…showing her that her hysteria is based on lies, bad stats, politicized “science” and hooey?
I admit it, that headline sucked me in to reading “Social Q’s,” a Times advice column that puts wokeness over wisdom, causing me to put it on the EA blacklist.
“My wife has become an eco-warrior,” a married weenie writes. “She has strong feelings about the environment and other people’s carbon footprints. She challenges our friends repeatedly about their lifestyle choices. I agree with her in principle, but I can’t support her moral outrage. …Help!“
Predictably, the column’s proprietor, Phillip Galanes, begins by saying, “I would begin by praising her, rightfully, for her commitment to an important issue.” I’ll fix it for him: “an important issue that nobody really knows much about, especially indoctrinated progressives who are passionate about what their bubble-mates are passionate about regardless of facts.”
I had missed this story until one of Trump Deranged Facebook friends made an arch comment about me teaching “Presidential pardon ethics.” Huh, I wondered, what this old fool blathering on about now? It can’t be Biden’s advance pardons of his whole corrupt family because this guy never criticizes Democrats, so it must be something Trump did!” The Deranged have their uses: if Trump has done anything that by any possible stretch of the imagination could be bitched about, these people are like human Geiger-counters.
Sure enough, an op-ed in the Times came out yesterday called “The Pardon That Represents the New Era of Corruption.” [Gift link!] Wait, would that be President Clinton’s outrageous pardon of international fugitive from justice Marc Rich in exchange for a huge donation to the Clinton Library by his ex-wife? No. Democratic federal prosecutors Molly Gaston, who was part of the “Get Trump!” DOJ prosecution, and J.P. Cooney, special prosecutor Jack Smith’s deputy at DOJ, wrote the opinion piece because the President pardoned Representative Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat awaiting trial on federal bribery charges. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say the wrote the opinion piece because they could see the potential in the story to impugn President Trump.
For good measure, to style the partisan hit job as “non-partisan,” the two prosecutors also attacked Hakeem Jeffries for praising Trump’s pardon of a Democratic House member. “Rather than be critical or perhaps stay silent, the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, welcomed the pardon and engaged in shameful pandering, apparently to maintain Mr. Cuellar’s party loyalty,” they write. “Most disturbingly, Mr. Jeffries did so by attacking the legitimacy of the criminal case against Mr. Cuellar, publicly dismissing the indictment against him as “very thin.” As former federal prosecutors who spent our careers rooting out public corruption, we see this for the wagon-circling that it is. The jury’s detailed, 54-page, multicount indictment against Mr. Cuellar was anything but thin, and he should have had to stand trial before a jury of his peers.” They continue, “Mr. Jeffries’s embrace of Mr. Cuellar was a disturbing sign that Democratic leaders, when it is politically advantageous, may be willing to join in Mr. Trump’s degradation of the justice system.”
I have a tough day (and night) ahead with a major deadline looming, an anxious client, and some kind of digestive disruption that has me guzzling Pepto-Bisnol like there’s no tomorrow. I’m counting on the commentariate to keep things ethical and lively around here if I’m unable to add much.
One minor note of interest: apparantly at some point or other, as she’s been boasting about her eventual bust in the Capitol, Kamala Harris slipped up and referred to herself as the first Veep “of color.” This prompted several conservative news sources to bring up a fact check from USA Today in 2021 that pointed out that while Harris was the first female U.S. VP, the first black (sort of) VP, the first VP of “South Asian ancestry,” and the first woman of color to be elected to the office, first U.S. Vice-President “of color” is not on her dance card, that distinction going to this guy…
…Charles Curtis, who was Herbert Hoover’s VP from 1929-1933. His mother was one-quarter Kaw Indian (his father was all-white) making Curtis 12.5% Native American. Blecchh. Who…Cares? By my standards, Curtis isn’t “of-color” but white, and how I long for the day when these kinds of “historic distinctions” end up in history’s metaphorical dustbin where they belong.
Fun Fact: William M. Evarts, Rutherford B. Hayes’ Secretary of State, was the highest ranking U.S. official in history with a third nipple! Okay, I made that up, but that’s about the level of distinction Curtis deserves for having one Native American great-grandparent.
