Oh, stop, stop, Jon, my sides are splitting! The funny man went on,
…since he (it?) sure has been speaking for a lot of Democratic Party candidates…if you can believe its (his?) alleged victims.
Of course, you can’t.
In California, the leading candidate to replace Gavin Newsom as governor, Rep. Katie Porter, has been bedeviled by emerging videos of her abusing staffers, refusing to tolerate probing questions from interviewers, and generally acting like a witch on wheels (It’s Halloween!) Porter and her political allies insist that these clips don’t show “the real Katie,’ which is comforting, since that demon impersonating Porter just stops short of spewing green vomit.
Then there is Jay Jones, who in his passionate apology last night (during a televised debate between the two candidates for Attorney General in Virginia) characterized his extended discourse on how much he wants to murder his political opponents and see their children dead as a “mistake.”
The case, Louisiana v. Callais, involves the question of whether Louisiana’s congressional map violates the 15th Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment because it clearly includes two districts with boundaries based on race. The objective was to create two majority black districts. In other words, use race as the reason for determining Congressional districts.
Justice Jackson’s head-exploding argument? Giving blacks special advantages in the matter of representation was like making special accommodations for the handicapped under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Black Americans, you see, are permanently handicapped because of the crippling effects of slavery (which ended 160 years ago) and Jim Crow (which ended 100 years later, about 60 years ago.)
“So going back to this discriminatory intent point, I guess I’m thinking of it, of the fact that remedial action absent discriminatory intent is really not a new idea in the civil rights laws. And my kind of paradigmatic example of this is something like the ADA,” Jackson said.
“Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act against the backdrop of a world that was generally not accessible to people with disabilities,” the DEI Justice explained. “And so it was discriminatory in effect because these folks were not able to access these buildings. And it didn’t matter whether the person who built the building or the person who owned the building intended for them to be exclusionary; that’s irrelevant. Congress said, the facilities have to be made equally open to people with disabilities if readily possible. I guess I don’t understand why that’s not what’s happening here. The idea in Section 2 is that we are responding to current-day manifestations of past and present decisions that disadvantage minorities and make it so that they don’t have equal access to the voting system. Right? They’re disabled. In fact ,we use the word ‘disabled’ in [Milliken v. Bradley]. We say that’s a way in which these processes are not equally open. So I don’t understand why it matters whether the state intended to do that. What Congress is saying is if it is happening … you gotta fix it.”
Got it! American blacks are permanently disabled. This is the rote justification for affirmative action forever, DEI (which Jackson understandably has an affection for), and reparations for slavery. It is a jaw-droppingly demeaning characterization of black Americans, and pure stereotyping.
Her “logic” also misses an obvious and crucial point: when the 1964 Voting Rights Act was passed, the U.S. was just barely leaving the Jim Crow era. Brown v. Bd of Education was only ten years old. Inter-racial marriage was still illegal in many states. Progressives and race-hucksters like Jackson refuse to acknowledge that there has been massive progress in race relations since 1964, and they deny that progress because it means giving up their own benefits from the phenomenon of presumed racism. “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” Jackson’s statement marks her as a racketeer.
That quote from Jackson is damning (and it bolsters the EA case that Joe Biden was the worst POTUS ever, since he appointed this partisan hack) and should be headline news, but it’s not. Gee, I wonder why… Over at SCOTUS blog, the new proprietor, Amy Howe, provides what she represents as a thorough analysis of the oral argument in Louisiana v. Callais without mentioning Jackson’s outrageous theory at all. So far, I have only seen it mentioned on conservative blogs and news sites. In fact, I was driven to Breitbart, a site I banned for being biased and untrustworthy, to find the full quote.
Is Jackson the worst SCOTUS Justice ever? I think she’s worse than Sotomayor, which is pretty amazing, but no, I’m sure there have been worse ones in the Courts dim past. But she is pretty assuredly the worst Justice in my lifetime, and that would include the execrable Harry Blackmun, who inflicted Roe v. Wade on the nation as well as the indefensible majority opinion declaring that baseball, alone among professional sports and billion dollar private businesses, should be immune from the antitrust laws. Harry was an mediocre judge in over his head thanks to a Peter Principle Nixon appointment, but he was at least smart enough not to claim that being black was the equivalent of being disabled.
[ This was last year’s Columbus Day post, and I decided that I couldn’t improve on it, so up it goes again. It is, after all, the proverbial two-bird stone: a straight reminder of how much we, and the world, owe to Chris, and how narrowly we avoided electing a pandering idiot as President. Another Columbus Day Ethics Alarms post worth visiting is this one, because it has the link to Stan Freeberg’s immortal Columbus riff on his “Stan Freeberg Presents the United States of America,” one of the most inspired pieces of musical satire ever.
