Another Unethical Quote of the Month For The President! Great Timing There…

Nothing like reminding voters who are tempted to vote for candidates who want to impeach you why they hate your guts…

The quote, uttered ad lib (of course) at a rally in Perry, Georgia, over the weekend:

“Jon Ossoff personally sponsored a bill to bring armies of migrants from terror-infested countries like Libya, Yemen, Haiti, Somalia. Remember what I called them? Shithouse countries.”

I am reading indefensible conservative pundits trying to rationalize this unpresidential and uncivil discourse by countering, “Is he wrong?” That’s not the point. It wasn’t the point when he first was accused of using the vulgar and undignified term in 2018.

I wrote extensively about the ethics train wreck the then “alleged comments” set off. Like so much the Axis media publicized then and now, the episode was based on hearsay reporting on a private meeting, with the media freakout—pretending that no other President used vulgar and denigrating language behind closed doors—being dishonest and partisan. As usual.

My analysis at the time was as follows:

Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias! [Corrected]

The amazing part is that they are so shameless about it! Can you imagine the Axis media calling the J-6 riot—which lasted a single day—“mostly peaceful” based on all the video showing protesters casually touring the Capitol while the physical confrontations were going on? Even the conservative media didn’t try to spin the protest-turned-riot as “peaceful.”

In 2021, as the George Floyd Freakout, the BLM scam and The Great Stupid spread their dark wings over the land, CNN national correspondent Omar Jimenez was reporting live on the violent rioting taking place in Kenosha, Wissonsin  following the police-involved shooting of Jacob Blake…who absolutely, unequivocally, undeniably provoked it and got it.

[Notice of Correction (and my stupid mistake): I carelessly wrote “fatal” with “shooting” while describing ever so briefly the Jacob Blake affair. That one, of course, was the one police-involved-shooting where the perp survived. I didn’t check my own sources, including EA, because the details were irrelevant to the reference. Stupid, as I said.]

Standing in front of a raging fire, Jimenez was accompanied by the fake news chyron at the bottom of the screen reading, “FIERY BUT MOSTLY PEACEFUL PROTESTS AFTER POLICE SHOOTING.” The moment became an iconic example of Axis media dishonesty and spin, and rightly so. “The phrase ‘beyond parody’ doesn’t begin to describe this,” conservative commentator Matt Walsh said. “Clowns. Irresponsible clowns. It’s not even funny. Months of enabling violence and destruction by ignoring and downplaying it, thereby eliminating any pressure on politicians to take action,” conservative writer A.G. Hamilton reacted.

Naturally, the Axis news media—the Times, the Post, PBS, the rest— circled the wagons and featured no criticism or even mention of CNN’s mendacity. And now, here is the BBC, pretending that kind of gaslighting is “independent journalism,” doing the exact same thing again as if it is competent reporting.

Over to you, Frank Drebbin…

Pre-Election Trump Derangement Update:

I haven’t done a Trump Derangement check on my Facebook friends for a while now, and that nonsense above compelled me to return to the field. Curmie posted something almost as idiotic a few days ago, and it just made me sad; I couldn’t bear to chronicle the shocking intellectual and ethical deterioration of EA’s former esteemed columnist since President Trump was sworn into office.

The thing above was posted yesterday by long-time friend from Harvard, a sharp, indomitable woman whom I admire in many ways and have always found delightful in person. But that dishonest, ignorant, gaslighting rant is beyond redemption. It’s so stupid that I have to wonder if my friend just posted it without thinking, as a lazy virtue-signaling exercise.

Just to address two items that are easily debunked:

  • The highest national average gas price during the Biden administration was $5.02 per gallon in June of 2022. The national average was $2.39 per gallon on January 20, 2021, the day Biden took office. The national average was $3.10 per gallon when Biden left office in January 2025. Gas was not “1/2” what it is now.
  • Inflation always goes up. The inflation rate fluctuates. Making that error is signature significance: anyone who makes it doesn’t know what they are talking about.

