Bravo.
Government & Politics
The Puppeteering Of Sen. Feinstein
“Have you no sense of decency? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?‘
With those deft, live-televised and well-timed (and planned in advance) words, lawyer Joseph Welch set off ethics alarms around the country that stripped the mask from Sen. Joe McCarthy and signaled the end of one of the ugliest episodes of political misconduct in American history. The Democratic Party is in the midst of another such episode of its own construction, but it’s doubtful that a Welch-like question would have any effect today. Nonetheless, the Democratic Party’s cynical and desperate manipulation of the brain-damaged (John Fetterman) and the elderly and senile (President Biden) to maintain its tenuous hold on power is an abandonment of decency arguably as disgusting and anti-Democratic as McCarthy’s smearing of political foes as Communists.
The party’s reduction of Senator Diane Feinstein, 90, once a sharp and professional Senator from California, but now a sick, mentally-diminished shell, to its marionette is particularly ugly. Last week, Feinstein relinquished the power of attorney to her daughter, a tacit admission that she was no longer competent to handle her own affairs. Yet she remains in a position that requires her to participate in decisions regarding the affairs of the United States, and its many millions of citizens. How could she be incapable of acting in her own interest but still qualified to do the job her constituents (foolishly) elected her to do? Obviously, she can’t.
Comment Of The Day: “First Open Forum Of August!”
Michael West, who used to weigh in here far more frequently than he has been able to in recent years, issued a well-timed commentary in last week’s Friday open forum. It’s a perfect intro, if a bit ironic, to a post I’ll get up today if climate change doesn’t kill us all about the intractable reaction some have had to yesterday’s heresy that Donald Trump has officially jumped the legitimate Presidential candidate shark. The recent ban-ee actually sounded like Trump, warning me of dire consequences should I not succumb to his arguments and dance to his off-key tune.
Here is Michael West’s Comment of the Day on the most recent open forum:
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On the widening worldview dichotomy, objectivity and debate:
Can a progressive commenter ever last here anymore?
The complaints that this is a conservative echo chamber have some practical merit – in that most of the commenters here have a libertarian or conservative lean. The progressives all left, mostly of their own accord, many because their own assertions painted themselves into logic corners from which all they had left was the vitriol that eventually got them banned.
Therein lies the question – can a progressive commenter last here without admitting that their entire train of thought has gone off the rails? And once a progressive commenter does have that realization – can they honestly remain progressive anymore?
It’s Come To This: “Liking” A Politically Incorrect, Bad Taste Joke On Social Media Can Get You Suspended In The United States Of America
Madness.
Rising NASCAR driver Noah Gragson was suspended indefinitely for liking a meme on Instagram. The meme was a pun evoking the “Little Mermaid” song “Under the Sea,” sung in all versions by Sebastian the Crab. It showed the crab with George Floyd’s head superimposed with a reference to his demise, like this:
Too soon? Once his politically incorrect sense of humor was brought to its attention, Gregson was suspended indefinitely by his team, the Legacy Motor Club, and by NASCAR as well. “NASCAR fully supports Legacy Motor Club’s decision to suspend Noah Gragson,” the racing association stated. “Following his actions on social media, NASCAR has determined that Gragson has violated the Member Conduct section of the 2023 NASCAR Rule Book and has placed him under indefinite suspension.”
Why Big Lies Work: A Case Study
Well, another one.
Democrats and the mainstream media decided to go nuclear with the false accusation that the new Florida history guidelines, championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, want schools to teach that slavery was beneficial to enslaved African Americans. It’s an outright lie, as anyone who reviewed the guidelines could see, and as Ethics Alarms explained. The Vice President of the United States made the accusation in multiple venues before African American audiences. (Yes, she’s an idiot, but she’s still Vice-President, and her statements are publicized widely). The usual race-baiters and liars among the partisan punditry, like MSNBC’s vile Joy Reid, repeated the lie, and even a GOP Presidential hopeful, weak, cowardly Sen. Tim Scott, gave it credence.
Far from being evidence of racism, white supremacy or prejudice, the guidelines are really evidence of how extremism succeeds by producing “compromises” that are irresponsibly radical anyway. The slavery history teaching guidelines require an absurdly disproportionate emphasis on slavery in grade school, and will result in inadequate instruction on many other more essential topics and skills. Never mind though: as Hitler and Goebbels explained, the purpose of Big Lies is to get a damaging narrative widely distributed, so much so that the target has to respond to it, giving the lie legitimacy and keeping it in the public consciousness.
Unethical (And Stupid—But Funny!) Quote Of The Week: Al Sharpton [Updated And Expanded]
“Can you imagine our reading that James Madison or Thomas Jefferson tried to overthrow the government so they could stay in power?”
—-Al Sharpton, MSNBC host and history scholar.
Personally, I have a hard time imagining Al reading.
People actually listen to this guy and care what he thinks. Barack Obama listened to this guy. He is paid to inform MSNBC viewers. No really, he is!
Al takes “bias makes you stupid” to new vistas.