Kentucky Representative Sarah Stalker says white children need the opportunity to feel bad about their skin color in K-12 educational settings. pic.twitter.com/Oq85uKEpKD
What this says about her party and its ideological moorings is obvious. So is what it tells us about anyone who would vote for someone like this to have any power or influence over our society. We have had the “gotcha!” privilege debate here extensively in the 20-teens, and it was insufficiently slapped down to prevent the DEI and “presumed racism” pathogens.
The ethics mystery is why anyone white swallows this crap? I can see the advantages to minorities, since they can, by accepting it, absolve themselves of all failures, misdeeds and shortcomings. However, whites (and men) who fall for this argument are agreeing to be metaphorically hobbled, like Kunta Kinte in “Roots.” Worse, they are endorsing the hobbling of their children too.
I get why extreme, ruthless, unethical progressives push such garbage: it’s a means to an end, and the end is power. I do not understand why anyone privileged with a functioning brain and critical thinking skills tolerates officials like Stalker, never mind actually voting for her.
I still am noodling about how exactly to define Trump Derangement beyond listing the symptoms. I’d say, for example, that a retired and distinguished lawyer re-posting with favor a typical Occupy Democrats Facebook rant qualifies as one. This particular Occupy Democrat post—is that group worse than Move-On, better, or the same?—expressed outrage over “US citizen and Army veteran George Retes'” testimony to Congress over (if he is to be believed) a mistaken arrest and abusive treatment by I.C.E., as it mistook him as an illegal immigrant. Naturally, since he was recruited by Democrats to impugn the agency, my friend (and a somewhat famous classmate who has been engaging in what I would call borderline unethical conduct by regularly attacking his former client, President Trump) automatically accepted his account over that of Homeland Security, which in a release rebutted Retes’ claim as well as that of others who have been cited by critics as being falsely detained or arrested.
“My understanding was that independent agencies exist because Congress has decided that some issues, some matters, some areas should be handled in this way by non-partisan experts, that Congress is saying that expertise matters — with respect to aspects of the economy, and transportation, and the various independent agencies that we have. So, having a president come in and fire all the scientists, and the doctors, and the economists, and the PhDs, and replacing them with loyalists and people who don’t know anything, is actually not in the best interest of the citizens of the United States.”
—-Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, making the case for a technocracy that directly contradicts the structure of government dictated by that U.S. Constitution thingy, in her questioning of U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer during this week’s oral argument in “United States v. Slaughter”.
As Professor Turley archly comments in his post on Jackson’s classically totalitarian belief that the proletariat can’t be trusted and must be guided by supposedly wise and beneficent “experts” (like her), “Jackson simply brushed aside the fact that the president is given authority to execute the laws and that the executive branch is established under the Constitution…The use of “real-world consequences” seems to overwhelm any true separation-of-powers protections for presidents against the administrative state. It also allows the Court to delve into effective policy or legislative impacts in support of the expert class over what are framed as ignorant or vengeful presidents.”
To state what should be obvious about the so-called “expert class,” they have proven themselves to be very partisan and therefore not sufficiently trustworthy for Congress to bestow on them “independence” from Presidential oversight within the Executive Branch. We have seen that experts like university professors and scholars are overwhelmingly biased and partisan, that scientists are biased and partisan, that doctors, lawyers, economists, psychologists, judges and, yes, ethicists are biased partisan. The concept of the non-partisan, independent expert is a convenient ideology-driven mythology, and anyone paying attention to what we have witnessed in our country, society, and culture over the past couple of decades has to admit that it is as believable as Santa Claus.
Let me add in closing that the arrogance and smug entitlement that radiates from Jackson’s “people who don’t know anything” is staggering, obnoxious, and ironic. She’s a Supreme Court Justice and apparently doesn’t know what the Constitution means…
If you can watch Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth in that CNN segment without your head exploding at the 3:43 mark, you are a better man than I am, Gunga Din.