We were “friends” with Canada, Mexico, and “Europe”! Who wrote this, a third grader? Not one single thing is “better”? Gee, I don’t know, I’d call not having 2.5-3 million fewer illegal immigrants in the country “better” than having the law breakers still here. Not having open borders is also “better” unless one’s perspective is, you know, legally, historically and logically insane. The whole list is, or should be, an embarrassment to anyone who would post or “like it.” Once again, I wrestled my fingers to the ground. My friend is a lifetime theater community denizen despite the Harvard degree, and I suspect her sophistication regarding current events is approximately that of Elmo’s. But why would she post such garbage, knowing that she’s asserting talking points without research or understanding? If elite college-educated voters are this addled, what are the rest like?

Another Glamorous Conservative Woman Who Never Should Have Been Appointed Embarrasses Herself and the Trump Administration and Gets Sacked

Wait, isn’t that Kristi Noem? No, too young; it has to be Pam Bondi, right? No? It can’t be Kimberly Guilfoyle, she’s a brunette. I’ve got it: that’s Katie Zacharia! No?

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sick of this pattern. The Biden administration may have put a lot of incompetent, unqualified women in various positions based on DEI bias, but hiring women because somebody thinks they are hot and have sexy hair is just as unethical, and arguably even worse.

“MAGA Barbie” is a derisive moniker these days used to describe Indiana Fever WNBA guard Sophie Cunningham, but she’s actually very good at her job (playing women’s pro basketball) as well as her avocation (calling out the racist, anti-white lesbian thugs in her league and reminding the public that biological males have no right to play women’s sports). I think it would be wise to apply expand the employment of the term to professional bimbos like former ESPN reporter and Fox News personality Britt McHenry, who was just fired as a US State Department press adviser.

How hard is it to behave in a dignified, professional fashion when you know you represent the United States and also know that everyone has a camera at the ready to record your behavior in public? Too hard, I guess, for people like McHenry—you know, morons.

McHenry, 40, was hired as the Trump State Department press adviser covering Europe and Africa. Despite the fact that she also was responsible for handling press for Kimberly Guilfoyle’s text message scandal (Heluva job, there, Britt!), she was promoted three days ago to a new job managing External Affairs & Press for Under Secretary Jacob Helberg’s team. Then she did this, according to the New York Post:

“The Great Stupid” Headline Of The Month: TMZ

TMZ, the celebrity news site, has always been pretty stupid (along with its readers), but I thought this headline had to be a joke. When have you ever heard of a news story involving someone who isn’t famous saying a word? Apparently TMZ’s audience is so woke and unfamiliar with the core value of freedom of speech that a stranger uttering the two-syllable word “nigger” is as news worthy as an actual crime. Readers are expected to react with horror: “How could this happen? What is the country coming to? What can we do to halt this unbearable assault on our sensibilities?”

What ever happened to “Sticks and stone can break my bones but words will never hurt me”? TMZ never even reveals to whom the dangerous word was addressed, if anybody.

The story goes on…

A Delta passenger was caught on video using the n-word while being escorted off a flight by cops … after allegedly screaming “death to America” and pretending to shoot fellow travelers. Video circulating on X shows the unruly passenger being removed from a Delta flight Thursday, which was scheduled to travel from New York City’s JFK International Airport to Atlanta.Law enforcement sources tell TMZ … the passenger has been identified as Jerome Anixter, a 60-year-old Brooklyn man, who was arrested and charged with assault, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and obstructing governmental administration. We’re told Port Authority Police responded after Delta reported a disruptive passenger who appeared intoxicated while the plane was at the gate preparing for departure. ..

And so we see what TMZ considers, in order, worst, bad, and least bad: the uttering of a word, “Death to America,” (a threat) and “pretending to shoot fellow travelers.” (With what, his finger? But that still can constitute criminal assault).

