During the debate over the House bill to stop males “transitioning” to glorious womanhood from injuring female athletes while cheating their way to taking their scholarships, records, championships and safety, two of the worst female members of Congress—and that’s quite an achievement, given the competition— showed (again) why the public no longer trusts its republic. The two women showed themselves to be ethics dunces, incompetent elected officials, disastrous role models and, to get technical about it, assholes.
Government & Politics
A Jumbo For Democrat Bitter-Enders and the Trump-Deranged
This made me laugh out loud, and I have to do a quick post. I heard successive guests and hosts on MSNBC desperately try to give puppet President Joe Biden credit for today’s cease fire and negotiated release of the Hamas hostages, including the Americans. They denied that Donald Trump had anything to do with it. Trump, you may recall, promised that “all Hell would break loose” if the hostages were not released by the time he became President. Inaugeration Day is January 20. The cease-fire deal goes into effect on January 19.
That’s just a coincidence, you see. Sure it is. “Elephant? What elephant?”
Would it really be so difficult for even the worst Trump-phobics to give him credit for what to any non-deranged observer is so clearly the result of his thinly-veiled threat and the belief abroad that, unlike some “red line”- drawing Presidents of the recent past, it is risky to call this one’s bluff?
Apparently it is too difficult. They would rather lie when the lie is obvious and indefensible than show the integrity to admit that the man they hate so much did something that worked. How unprofessional. How petty. How self-indicting. How stupid.
But funny!
Ethics Alarms Will Now Be Kind To Kamala…
I always feel for the losers in Presidential elections. It has to be one of the most crushing career failures that any human being has to endure, certainly in politics.
In “Inherit the Wind,” Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee’s famous play based on the Scopes Trial, the wife of “William Harrison Brady,” the character who is a thinly veiled version of William Jennings Bryan, has a moving speech about how no one can imagine the pain her husband has suffered losing three Presidential races, as Bryan did (a record). In modern times, losing just once usually ends a candidate’s political career, no matter how young they may be or how close the election.
I think that it is highly unlikely that Kamala Harris, the DEI Vice-President who had no business running even once, will break the recent pattern. She will sign a book deal, cash in, and fade into obscurity, a bad memory for Democrats, a living joke to everyone else. Unfortunately for her, Harris is still our Vice-President, and cannot start fading away yet.
Yesterday she was again the object of derision and mirth on social media and on the conservative websites for her very Harris-like performance during an unscripted Oval Office briefing on the Palisades fire crisis. It was this section, a trademarked Harris “word salad,” that attracted the ridicule:
“It’s critically important that, to the extent you can find anything that gives you an ability to be patient in this extremely dangerous and unprecedented crisis, that you do.”
I can’t say anything nice about the idiotic content of that statement, for telling people whose houses are burning to be “patient” is about as tone-deaf as a political figure can be. However, I finally have figured out why she keeps issuing those “word salads.” It isn’t because she is a dullard, although she is. The reason for her malady should have occurred to me earlier when I considered giving her a permanent Julie Principle pass on them.
“Lying, Losing and Cheating Is No Way To Go Through Democracy, Democrats!”
Do Democrats really cheat more often than Republicans? It sure seems like it over the last year at least, when the party faked out the nation as long as possible pretending that Joe Biden was really President, then made Kamala Harris their substitute nominee without her winning a single primary vote. In addition, its plan for winning the Presidential election was t put Donald Trump in jail, or at least set him up to be labeled a “convicted felon.”
From Minnesota comes a particularly ugly example of ethics rot on the struggling left. There are 134 Minnesota House districts. When the votes were counted after the last election, Republicans had gained enough seats to deadlock the state’s House, 67-67. Ah, but one of the Democrats’ candidates had cheated! In House District 40B, Democrat Curtis Johnson falsely claimed to reside in the district and he didn’t, making him ineligible to run or serve under the Minnesota Constitution. The GOP filed an election challenge and it was successful, so a district court issued an injunction barring Johnson from taking that seat. A special election will be held to fill the seat at some time in the future—don’t ask me why Johnson’s cheated opponent didn’t automatically get declared the winner: I don’t understand Minnesota (Al Franken, Jesse Ventura, Tim Walz…) at all, and less with each passing year.
Unethical Quote of the Month: CNN’s Brian Stelter
Here is Brian Stelter, making a fool of himself, and CNN, and the Axis of Unethical Conduct, again:
This is the depth to which this cosmic hack will stoop to bolster his propaganda-spewing pals in the Axis. Censoring free speech is the equivalent of putting out deadly fires! Brilliant, but telling. This is CNN!
