Wow, it takes some impressive ineptitude to get two “Incompetent Elected Official of the Month” designations in less than 30 days, but this creep was up to the challenge.
Yesterday the House voted 413-2 to censure Edwards. The House Ethics Committee recommended the action after it found last month that he had engaged in unprofessional and inappropriate behavior with two former female staffers. EA wrote about that stage of this episode here.
Edwards then stood up and sort-of-kind-of apologized, but not really, saying,
“I want to say something directly and publicly to the two women who have been at the center of all of this. I am sorry. I’m sorry that my actions, my judgement or the way that I expressed a friendship ever put either of you in an uncomfortable position. My intentions were only grounded in what I understood our friendship to be and in genuine admiration and respect that I had for each of you. Not only as professionals, but as people. I ask each of you, Republican and Democrat alike, to look beyond the headlines and examine what the committee actually found. I am not asking for special treatment, I am asking for fair treatment. I am asking you to decide if the punishment before you is supported by the evidence proportional to the conduct actually established.”
Just to get the framing straight: The Axis news media reflexively states that President Trump’s long-standing position that the 2020 Presidential Election was “fixed,” “rigged” or “stolen” is “baseless.” This is, as EA has pointed out many times, deliberate disinformation and the product of pernicious bias.
While it is impossible to prove that the election was “stolen” and that Trump actually won (and thus he should quit saying that, but you know he won’t) there is plenty of basis for the claim that the 2020 election was rigged, etc. The news media sees no “base” for that because the news media is what rigged it.
Indeed, far from being merely a legitimate basis for a theory, the Axis of Unethical Conduct’s powerful journalism wing’s four year-long efforts to mislead, frighten and enrage voters for the purpose of bringing down Trump and his first administration are blazingly etched in the tablets of history like the Ten Commandments are carved in stone by God in Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments”:
The fake “Russiagate” story
The routine negative tilt of virtually all Trump Presidency coverage not on Fox News
The hostile badgering by the White House Press Corps, exemplified by CNN’s Jim Acosta
The press’s cheerleading for the first purely partisan impeachment
The fearmongering in the news media to force and support the insane national shutdown during the pandemic, crashing what had been a successful economy under Trump (and making the dubious election procedures used in the election possible).
The failure of reporters to raise the already evident issue of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline during the campaign (I noticed it; why didn’t they?)
The Hunter Biden laptop cover-up.
Amazingly, that’s not a complete list. Not even close.
Despite some backlash and scattered efforts to reform, the news media is still determined to bring Trump down and reverse his policies. Current and ongoing efforts include vilifying I.C.E, extolling “good illegal immigrants,” promoting the most extreme agenda items of the pro-transsexual fad (or, more properly, social contagion), obsessing over relative trivia (the Kennedy Center, et al.) while burying indisputable policy successes, and broadcasting dubious polls Again, that is a partial list. The lies, spin, misrepresentations and instances of journalists acting as Democratic (and, mirabile dictu, Democratic Socialist/Communist) activists is now intensifying as the 2026 mid-terms approach. The Axis wants the Democrats to control Congress so the President can be neutralized by an endless stream of House impeachments until the end of his term, whereupon Democratic prosecutors can work to put him in jail after as many show trials as it takes. Apparently it also wants non-citizens to vote, elections to be intrinsically untrustworthy, the borders to be open again, as many unborn babies as possible killed, women getting trounced by biological males in women’s sports, a rigged Supreme Court, more crimes in major cities, and permanent discrimination against whites males, among other blessings.
All of this is a long prelude to noting how CNN, through its venerable hack Wolf Blitzer, spread a lie last week about the substance of Trump’s (excellent and necessary) attempt to limit mail-in ballots.
Here’s Ann on her substack (of course she has a substack) still pounding away on “The Great Replacement” theory:
Americans see videos of thousands of Muslims marching through London and Paris, and say, Europe is finished. Shocked at the unassimilable cultures being dumped on them, Europeans imagine no one has ever suffered so much.
So it’s unanimous. The U.S. is so lucky to have Hispanic immigrants instead of Muslims!
The consensus opinion could not be more wrong. Europe has only just begun its experiment with “multiculturalism.” The U.S. is so far along on this journey, it would be a miracle for the country to survive another half century in any recognizable form.