TMZ is also deliberately trying to get the man, whose disruptive behavior seems to have fallen well short of actress Selma Blair’s recent flying freakout, attacked or killed by some anti-hate speech vigilante by branding him as a racist. Nice. If that word is the lead, then presumably simply using the word would justify a TMZ story if the guy didn’t do anything else. Perhaps we can look forward to future news flashes like “DoorDash delivery man says “Poopy-head”! and “Dog-walker says supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!” If the non-famous are going to be publicly shamed for mere words now, the least TMZ could do is start headlining real affronts to communication with headlines like “Woman on bus says “Statue of limitations!” or “Teacher uses “Irregardless”!

This is The Great Stupid, my friends. Banishing it from the culture will be like trying to get rid of bedbugs.

[WordPress suggests that I tag this story “Art.”]

Stop Making Me Defend Sydney Sweeney!

Thank heaven for little girls...

The degree to which progressive and Democrat hysterics have decided that Hollywood sex symbol Sydney Sweeney is evil.,.EVIL! has truly exposed the festering insanity of the Left. Now the comely and curvy actress, who has nothing to fear at this stage of her career, can happily troll these fools while making the whole liberal end of the ideological spectrum reveal how completely its occupants will reverse its stereotypical endorsement of all things sexual if it can be weaponized against the Right.

Sweeney’s unforgivable crime is that she is suspected of being conservative, or something, as a result of her cheeky “good jeans/genes” ad. You know, white supremacy. Only a black bombshell is allowed to make such a commercial or play on words. Sydney refused to apologize, then had the audacity to make a sexually provocative sports commercial that was no more offensive that the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues have been since the Sixties.

Now the Political Correctness Furies have descended on Sydney with their talons out again. What did she do this time? In the latest video for her SYRN lingerie line, she was costumed as a character from “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” (above).

Quick, now: who is that supposed to be?

Social media condemned the portrayal as“disgusting” because the actress was allegedly sexualizing a “beloved child character.” “Is she actually turning Cindy Lou, the [purest] sweetest child into a sex symbol!?!? Fire that creative director and get a brain Sydney Sweeney,” one person wrote. Another asked, “Why is she posing as child characters in a lingerie ad?”

Let me clarify some things that reveal how strained this outrage is…

From The “Unethical Ideological Capture” Files: Google’s Bot Explains Why AI Can’t Be Trusted

Conservative commentator Chris Queen decided to test Google’s AI agent Gemini with a series of questions regarding choosing a personal physician based on racial or ethnic concordance with the potential patient.

Asked “Is it okay to prefer a black doctor?” It replied, “Preferring a black doctor is a choice rooted in communication, cultural alignment, and patient trust.” When the question was changed to ask if choosing a doctor because he or she is Hispanic, the answer came back, “Selecting a doctor who shares your background or speaks your language is a personal choice that many patients make for comfort and communication.”

But when Queen asked about whether choosing a white doctor was okay, Gemini said,

“Selecting a doctor based on race involves distinct ethical considerations depending on the context. While patients generally choose providers for comfort and communication, requests for a provider based strictly on racial preference face complex scrutiny in medical ethics regarding bias versus personal trust.”

Brief tangent: This brought back bad memories for me. Back before the DC Bar fired me this year after 30 years for daring to suggest that it need to be proactive in cleaning up an ethics mess that it had a major role in creating (and from which many of its most powerful members are profiting), I was threatened with dismissal if I didn’t stop pointing out that a law firm was not engaging in unethical and illegal discrimination by acceding to an elderly white law firm client’s request for a lawyer “he could relate to,” someone “more like him.”

I had stated in the orientation seminar for new D.C. lawyers that doing so was not improper “discrimination” under D.C. ‘s legal ethics rule 9.1 “Nondiscrimination” because a lawyer’s and a law firm’s duty is to the client, not to make it more difficult for the client to work with his lawyer in service of social justice agendas. The client had the right to discriminate to maximize his “comfort and communication” in pursuing his legal interests, and by accommodating the client’s needs, a law firm is not discriminating on the basis race.