And this is CNN: CNN “factchecker” Daniel Dale rushed to try to defend the incompetence of L.A. and California Democrats, saying “There is no shortage of water in the LA area,” and babbling that reports of fire hydrants being dry were due to “technical logistical infrastructure,” whatever that means. You can’t check facts before the facts are known: a major investigation will be required to determine exactly what went wrong, what public officials were at fault, and what factors were in play regarding the devastating Palisades fires. Never mind, though: to those brave factcheckers, a lack of facts won’t dissuade them from rushing into debates and drowning opinions that might singe the Woke and Wonderful.
Janisse Quiñones, chief executive and chief engineer at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said that the fire response put immense strain on the water system. That would seem to suggest a shortage of water, no? Or the fact that many fire hydrants were dry, according to the firefighters who tried to use them. The Santa Ynez Reservoir the Pacific Palisadeshas been out of commission since February 2024, meaning 117 million gallons of water was missing, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Meanwhile, Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, desperately saying anything he could come up with to preserve his presumed status as the front-runner for the Democratic Party’s 2028 Presidential nomination, told NBC News that the state’s reservoirs are full. He also said, more accurately, there will be an independent investigation of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.
It should come as no surprise that these essential public servants, the Axis factcheckers, didn’t choose to factcheck shameless Biden paid liar Jan Psaki, now a paid liar on MSNBC, who told viewers. completely without facts, that the California fires weren’t the fault of anyone in California at all, but Donald Trump for not doing enough to combat climate change. The Axis of Unethical Conduct (that’s the “resistance,” Democrats, and the left-biased mainstream media for those unfamiliar with the Ethics Alarms term) sense that accumulated incompetence and bad progressive policies on display as homes burn might be a tipping point for ridiculously woke California, causing millions of voters to suddenly slap their foreheads and exclaim, “Why have we been voting for these liars and idiots?” I have my doubts that anything short of mass deprogramming can achieve that result, but still what we are getting from Stelter, Psaki and others reeks of panic and desperation.
A “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Note…
Over on last week’s Friday Open Forum, there is a discussion about “pet peeves.” Obviously one of mine is people who insist that there is no mainstream news media bias, despite the overwhelming evidence that the vast majority of news organizations, reporters, editors, broadcast news hosts and pundits are committed to “advocacy journalism” (that is, unethical journalism) and determined to advance the policies, ideology and major figures who reside on the left side of the political spectrum. I regard such people, which include a disturbing number of my friends and relatives, as one of four things: naive, dishonest, in denial, or not as bright as I thought they were due to bias, which, as we all know, makes us stupid.
I have felt this way for a long time (Hmmmm…I wonder when “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias” became a tag on Ethics Alarms?), but if 2024 didn’t make anyone who maintained that our news organizations and “journalists” were largely objective realize that they had been duped, there is no hope for them.
The New York Times, naturally, is usually Exhibit A here, not because it is the most left-biased news organization (MSNBC gets that title, easily) but because the paper is regarded, still, as the gold standard of American journalism. For the Times to be so flagrantly biased and so often in thrall to the radical Left (See: “The 1619 Project”) is a rank betrayal of the American public and our democracy as well as journalism, all of which need independent, objective news reporting from the so-called “legacy media.” If the best news source is partisan, biased, and devoted to propaganda, what course is there for the public but to be cynical, distrustful, and ultimately uninformed?
And indeed we are.
Comment of the Day: “The Worst President Ever? Part 6: The Final Field”
Steve-O-in NJ contributed a well-reasoned and researched resolution of the Ethics Alarms series “The Worst President Ever?” after the penultimate installment, which I posted last month. At the time, I still wasn’t certain how the Wilson-Biden contest would come out, and since (spoiler!) his analysis came down to the same final two, I resolved to hold this obvious Comment of the Day until I had finished my final installment, which went up (finally!) last night. Steve’ alternate analysis is excellent, as all of Steve-O’s historical epics are.
Here is Steve-O-in NJ’s Comment of the Day on “The Worst President Ever? Part 6: The Final Field.”
An interesting list, certainly. I believe that if you asked 100 people who the worst presidents were and why, you’d probably get 100 answers that would all differ at least slightly, although some common threads would run through them, and you’d get one group from conservative folks and another from liberal folks. I’m not sure I 100% agree with this list, but it’s the list you’ve given us to work with, so here are my thoughts:
Franklin Pierce – Had a life-long problem with alcohol, to the point where other military officers (yes, believe it or not he is one of the ten presidents who was a general) called him the “hero of many a well-fought bottle.” Tragic family history, and let grief and drink paralyze his single term in office.
James Buchanan – Took almost no steps to stop the Civil War from happening. Started to dislike the office to the point where he told Lincoln that if Lincoln was as happy upon assuming the presidency as he was upon leaving it, he was a happy man indeed.