In addition to being screwed by the sizable group of Americans always clamoring for cheap labor, the U.S. is uniquely screwed by its geography, as pointed out by Harvard professor Samuel Huntington twenty years ago. We are the only developed country that shares a border with a third world country—and that border is 2,000 miles long, protected by a picket fence. Moreover, the income gap between Mexico and America is greater than any other two contiguous countries in the world.
But why not cheer for the U.S. becoming another Mexico, as The Wall Street Journal does? Think of all that cheap labor!
One side benefit of having to watch all the Red Sox games as Boston closes in on a serious run for the 2026 World Series is getting a chance to see the various campaign ads for Congressional candidates in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and the other New England states served by the New England Sports Network (NESN) that broadcasts the games to “Red Sox Nation.” Let me rephrase that: getting the chance to see how idiotic the ads are.
The one you see above, by Democrat Chris Pappas, is easily the best of the dozens of ads I have seen, and it’s idiotic—infuriatingly vague, misleading, and using broad innuendos that don’t make any sense.
What restaurant has “VIP sections”? The analogy between a restaurant and Congress is so strained it makes my brain hurt. What does “play by their own rules” mean?
I view any Democrat as ethically estopped from complaining about members of Congress engaging in stock trading. The most powerful Democrat in Congress for decades, Nancy Pelosi, was also the most flagrant beneficiary of Congressional inside trading. The Trump Administration has done a great deal to lower prescription drug prices, but nothing except nationalized health care or government guaranteed income can prevent citizens from having to make choices regarding how to spend their money.
But, again, this is by far the best ad I’ve seen. Several boast that they should be elected to Congress to “stand up to Trump.” What does that mean? The Democrats will vote against anything Trump supports even if its rainbows and lollipops. “Standing up to Trump” means what, making mean faces at him? Insulting him, like members of The Squad or Jasmine Crockett? How does that help constituents? Many also say they will “stand up to” or “oppose” I.C.E. Does that mean they support open borders? Do they not want to get the dangerous illegals out of their constituency? Or are these just meaningless, focus group-tested buzz words? Almost all of them say that if elected they will “bring costs down.” Do they not know that costs as a whole never “come down,” do they think people are so stupid they don’t know that, or are people so stupid they really think that?
Maybe it’s my imagination, but I don’t think so: I remember campaign ads once containing occasional genuine, practical, achievable policy positions. Now its all virtue signaling: Elect me because I hate Trump. Elect me because I don’t like I.C.E. Elect me because I’d really like to do all of these things I won’t have the power to do but at least I have good intentions.
It is only fair to flag this idiocy, since I routinely call out the Times’ progressive and Democratic Party propaganda under the “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!” banner and leave the Post, which I stopped subscribing to a decade ago because it was so infuriatingly biased, relatively unscathed, :
One of my few non-Trump Deranged Facebook friends posted that tweet today with the wry legend, typical of him, “I don’t see the problem…”
This wasn’t among my planned posts for today, but after picking on the Times in the previous post, I feel ethically obligated to point out that the Washington Post is an “enemy of the people” too.
The graphic above was based on data from the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (BGN), White House executive orders, and U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary’s Orders to chart notable geographic renamings in the U.S. from 1963 to 2026.
While renaming two large bodies of water is certainly an unusually flamboyant example of changing names of geographical locales for political or other reasons, Trump’s contributions to the map certainly have plenty of company. The hysteria attached to the most recent “horror,” the renaming of Lake Ontario (Who. Cares.) is, in this context, wildly excessive.
It is also, as an astute conservative contrarian on my Facebook feed pointed out, hypocritical. The same people foaming at the mouth over the loss of “Ontario” to name a lake shared by the U.S. and Canada were all-in as schools, streets, plazas, parks, buildings and more had their names changed by wokesters when The Great Stupid spread its dark wings over the land. They applauded attempts to erase from cultural memory such crucial figures as Founders Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Mason, Presidents George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, William McKinley and John Tyler, and important historical figures like Robert E. Lee and John C. Calhoun….and I’m not even talking about all the toppled statues.