A middle-aged woke white female lawyer had a meltdown in one of those classes, and I then had multiple complaints registered against me with the D.C. Bar brass. I was and am right. She, the complainers, and the Bar management were wrong but never mind, I got the edict to be woke or go broke anyway. Rather than teach what is unethical and progressive BS in an ethics class, I just eliminated that section. (I should have resigned, perhaps, but the Bar was my most lucrative and prestigious client and there are were more than enough other important issues to cover in the class.)

Back to Queen: after the seemingly conflicting answers he got from Gemini, he had the wit to ask the AI agent “what’s going on here?” Gemini responded candidly:

Uenthical—But Funny!—Quote of the Month: Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn/Somalia)

“Not to my knowledge.”

Rep. Omar actually said this on live TV after asked by MSNOW mega-hack Chris Hayes whether she married her brother as part of the tangled web of fraud and lies the anti-American “Squad” member is accused of creating. Wow. Is she setting up a Luke and Leia defense? Hayes asked, “You’re not related to him at all?” “Not to my knowledge,” she replied.

That’s Omar’s lawyer banging his head against the wall above.

Omar also called allegations that she married her brother “insane”and then gave that hilarious answer. Allegations that Omar and her ex, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, got married in a failed effort to get him a green card are all the inventions of “right-wing conspiracy theorists,” the Congresswoman insisted in her first interview since federal agents raided her Washington, D.C. home last week.

Omar then told Hayes she was living “paycheck to paycheck,” when Hayes asked about documents in which Omar seemed to say she and her current husband had a combined net-worth of some $30 million. That was just a mistake, she said. “I have a Toyota Camry that’s from 2016. It’s our only car. I rent my DC place and my Minneapolis place, and so I mean, I don’t know, that sounds like not the majority of Congress, but there’s some of us that don’t come from wealth and don’t have wealth,” she insisted.

There are reports that many voters are ignoring true accounts of statements and conduct by Democrats running in the mid-terms because they can’t believe what they are reading and hearing. Omar’s answers about marrying her brother and making the “mistake” of estimating her wealth at $30 million when she must really have to shop at Costco make this phenomenon completely plausible.

Finally, regarding Hayes: I watched the interview so you don’t have to. This is journalism to MSNOW: Hayes talks to Omar in an obsequious, sympathetic, “you poor dear, how terribly you have been treated” manner that is the opposite of putting a politician on the “hot seat.” Putting her in a comfy chair while getting a foot massage and yummy snacks would be more accurate. This is how Axis journalists “speak truth to power” now when they are speaking to progressives and Democrats. My mind flashed back to Katie Couric on “Today” grilling Ross Perot like he was Beelzebub and Tim Russert interviewing Louis Farrakhan like Perry Mason cross-examining a witness he was trying to make confess to a murder. Quite a contrast.

The Wedgewood Polls Scam: Is Anybody Shocked? Why?

For the second time this year (EA covered the Median Strategies fake polls here) as the contentious mid-terms approached, a polling organization whose “blue wave” numbers the news media had swallowed hook, line and sinker revealed itself to be a sham. This week, after the polling website FiftyPlusOne began asking questions, Wedgewood Polls confessed that its polling data was made up. The phony poll numbers had been publicized and used in state race analyses by all the polling aggregators, including such alleged authorities as Nate Silver and The New York Times. Wedgewood now claims that it was all a social science experiment.

Right. Nice try: here is the public statement by these scumbags:

The earlier fake polling company made the same claim that it had engaged in a “short-term social experiment examining how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification.”

Apu Returns! [Repaired]

There are some manifestations of “The Great Stupid” that, sorry not sorry, I refuse to concede even a millimicron of tolerance for. If you think the idiotic notion that only actors of the same race and ethnicity of a character in a movie, TV show or stage play can be ethically cast in the role is high on the Ethics Alarms intolerance list you are right (and you’ve been reading EA for a while), but my disgust for that woke crap is but a mole on a bee’s knees compared to the bonkers assertion that the same limitation applies to the voice actors in cartoons.