Andrew Johnson – Never meant to be president, put on the ticket because he was a Democrat and a southerner. Couldn’t control the radical Republicans. Was impeached (probably unfairly) and came the closest any president ever came to removal from office. Also had the hardest act of all to follow.
Woodrow Wilson – Biggest racist ever to sit in the White House. Also probably one of the 3 or 4 most arrogant presidents. Led us into WW1 when we might not have needed to go, then alienated the world with his attempt to impose his own morality. Also alienated most of his political allies back home and was a willing participant in hiding that he had had a debilitating stroke from the country.
Richard Nixon – Popular president who didn’t trust his own popularity to take him past the finish line and overreached, then tried to cover it up.
Unethical Quote of the Month: President Joe Biden
“It’s just completely contrary to everything America is about. We want to tell the truth. We haven’t always done it as a nation. We want to tell the truth.The idea that, you know, a billionaire can buy something and say, ‘By the way, we’re not gonna fact check anything,’ and you know, you have millions of people reading, going online, reading this stuff. Anyway, I think it’s really shameful.”
—-President Joe Biden, attacking Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg decision’s to end its biased, censorious fact-checking system that relied on partisan propaganda operations like PolitiFact and Snopes.
What’s shameful is a President of the United States advocating speech censorship. Like many of Biden’s brain-addled outbursts lately, however, he has committed the cardinal political sin of saying what he and his puppeteers really believe out loud. So now we know, at least those of us who weren’t paying attention before and couldn’t read the metaphorical neon signs flashing before our eyes, Joe Biden and his entire party advocates the censorship of free speech on social media, including opinion, adverse positions and anything that might expose its rotting proto-totalitarian party for the threat to democracy it has become. Thanks, Joe! But it was pretty obvious already.
I’m glad that I have waited to post the resolution of the “Worst President Ever” inquiry until tomorrow, because so much applicable information has been flowing regarding just how awful Joe Biden has been. I think all who have read the series carefully have figured out that the finals are going to come down to Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Woodrow Wilson and Biden, and it doesn’t take a PhD to guess who the last two competitors will be either. Once I thought the ultimate “winner” was clear-cut, but Joe is fighting for the title to the bitter end.
He and his fellow censors circulated lie after lie before and during the Presidential campaign (among them that only Donald Trump lies) yet Biden has the astounding brass to talk about wanting to tell the truth. You know, truth like Biden being sharp as a tack. “Truth” like the border being secure.
Now THAT’S A Provocative Lawn Sign!
And apparently a real one, the creation of Democrat for an Informed Approach to Gender. Its website is here.
I wonder how that sign would go over in my neighborhood, where the standard woke virtue-signaling signs (“No human being is illegal”…”Love is love,” etc.) sprout like poppies in Flanders Field.
______________
Pointer: Dr. Emilio Lizardo
Snow Day Ethics Warm-Up, 1/11/25
It’s another snow day in Northern Virginia, but that isn’t stopping climate change hysterics and progressive public policy incompetence apologists from blaming California’s latest wildfire catastrophe on global warming—not L.A.’s incompetent mayor, not the inadequate fire department budget, not the arsonists who may have started the fires, and not LA’s DEI water head, who left a crucial reservoir disconnected, resulting in fire hydrants not functioning.
Department of Water and Power (LADWP) CEO Janisse Quiñones was hired at a $750,000 salary in May, double that of her predecessor. To be fair, she had a background in California fires: she was previously a top executive at electricity company PG&E, a senior vice president at Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) from 2021 to 2023. That’s the company with the power lines that sparked responsible for the second-largest wildfire in California history, Dixie, in 2021. Before that, the company’s involvement in the 2018 Camp Fire resulted in PG&E paying a $13.5 billion legal settlement, although its liability for causing fires was estimated at $30 billion when the company filed for bankruptcy in 2018. It exited bankruptcy in 2020, just in time to hire Quiñones. Hey, but it’s all climate change!….Meanwhile, the discussion over at the Friday Forum (again, sorry for posting it late) about pet peeves and my late wife’s particular objection to using “that” when “who” is correct reminded me of a brilliant limerick that I had almost forgotten.
My strange friends back in Arlington, Mass. used to play a limerick game in which one of us would come up with a first line, the next would add the second line, the third would complete the third and fourth lines that have to rhyme, and my dear, brilliant, witty friend Jay Sylva would always come up with the final line, because he was so good at it. I specialized in first lines, and this time offered, “The man who had eaten my face…” (it wouldn’t have scanned with “that’). The subsequent additions left us with…
The man who had eaten my face…”
Had the nerve to come back to my place.
I said, “Stay a while!
If you’ll cough up my smile…
To which Jay immediately added, to applause and his eternal glory,
I’ll forgive you for not saying grace!”
On to today’s early list…
Ethics Alarms 