As an aside, I saw for the first time, the brilliantly gold-refinished hyper-muscular horses and riders that grace D.C.’s Memorial Bridge as I crossed crossed from from the Old Dominion to the Lincoln Memorial. They look great, in stark contrast to their tarnished, ruined appearance for, oh, as long as I’ve lived in the area. But I bet the Trump deranged still hate the upgrade, because he did it. For example, a Trump-hater posted on X a representation of how Trump’s arch would block the view of the Lee Mansion in Arlington National Cemetery. Huh. So you wanted to pull down every statue of the General across the country, but his plantation’s mansion is sacred!
I’m getting this Comment of the Day by Tim LeVier up about a week late. Fortunately, I was reminded of the topic because essays and articles about the weird outpouring of support for a child-killer keep coming. Here’s the beginning of one I read today in The Free Press:
“Struggling, sleep-deprived moms are propping up their phones in their bathroom, hitting the record button and throwing ice at it while screaming for a whole minute. “Instead of having a screaming match with my toddler,” one mom wrote in a social media post, “I throw ice into my tub. It allows me to feel angry without being destructive.” Moms are also setting up ring lights to film themselves hysterically sobbing in front of their small children. Others are filming their crying babies with the caption “Me too, Lindsay,” in solidarity with Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mom who killed her three children—ages 5, 3, and 8 months—and is currently on trial for murder. This brain rot has spread like wildfire, as the algorithms made sure it would, and in the momosphere—the network of TikTok moms and mommy influencers and mom bloggers—it has been almost universally embraced as a healthy, liberating way for mothers to exhibit their rage.”
Tim’s analysis is as useful as I found it to be last week. Here is his Comment of the Day on the post, “On The Lindsay Clancy Support Movement: ‘What’s Going On Here?’”….[Oh…I know it’s foolish and biased to judge people by countenance, but boy, if I were casting Medea—or Lizzie Borden—that face would be irresistible.]
***
I have to break down any comment by the groups involved:
1. L. Clancy – She’s on trial. She did the deed. By her plea, I would say that’s an admission of being the one to have done the deed, her defense is not that she didn’t do it, her defense is that there’s disagreement to the severity of the charge due to her mental health. That is a proper question and should be settled by the courts / justice system.
2. The Parents and their Fundraisers – As I had heard it, money was being raised to support her parents through this and provide them with a place to stay because 3 years of motel rooms adds up.
It is a noble enough goal for the parents to attend the trial and confront the facts and reality of what is determined regarding your child. The people legitimately raising funds and supporting only this goal are probably showing some kind of exemplary ethics in being able to overlook the “Ick Factor” of the case and demonstrating a duty to care. How much easier would it be for the parents to not confront reality and wipe their hands of their daughter?
3. The Grifters – Ostensibly, there must be online grifters that have their own interests in play. They find hot button issues to sell some t-shirts and signs and whatever else will turn them a profit. They’ll lie about donating money and they’ll fan the flames to market and sell their wares.
These people are scum and not real people. They likely use AI generated video characters to fan these flames and profess their own special kind of virtue.
4. The Protestors / Defenders / Supporters – Providing financial and material support to someone they have no prior connection.
These people are deranged and one has to question where they came from and who has time to commit to such folly at a time when everyone and their mother is complaining about the cost of things. Why would anyone protest due process? She’s making her case in a court of law and the fair process will play out resulting in a judgment. This isn’t an area for “opinions” and to influence an outcome. Its meddlesome and the act of a narcissist that believes in one’s own “greatness” or “importance” over that of an impartial judicial institution.
[Note: I am abashed that over the years Ethics Alarms has neglected formal ethics theory far more than it has focused on it. Thus I was thrilled to receive this excellent guest post, submitted by faithful Ethics Alarms reader James Rogers. JM.]
It is evident to many, perhaps even a majority, that we have been living through and are still in a substantially unethical period in US and world history. How can we objectively determine if this is true? The multiple ethics train wrecks highlighted by our blog host is certainly one. Another reasonable and slightly less subjective method would be to consider how an eons-old founder of our civilization measured ethical people and behaviors generally and in the realm of politics.
Recently, I took the opportunity to read two books on the matter by Aristotle (4th Century BC), ‘Nichomachean Ethics’ and ‘Politics’. In those readings Aristotle directly addressed both the individual and societal perspectives on ethics and ethical government. This perspective has additional appeal as it isn’t tinged by modern religious biases.
