Jim Gaffigan can be a funny stand-up comic, but whoever it was at CBS who invited him to write a political op-ed piece should be fired. Here it is, with a few comments from me…
“How are you holding up? Are you over it? I’m over it. I’m fine. At least, at times I think that. It’s obviously not what I wanted but that’s life. I’m not going to lie. It been an adjustment, but the world continues to spin.”
It’s an election, you fool. Just because you hang out with people who are Trump Deranged and think anything short of woke insanity, mandatory political correctness and free “gender-affirming care” for illegal immigrants in prison is fascism doesn’t mean this or any election is something you have to “hold up” after. This kind of talk spreads panic, paranoia, division and craziness. Shut up.
“And I’m an adult. I have children that are counting on me. I mean, they don’t listen to me, but I can’t just curl up in a ball and mope.”
Which is more ethical: for President Biden to pardon his black sheep son Hunter, or for him to let Hinter be sentenced to prison?
By that wording you can tell that I regard this not as an ethical dilemma but rather an ethics conflict. In the latter variety of ethics problem, two separate ethical principles dictate diametrically opposed solutions. This same ethics conflict has been explored in too many novels, movies and TV episodes to list. “Blue Bloods,” Tom Selleck’s ethics-obsessed cop show revisits the problem regularly: does loyalty to family always trump professional duties and obligations, and if not, when?
The Presidential pardon power is absolute, and many have opined, “Why wouldn’t Biden pardon Hunter?” Other Presidents have pardoned friends, benefactors (Gerald Ford pardoned the man who made him President), donors and supporters. Ann Althouse weighed in with this cynical rant…
I missed this pre-Great Stupid story in 2019, when it was a harbinger of stupid things to come, and so missed it again this year, when it was back in the news a few days ago. It wasn’t too long ago that Fred and Pennagain reliably alerted me to ethics stories around the web that I otherwise might have missed. A few of you do send me story ideas regularly, but something like this shouldn’t slip through the cracks.
“This” is this (Source of that movie quote?): Absurdist artist Maurizio Cattelan taped a banana to a wall at an art show in 2019 and called it “Comedian. He claimed that it was intended to force critics to consider how modern “art” is defined, but it just as easily have been a publicity stunt or a con. My wige considered Jackson Pollock paintings no more “art” than bananas taped to a wall. Performance artist David Datuna ripped the banana off the wall and ate it, so Cattalan just taped another banana to another wall. The New York Post recreated “Comedian” for just $5.75, but, see, because the Post isn’t an “artist,” that didn’t count.
Since last week, in succession, “The Ethicist” who hangs out at the New York Times Magazine has chosen to answer “My Mom Voted for Trump. Can We Let It Go?,” then “Am I a Hypocrite for Calling Donald Trump a Liar?” (which was too stupid for Ethics Alarms to even make fun of) and now comes the brain-melting “Shouldn’t Trump Voters Be Viewed as Traitors?”
“Name Withheld” writes, “From my perspective, the attack on the Capitol spurred on by Donald Trump on Jan. 6, 2021, the efforts to nullify the results of the 2020 election with false electors and unfounded court cases and the persistent effort to discredit those election results without evidence amounted to an attempt to overthrow a pillar of our democracy. More to the point, 18 U.S. Code Chapter 115 includes crimes against the nation described as treason, misprision of treason, rebellion or insurrection, seditious conspiracy and advocating the overthrow of government. I hold anyone voting for Trump at least morally guilty for the consequences of Jan. 6 and everything that follows the recent election. Would you agree that people who vote for Trump in light of these circumstances are themselves guilty of treasonous acts?”
A social media commentator called Caesar listened to a long, long podcast exploring the Harris loss with her chief advisors and the architects—if you can call them that without choking—of her campaign, then summarized what he heard here. His summary is too long to summarize on Ethics Alarms, and based on the little I could stand listening to of the podcast, it seems accurate.
The major ethical use of the jaw-dropping results is as a perfect example of the Ethics Alarms motto, “Bias makes you stupid,” in its full, destructive, mind-blowing glory. There is denial and delusion here in abundance, beginning with Caesars first two summaries of what he heard in the post mortem:
The campaign was perfect, and
Harris was perfect.
They also tell you how warped the perception of these presumably intelligent people was and is.
Another unavoidable takeaway from the summary is that Democrats and progressives should be terrified about the prospects for their party if this stunning blindness is typical of their compatriots. They literally don’t understand, not merely why they lost, but also the nation, American society, our culture, our history, Donald Trump, how to process unwelcome data, the essential skills of self-examination and learning from mistakes, and more.
The summary also supports a conclusion I came to shortly after Kamala Harris was installed as Biden’s replacement as the Democrat’s Presidential nominee. The party will never be able to nominate a male, especially a white male, again until a woman finally is elected President. Like General Burnside’s doomed troops at the battle of Fredericksburg, it will keep charging up the hill with inadequate forcesas if there is realistic chance of victory though each failed charge makes the odds worse.
