Over the weekend after President Biden’s less-than-reassuring interview on ABC, radio hosts Andrea Lawful-Sanders and Earl Ingram appeared on CNN. Both had held radio interviews with the President after his disastrous debate performance as part of the White House’s rehabilitation program. “Were those questions given to you by the White House, or the campaign, or did you have to submit questions ahead of this interview?” CNN host Victor Blackwell asked Lawful-Sanders.
Ethics Train Wrecks
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:
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.
Observations On This Smoking Gun Evidence That Nothing Is Too Unethical For Today’s Totalitarian Democrats
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.
How Low Will The Mainstream Media Stoop In Its Desperation To Somehow Save Joe Biden? Oh, Even Lower Than This…Just Give It Time…
Journalism! Yes, it’s true: trying to smear Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to pick up a couple straying percentage points as a whole point herd seems to be abandoning President Gabby Johnson (“Rarit!”) after his debate debacle, Vanity Fair actually published an “exposé” claiming that the third party candidate was photographed eating a barbecued dog in Korea:
Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! Or stupidity…I read about that story and decided it was obviously nonsense. Then I saw the photo, and knew it was nonsense: As Lloyd Bentsen would say, “I’ve kept goats. I’ve seen barbecued goats, and dogs have been friends of mine: that was no dog.”
Jill Biden: An Ethics Villain’s Route to Power
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),
Ethics Quiz: Harvard’s Honorary Degrees
Hmmmm.
Here are the distinguished individuals Harvard saw fit to award honorary degrees to at graduation this year. (I’m sure some of them, heck, maybe all, are very fine people) :
- Gustavo Dudamel, music and artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, his home country, and music and artistic director-designate of the New York Philharmonic
- Jennie Chin Hansen, immediate past chief executive of the American Geriatrics Society, and past president of AARP—a pioneer in care for the elderly.
- Sylvester James Gates Jr., Clark Leadership Chair in Science and Distinguished University Professor and a University System of Maryland Regents Professor, a theoretical physicist who has worked on supersymmetry, supergravity, and superstring theory.
- Joy Harjo, twenty-third Poet Laureate of the United States, 2019-2022, the author of 10 books of poetry (plus plays, children’s books, and two volumes of memoir), and a performing musician who played for many years with her band, Poetic Justice, and has produced seven albums.
- Maria A. Ressa, co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 (with Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov) for her brave, independent news coverage of her native Philippines.
(Former Harvard president Lawrence Bacow also got an honorary degree, but ex-Harvard presidents always do if they manage not to get fired for plagiarism, so he doesn’t count.)
Interesting. Out of five honorees, not one was a white American, not even a white woman, or a white LGTBQ warrior. A Venezuelan male, a female Filipino, Harjo is Native American, Gates is black, and Hansen is Asian American.
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Week is…
Is there anything wrong with this roster?
Ethics Villain: “Morning Joe” Scarborough, But You Should Have Known That Already
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:
More Post-Debate Ethics [Expanded!]
To a substantial extent, the aftermath of the oogy Presidential debate this week has been more revealing than the debate itself. Nobody who has been paying attention should have been surprised by President Biden disturbing performance. Just the fact that he was willing, or was allowed, to participate in the debate at all had me thinking that day, “Well, I guess they must have figured out some way for Joe to keep his dementia at bay for 90 minutes.” They hadn’t. Biden could have pulled out of the debate with relatively minimal damage, citing his health (he did have a cold) or something else. The blow-back and speculation would have not significantly more critical than what he received for skipping the traditional Presidential live appearance on the Super Bowl broadcast.
There is speculation that Joe was deliberately set up to fail. In the previous EA post about this debacle—and anyone who was pleased or amused by Biden’s distress needs an ethics transplant—I attributed the President being subjected to the national and international humiliation to his party’s, campaign’s and staff’s incompetence. Hanlon’s Razor still compels that verdict, but I must say some of the recent conspiracy theories sound increasingly plausible.
In this post from May 21, I harshly criticized George Mason professor Jeremy Mayer’s USA Today column headlined, “How Biden Can Save America From Trump’s Return To The White House: Drop Out of the Race.” Professor Mayer was gracious, good-natured and gutsy enough to come here to defend his position and also join the comment wars. He’s an admirable person and a thoughtful one, obviously. I just realized that I never apologized for calling him an “idiot” in my post. I still disagree strongly with his article, but he’s not an idiot, and I hereby apologize for that slur. It was unfair and wrong. I’m sorry, I regret it, and I will try to restrict my use of “idiot” in the future to genuine idiots.
But I digress. I would be fascinated to know how the events of this week have altered his position, if at all. To quote the USA Today piece: “Biden could announce, anytime this summer, that he’s out. He could use the same logic that got him the nomination in 2020. He sincerely and accurately believed that he was the Democrat with the best chance to beat Trump. Now, he is one of the few national Democrats who could get Trump reelected.”
Based on Biden’s defiant rally yesterday, I don’t see how he could reverse himself and withdraw without looking bullied and being further humiliated. One thing we know about Biden’s personality is that he is insecure, and as a lifetime over-achiever he bristles at criticism and being, in his view, underestimated. Many are evoking the model of President Lyndon Johnson, who withdrew from his re-election campaign in 1968. Johnson was more popular than Biden at the time, and he withdrew much earlier, in March. He also had a divisive and much hated Republican looming as his likely opponent, Richard Nixon. But Johnson really was, as George W. Bush claimed to be, “a uniter not a divider.” He saw his presence in the race as further dividing what was already an ominously divided country, as well as his party. Biden has actively encouraged division as President. Biden’s no Johnson.
Other points…
Ethical Quote of the Week: Nate Silver
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,