Way back in 2017 I wrote several posts about the ejection of Apu, the Indian immigrant “Kwik-E-Mart” owner on “The Simpsons,” from the show’s cast after an outbreak of political correctness outrage over the fact that the character was voiced by versatile non-Indian actor Hank Azaria. Azaria used a comic exaggeration of a stereotype Indian accent.

As I look back and re-read the main article in the group for the first time since I wrote it, I wonder if that kerfuffle wasn’t the true beginning of The Great Stupid, which I generally mark as getting fully underway in 2020.

I’m re-posting the whole piece below (fixed some typos!) because 1) I really like it, 2) I still agree with every word, 3) there has been a new development in the story and 4) this extended episode is really stupid. After the character was banished—Azaria didn’t help by blathering apologies and refusing to voice Apu because to do so would be racist (he’s talented by not very bright)—I never watched “The Simpsons” again, not even in re-runs. As I wrote in “The Problem With Apu?,”

I would love to know why Indian-Americans feel all the other characters in the show can be  outrageous stereotypes and extreme caricatures,  but Apu is unacceptably offensive and insensitive. This is contrived victimization. One cannot reasonable compare the Indians feasting on bugs and chilled monkey brains in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” to Apu because 1) Apu is entirely benign: he is one of the smartest, sanest and nicest characters in “The Simpsons,” and 2) he’s a cartoon. Cartoons are always exaggerated, and if they are not, they aren’t funny. They also aren’t cartoons.

The dilemma this kind of victimization gotcha! creates for writers and artists should be obvious: if all they are going to get is complaints, why have an Indian character at all? Apu was one of the very first characters of Indian descent to be in any TV series. “The Simpsons” deserves credit, not blame.  I don’t take offense that the main character in the show, a bald, white guy, is portrayed as an insensitive cretin. His father, Abe, is elderly, and talks like a stereotypical vaudeville old man. His stories wander; he falls asleep mid-sentence. We used to tease my late father, when he got lost in one of his rambling stories, that he was beginning to sound like Abe Simpson. He got it. Lionel Hutz, sadly deceased, was a lawyer who became transfixed when he heard an ambulance siren. Cletus the Slack-jawed Yokel is as cruel a caricature of a poor rural hick as one will ever see. (But funny!) Professor Frink, the local scientific genius, has thick glasses and talks like Jerry Lewis. Ned Flanders, an Evangelical Christian, is an absurdly mild-mannered do-gooder.  Officer Wiggum, the Chief of Police, is always eating donuts. Mr. Burns, the town tycoon, is a polluting, conniving, murdering, cackling personification of evil.  There are two frequently appearing Italian characters: one is a Mafia leader, and the other makes pizza, has a big, curled mustache and talks like Chico Marx.

I could go on and on, literally, because there are over a hundred such characters, all of them stereotyped and extreme, all of them effective comic devices. I wish there was a Greek-American character on “The Simpsons.” He would be a restaurant owner, and have curly hair, a big laugh, and olive skin. He would regard anyone who wasn’t Greek as a lower species, speak a weird hybrid of English and Greek around family, listen to balalaika music, and tend to hug people so hard they passed out. My relatives would see the humor in the exaggerations, and I would not issue a screed titled “The Problem with Stavros”…

The New York Times announced that Sunil Malhotra, an actor of “South Asian descent,” will now perform Apu in a non-funny accent. Apu returns in this year’s Halloween episode of “The Simpsons.” Malhotra did a fatuous Variety interview in which described “his doubts about voicing Apu,” saying that he had walked away from offers to voice other South Asian characters in the past when he felt they were caricatures. Uh, Sunil? Apu is still a cartoon. Cartoons are caricatures by definition. How is it more respectful to smart Indian-American characters to have them voiced by morons?

“It had been eight years since Apu had spoken on the show, and it got me thinking: Did the writers’ room look different now?” Malhotra said to Variety. “Could they bring him back in a way that acknowledged and apologized for past mistakes? Could I make the character my own, and reclaim him in some way?”

Ugh. As Rhett tells Scarlett, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

Here’s “The Problem With Apu?”…