But back to Columbus Day: its cancellation in some woke-lobotomized states (Indigenous Peoples Day) was part of the “America is evil and we should all be ashamed” cultural poison that the Mad Left has been trying to choke our society with for a long time. President Trump has more pressing challenges as he takes on the herculean task—it compares to Herc cleaning out the Augean Stables, the last and most disgusting of his Twelve Labors—of repairing our culture, but clarifying the significance of Columbus finding the New World is part of it. Let’s be clear: by any utilitarian analysis the European migration to North America was a very good thing indeed, probably inevitable, and beneficial to the entire world. Thank-you, than-you, thank you, Columbus. ]
“European explorers ushered in a wave of devastation, violence, stealing land, and widespread disease.”
—Kamala Harris in 2021, pandering to the “America is a blight on the Earth and the world would have been better without it” bloc in the Democratic Party in a Columbus Day address.
“Diversity involves recognizing, including, celebrating, rewarding and utilizing differences of gender, race, ethnicity, age and thought – sweetening and often strengthening the pot.”
—-The Georgia Chief Justice’s Commission on Professionalism in the document supposedly designed to give Continuing Legal Education trainers (like me) guidance in preparing seminars on “professionalism,” exemplary conduct that goes beyond the Rules of Professional Conduct to bolster public trust and the reputation of the legal profession.
What utter, illogical, embarrassing, unethical, woke garbage this is…and from a judicial commission no less! I dare anyone to defend it. The putative author is someone named Karlise Y. Grier, who is supposedly a lawyer, and lawyers are supposed to be trained in critical thought. Gee, I wonder if…[checking]….of course she is. Only the undeserved beneficiary of such nonsense could endorse it so fatuously.
I’m going to be teaching, not for the first time, a professionalism seminar for Georgia lawyers, who are among those in the few states that require special “professionalism” credits. I had to read, in due diligence, the guidelines for such programs in Georgia that almost took longer to read than the course will last (one hour) because it was full of bloated bureaucratic babble. It is a professional requirement for lawyers to write clearly, but most don’t, and this thing was a disgrace. Nothing was as bad as that paragraph above, though.
What does “recognizing” differences in gender mean, and what does it have to do with the ethical practice of law? (Hint: Nothing.) Lawyers should treat all clients and adversaries the same regardless of race, gender or other group characteristics. Is that paragraph saying that Georgia lawyers should be able to tell a man from a woman? Is this a problem in Georgia?
“If it’s totally stupid, you don’t go along with it…”
—Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in comments at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., as he explained why he thinks the traditional reverence for Supreme Court precedent (stare decisis) makes neither legal nor logical sense
In discussions with some of my more fair and rational progressive lawyer friends about the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, several of them admitted that Roe was a terrible opinion, badly reasoned and sloppily written. This has been the consensus of most honest legal analysts since the 1970s, but never mind, Roe declared the right to kill unborn children for any reason whatsoever a right, so for abortion-loving feminists and their allies (including men addicted to promiscuous sex without responsibility), Roe was a “good” decision. But my colleagues who knew it was not just a poor decision but a terrible one condemned anyway, because, they said, it violated stare decisis, the hoary principle that the Supreme Court should eschew over-turning previous SCOTUS decisions even if they were outdated or clearly wrong, in the interests of legal stability, preserving the integrity of the Court and insulating the institution from the shifting winds of political power.
Like many principles, that one sounds better in the abstract than it works in reality, and Roe is as good an example as one could find short of Dred Scott. Roe warped the culture and turned living human beings into mere inconveniences whose lives could be erased at whim. How many millions of human beings don’t exist today because of the ideological boot-strapping logic of that decision, which bizarrely equated the right to contraception to the right to kill the unborn?
Reverence of bad decisions as beyond reversal is also a handy political weapon: as several wags have noted, stare decisus is mandatory when the precedent at issue is progressive cant (like Roe), but when the Left passionately believes a SCOTUS decision was wrongly decided, it’s time for an “exception” to stare decisus. In his recent appearance at D.C.’s Catholic University, where he taught at the law school until protesters against Dobbs in his classes forced him to stop, Justice Thomas pointed to Brown v. Bd. of Education, the landmark decision that overturned a well-established Court precedent holding that “separate but equal” was a principle that allowed segregation in the public schools as he neatly eviscerated the intellectually dishonest position that SCOTUS precedent must be sacred.