After stating that the the so called “double-tap” bombing of alleged Venezuelan drug-smugglers was a war crime and murder, Duckworth is asked by Dana Bash, inadvertently practicing journalism, whether the Senator in fact knows what the hell she is ranting about, and gets the equivalent of “no,” “I just know what I’ve read online” and “I only know what I read in the newspapers.”
What Duckworth answered can be fairly translated as “I don’t really know anything the average channel-surfing short-order cook knows about this, and maybe less only I just tuned in to MSNBC, but I’m a Democrat, we have to criticize anything the Trump administration does, and I’ve got some talking points that my staffer was emailed from the DNC—maybe the same ones you were sent, Dana—and I’m just going from those.”
Duckworth was on CNN to discuss the incident as a purported expert: she’s built her entire political career by relying on her Army National Guard veteran status and losing her legs when her helicopter was hit by a missile during the first Iraq War. It’s an insult to viewers for her to go on the air and accuse the Department of War of “murder” without doing more than checking “what’s available in the media,” whatever that means in her case. I bet she got a summary of “what’s available in the media” and what she “knows” is double hearsay.
If I am asked on a radio show to give my opinion as an ethicist about, say, a law firm firing a member for a social media post denigrating Charlie Kirk and President Trump, I’d better have read the various analyses by my colleagues in the field, looked at the relevant ethics rules and legal ethics opinions, kno what the fired attorney wrote, and be ready to provide some trustworthy analysis other than “I only know what I read on ‘Above the Law.'”
This is the very epitome of political hackery. The Senator goes on CNN with no preparation at all, and spews a predetermined and predictable position because Trump Bad, while not even pretending to have any special insight into what occurred.
As with the Axis news media’s refusal to investigate or admit that Joe Biden was Demented POTUS Walking (sort of) while he was winning the Worst President Ever competition, as with the Hunter Biden laptop cover-up, as with so much that it was complicit in distorting or hiding from the American public during the past 5 (6…7…8….9…) years in alliance with America’s proto-totalitarians, the New York Times was either deliberately or negligently asleep a at the metaphorical switch as Biden’s Administration opened the floodgates at our southern border. (Yikes! What a long sentence!)
This was an illegal immigration crisis created by the Democrats, not “actions on immigration.” And, as usual, the emphasis is on the Republican response to the Times’s favorite party’s misconduct, blurring the real issue. The problem with Biden’s indefensible failure to enforce our immigration laws and keep the border secure is that it allowed millions of unvetted, dangerous, illegal foreigners into the U.S. to the detriment of Americans, making it expensive, burdensome and divisive to kick them out, and not that the dereliction of duty “created an opening” for Trump.
The same Facebook friend who has previously endorsed idiotic comparisons between Mary and Joseph’s journey to Bethlehem and illegal immigration approvingly posted the photo above from St. Susanna Parish in Dedham, Mass. Its Nativity scene includes a sign reading “ICE was here” in place of Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus. Behold…
Terrific: bad history and bad analogies for ignorant progressive dupes! Merry Christmas!
Why is a standard issue anti-gun screed with moldy “common sense gun control” talking points being featured in “Psychology Today” under the guise of a “How to prevent suicides” article? Oh, lots of reasons, such as..
Anti-gun fanatics will use every opportunity imaginable to repeat their cant;
The fact that their objective, to somehow void the Second Amendment, is impossible doesn’t dissuade them from wasting our time;
Like most of the print media in the sciences, “Psychology Today” has been captured by the doctrinaire Left and allowed what should be a non-partisan topic be polluted by progressive activism;
Too many academics, scholars and experts today have no regard for integrity, and believe that they must accomplish their ideological goals by any means necessary, and
To someone whose only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
“Reducing Gun Violence, Particularly Gun Suicides: What we can learn from other countries when it comes to reducing gun deaths” announces its bias and how that bias has made its “expert” author stupid right in the headline. Other countries have nothing to offer us as far as gun policies are concerned. They do not have the same culture as the United States, nor do other nations enshrine individual liberty as securely as the United States. Other nations did not rely on guns and self-determination to the extent that the U.S. population has throughout its history, and other nations are far more submissive to government interference with their rights than Americans are.
Ethics Alarms 