Added: Just in case you think this was an anomaly, here is Al mocking a GOP Congressman for pointing out that the United States is a republic, as if he’s the idiot:
And Speaking Of Mainstream Media Bias, Spinning For Democrats And Misleading The Public, This NYT Report Is A Classic
When I read this astoundingly mendacious story in the Times, the first thing that I was reminded of was the memorable moment in “Plain Trains and Automobiles” when John Candy confidently tells a dubious state trooper that his burned out, roofless wreck of a car is “safe to drive.” (This goes right into the Ethics Alarms Clip archive.)
President Biden has repeatedly insisted that he has no knowledge of his son Hunter’s various sleazy business schemes, and that Joe never discussed Hunter’s money-making activities with him. Yet yesterday, in his nearly five hours of closed-door testimony to the House Oversight Committee, a former business partner of Hunter’s, Devon Archer, revealed that President Biden met with and spoke to his son Hunter’s international business associates on about 20 occasions as Hunter sought consulting deals (translation: lucrative influence and access peddling arrangements).
Hilariously, Archer claimed that the Joe Biden was not party to any of his son’s business deals. You see, Hunter Biden was just trying to sell the idea that he could provide access to his powerful father—by providing access to his powerful father. He was claiming that he could influence his father by showing that he could persuade him to pick up the phone, drop by and shake hands. Yet, reports the Times, Democrats on the panel insisted that it wasn’t what it was, by definition.
Nate Silver Tells The Truth About Media Bias: Ethics Hero
The only surprising aspect of Nate Silver’s latest substack essay is that he actually wrote it and had the courage to put it on the web. He is honest about mainstream media bias, and until he got kicked off his own creation, the 538 blog, Silver was a willing accomplice in this rot in the foundation of our democracy, making a lot of money in the process. Now—finally—he’s using his substantial critical thinking and research skills to expose the bad guys (his former pals before they rejected him : yes, I suspect there’s a measure of vengeance in this)who continue to successfully warp public knowledge and the process of an informed democracy by convincing sufficient number of ovine citizens that the concept of progressive media bias is a right-wing conspiracy theory. The focus of his traitorous analysis is how Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has helped address the effects of the media’s partisan bias.
In “Twitter, Elon and the Indigo Blob,” Silver becomes one of the very few progressives of note to admit what has been going on under their cultural assault. Some others include Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and Bari Weiss, but Silver is more scientific and detached than any of them, and as a result, his analysis is more persuasive and, I hope, more disruptive to the blue wall of silence the progressive Borg has erected around a throbbing, obvious, disgusting truth.
On The Ethically Depressing GOP Presidential Field
The New York Times gave us the chart above, in an article about how the “he could shoot someone at high noon in central park and we wouldn’t care” Trump “base” will make a Republican effort to nominate a responsible, respectable, competent candidate for President difficult if not impossible. Look at that array! And my sister, a Democrat, complains that her party’s options are terrible, which they are.
How can a nation this large and diverse have no leaders who seem capable of doing the top job ethically and well? This is a societal, cultural, systemic failure.
That a character like Donald Trump, former POTUS or not, can have that kind of overwhelming support in the midst of indictments, the long, long trail of ridiculous and offensive statements, and his disqualifying conduct of refusing to accept his electoral defeat yet tells us that something is deeply rotten in the state of America. And whatever that state of rotteness is, returning either Joe Biden or Trump to the White House would be an invitation to too many disasters to contemplate.
But let’s start from the bottom of the list, where hope blooms. Nobody wants Chris Christie to run. Good. He was an ethics villain in 2016, knocking off Trump’s adversaries in the debates when he had the rhetorical tools and ammunition to take out Trump the way he reduced poor Marco Rubio to a laughing stock. Then Christie endorsed Trump, whom he knew was unfit, in a corrupt quid pro quo deal, probably to be Vice-President, which Trump reneged on. Then Christie was out to get Trump again, but it was too late. The one-time rising GOP star’s star was already permanently tarnished by his George Washington Bridge fiasco anyway. He’s running to get headlines and speaking fees, I guess. That he has almost no support speaks almost as well for the Republican voters as their support for Trump is damning.
Vivek Ramaswamy is the GOP equivalent of tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang in the last cycle for the Democrats. He’s not a serious candidate, and anyone who thinks he is doesn’t understand the American Presidency. Like Christie, he’s just static in the race, and a distraction. In a very important election like the one approaching, causing static and distractions is unethical.
Ethics Quote Of The Month: Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky)
I was literally going to start this post with nearly the exact same statement, except I was going to ask how many progressives and die-hard Biden defenders would have the integrity to condemn the revelation that Facebook and Instagram censored posts and changed their content moderation policies after unconstitutional pressure from the Biden White House.
Not that this should have surprised anyone; it certainly didn’t surprise me, Censorship, deception and suppression of news, facts and reality is how the current mutation of the Democratic Party rolls, and Big Tech and social media have joined the mainstream media as their enablers and accomplices.