Since we are humans, tackling individual ethics seems foundational as societal ethics comprises humans behavior and interactions regarding governance and broader economic and social commerce. Starting there, Aristotle points out there are three essential reasons for human action:
Pleasure (personal gain or goal achievement),
Honor (public recognition, affirmation, or reputation), and,
Virtue (for the benefit of another or others though it may also benefit you) without expectation of any recompense or acknowledgement.
These are universal in our human motivations, regardless of a person’s status, wealth or education.
Finding a truly or purely virtuous person or people to interact with is more than tough to find. In fact, it is fairly certain that person or set of people do not exist. Potentially someone independently wealthy, who needs nothing, who simultaneously is pursuing virtue is possibly out there, but it would be more than challenging to find and identify them. If this is an accurate assumption, the human race is likely facing tough choices individually, as they strive to be virtuous themselves while finding others to engage with who will behave, at least in part, virtuously. As a result, we often make our own personal ethical compromises and also in our associations.
I try to avoid the Sunday talking-head shows now (once upon a time, my late wife and I would watch them all). For some reason I lighted on CNN’s “State of the Union with Jake Tapper and Dana Bash” this morning and caught the hang-dog, sour-faced Bash trying to bash Trump Administration illegal immigration policing czar Tom Homan.
Bash: “Do you feel at all bad about sending Haitians back to a country where your own administration considers conditions dire?”
Ethics Verdict: Stupid, manipulative, and irresponsible. “Feelz” are not valid considerations in law enforcement, nor are they legitimate topics for inquiry by serious journalists, of which we have approximately none; certainly not Dana Bash.
What exactly does she propose, importing the whole population of Haiti because that accurately labeled “shit-hole country” hasn’t managed to get its act together for its entire, miserable, violent existence since it became independent in 1804? Holman, who has a terrible poker face on which we could see his disgust with each one of Bash’s questions that had the unstated implication that he, and President Trump, of course, are heartless racists. Homan answered this one by saying that he doesn’t feel badly and shouldn’t when he is enforcing the immigration laws as passed by Congress. He also made the obvious, though not to Bash and all the other “Good Illegal Immigrant” bleeding hearts, point that millions of people across the globe are in line to come to “the greatest country on earth” the legal and right way, and there is no justification for allowing those who came here or remain here illegally to block their paths.
[This is CNN! I had to find an excuse to post this, but it is relevant to Paragraph 7 below.]
All over Facebook, my Trump Deranged friends have been egging me on to stuff their metaphorical heads up their metaphorical asses after they have used Dolly Parton’s demise to justify their own biases. My favorite was the one that began, “I don’t want to talk about Trump, but isn’t it interesting that the vile, bigoted asshole wrote nice things about Dolly even though she was woke and an LGBTQ supporter.”
Note: This woman doesn’t want to talk about Trump, but immediately turned an appreciation for a recently deceased, non-political country music superstar into an excuse to attack the President.
Remind me: how did I end up with so many friends like this?
Lie #1: Dolly Parton was not by any stretch of the imagination “woke.” She consistently refused to take political or culture war positions. “Live and let live,” “Trust in the Lord,” Love your Neighbor” are not woke talking points.
Lie #2: She was not an LGBTQ “supporter” other than to say she loved everyone. Claiming that Parton was a member of the Pride mob is now a viral near consensus on Bluesky, Instagram and Facebook, and even the bots on Google and “X” will confirm that non-fact. It’s the reverse of “If you’re not for us, you’re against us”; in Dolly’s case, that she didn’t support active bigotry against gays etc. and believed they should have the same rights and acceptance as everyone else, made her an LGBTQ+ activist.
Let’s examine this one a bit more. shall we? Dolly Parton never directly advocated same sex marriage. She once joked about gay marriage, “Why can’t they be as miserable as us heterosexuals in their marriages?” Bob Hope might have made that joke. (Maybe he did.) Bob was not “woke.” She gave the obligatory lawn sign pablum “I think love is love and we have no control over that” when pressed. I guess she also supported the Man-Boy Love group, then. “I think people should be allowed to marry,” was another of Dolly’s carefully worded ambiguities. Donald Trump’s comment was, “I have no problem with the gays.” Did that make him “woke”? An LGBTQ activist?
Ethics Alarms 