“He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them.”
President Trump, in his eulogy for assassinated conservative activist Charley Kirk at the massive memorial service in Phoenix
Can a quote be both ethical and unethical at the same time? You have to hand it to Donald Trump: his statement above at the Kirk memorial service had progressive heads exploding all over the map, and some conservative heads too. It was a genuinely provocative line, rich with contradictory meanings and implications. Did the President intend it that way? Who knows? They will be arguing about Trump’s brain in history and psychology tomes for a hundred years. I find myself hearing Wilford Brimley’s voice echoing through my brain in his iconic scene from “Absence of Malice”: “Mr. Gallagher, are you that smart?” Except in this case, it’s “Mr. Trump.”
Of course the line triggered the Trump-Deranged into self-identification, as with this guy…
But Trump didn’t say he hated half the country. Now Joe Biden came a lot closer to doing that when he accused Republicans of being fascists who are existential threats to democracy, though it was in a national speech to the nation not a memorial service. (I think that’s worse, myself.) We can’t be sure whom Trump regards as his “opponent.” Those who want him dead, as about a quarter of all Democrats according to one poll? Those who tried to impeach him twice and put him in prison using contrived prosecutions? Those who call him Hitler? The journalists and pundits who have been lying about him since he was elected in 2016 and before? Continue reading →
—Clay Travis, the founder of conservative sports site Outkick and co-host of “The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show,” responding to former President Obama’s statement on the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in which he deplored political violence.
Obama’s insincere and typically carefully-crafted public statement on the assassination of Turning Point USA founder and activist Charlie Kirk was this: “We don’t yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, but this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy. Michelle and I will be praying for Charlie’s family tonight, especially his wife Erika and their two young children.”
“We’re all people of religion, but there are evil people. And we have to confront that. I just give my love and hope to the family of the young woman who was stabbed this morning or last night in Charlotte by a madman.”
—President Trumpyesterday in remarks at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., referring to the horrific random knife murder in Charlotte that was not considered newsworthy by the Axis media because it didn’t involve a gun, which would have been exploited to make more gun control demands, and didn’t involve a white person killing a black one, which would have bolstered the “America is racist” narrative.
I want to note that an “Ethics quote” is not the same as an ethical quote, but rather a statement that raises ethical issues that are worth pondering. This one raises many. Such as…
1. As one wag on Instapundit said this morning, “I guess now the legacy media will have to cover the story.” And, I hope, try to explain why an event with so many hot button issue touch points was deemed unworthy of national news for two weeks.
2. Issues include Black on white crime. Democrat-run big city violence as Trump raises the issue of federal force bolstering law enforcement. Lack of security on public transportation. Society’s handling of the mentally ill. The victim was a legal Ukrainian refugee, as the Left’s support of the Ukrainian (hopeless) war continues in the absence of logic and reality. The social activist-driven revolving door system of arrests, releases and mild or no punishment to reduce “over-incarceration.” And more…
“There’s a free speech crisis in America today. But there’s no free speech crisis in Britain.”
—Maryland Democratic Rep. Jaime Raskin, proving for all time that he is a shameless partisan whom Marylanders should hang their heads in shame for inflicting on Congress and their fellow Americans.
Raskin really said that. No, I’m not kidding, he really did. He did! I’m not making it up!
The rapid government attack on free speech in Great Britain, where it has never been particularly strong, has been the subject of great concern among civil libertarians in the UK and here, for very good reasons. As Matt Taibbi, the red-pilled former Rolling Stone pundit recently wrote, “The arrest of Graham Linehan for his tweets is one of many examples that show [Great Britain] should not be treated as a free one.” (You can read about the Linehan scandal here.) Indeed. British citizens are being punished for peacefully protesting, for petitioning the government, for critical social media posts, and even for displaying the British flag. Yet Raskin says that there is no free speech crisis. His idea of a free speech crisis is CBS being forced to pay the piper after engaging in election interference to try to get an idiot elected President of the United States. Meanwhile, here in the good ‘ol USA, thanks to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the gradual exposure of censorious Leftist colleges and universities, and the demise of Biden’s proto- fascist Justice Department, free speech is healthier than it has been in quite a while.
After Raskin made his fatuous statement in the House hearing titled “Europe’s Threat to American Speech and Innovation,” was held to discuss EU and U.K. censorship, House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) quickly made the obvious rebuttal: “The gentleman alleges there’s no free speech in America under Donald Trump while his staff member holds up countless articles criticizing the Trump administration.”
Ethics Alarms 