Here is the Comment of the Day, an illustrative reminiscence from Michael R. in response to the post, “Unethical Tweet Of The Week: President-Elect Donald Trump (Sigh!).” It requires no further introduction…
***
Well, for 4 years, the federal government, the media, academia, and Hollywood have called me a far right extremist (and a lot worse). Federal agencies have training that lists Christians, white heterosexuals, etc. as domestic terrorist threats. These are the rules now. As long as the left thinks that they can treat their political opponents as threats to democracy, as bigots, and as domestic terrorists without ever being treated similarly by their political opponents, nothing will change.
It is being reported that 30 tech company founders have recently been de-banked. This comes after thousand or tens of thousands of other conservatives have been de-banked for their personal beliefs or political affiliation. If you are a conservative, you can’t become a teacher (the teacher ed programs have viewpoint interviews), you can’t get government internships (you need to volunteer for leftist organizations as part of the pre-reqs), and you will have a hard time going to law school. Med School will soon be an impossibility with the current leftist ideology being pushed. As long as there are no consequences for the left, there will never be support to stop such viewpoint discrimination.
When I was in college, I found out that one of my classmates had been sleeping in the lobby of the dorm for several weeks. Her roommate had moved her boyfriend into the dorm room and they wouldn’t let her in. When she went to the RA and the dorm director, they told her that “You two are both adults, you just need to discuss it and work it out”. She was frustrated because the roommate would not compromise on this. I laughed and said “Why should she? She has everything she wants and there are no downsides for her. What are YOU going to do about it?” So, I asked a freshman football player to go to her dorm room, pretend to be her boyfriend and ‘discuss’ the matter with the roommate and boyfriend. Well, he brought along the entire offensive line. Once he announced that he was her boyfriend, the roommate’s boyfriend fled. The roommate left school the next week. Nothing will change unless there are consequences.
The old TV show “Naked City” used to intone at the end of every episode, “There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.” There are far more than eight million ethics stories in our country’s rich and surprising history. This is one of those, and I pass it along to you.
The Franklin Institute, a museum in Philadelphia inspired by the work of Ben Franklin and dedicated to the study of science, exhibits a plane built in 1911 by the Wright brothers. It was, they say, a gift from Grover C. Bergdoll, a strange man with a strange history who was once an infamous national figure but who is now forgotten.
He was a wealthy playboy who was heir to a Philadelphia beer brewing fortune. He dodged the Great War draft in 1917, failing to report for military service. He was already known for his irresponsible conduct, taking flying lessons from Orville Wright and buying a plane from the Wright brothers that he used to buzz buildings among other stunts. He had multiple accidents and traffic violations in automobile as a teenager, and served two months in jail after a head-on crash in 1913. Since he was rich and well known, the government decided to an example of him to discourage draft-dodgers, It distributing wanted posters with his face and name, and when the soldier who supposedly was drafted to take Bergdoll’s place died in combat, the New York had a front page headline, “Died Hero in Battle in Bergdoll’s Place.”
The story gets stranger. Bergdoll was finally captured in 1920 after an ongoing manhunt, and sentenced to prison for five years. He escaped after less than a year. He convinced authorities to temporarily release him from prison to help them find a “pot of gold” that he claimed to have buried. Bergdahl escaped while his two U.S. Army escorts became distracted (they were playing pool at his family mansion), fleeing in his chauffeur-driven car to Canada, from which he travelled to Germany. He married there, but often returned secretly to the United States. Reported sightings of Grover were headlines news.
I didn’t see this until I had already put up the previous post about “Stupid Thanksgiving Tricks.” If I had, it would have been included. Above all else, the tweet is stupid.
I know, I know…this may be Julie Principle territory. Still, the conduct of the President of the United States is always of special significance, so I am loathe to declare before the second roller-coaster Trump term begins that he will be given an Ethics Alarms pass for the inevitable social media outbursts to come. What is so discouraging, not to mention unethical, about Trump’s Thanksgiving Day tweet is that it shows, again unfortunately, that our soon-to-be 47th President has a flat learning curve, at least in the area of public statements.
There is no reason for Trump to issue a back-handed “Happy Thanksgiving” message, and so many reason not to. He certainly knows that somehow managing to at least alleviate the toxic partisan divisions in America is not only an important task he must face and treat seriously, but also essential to the success of his administration. Trump Derangement is also approaching national health emergency status. What ethical objective can a tweet like that possibly accomplish? The answer is, I hope all can agree, none. Well, none except making Trump feel good. How juvenile and self-indulgent, in addition to selfish. The tweet is essentially gloating, a “Nyah, nyah, nyah!” to his foes. All it does is make them angrier, more hateful, more irrational, and more convinced that all Trump wants to do is inflict revenge on “Radical Left Lunatics.” The substantive goals he has claimed to be seeking will require his full attention; there is no time for such pettiness.
Yet there is it. No self-control, no hint of appropriate priorities, no sense of “I could tweet this, but it would be wrong.” No nation will be respected whose elected leader behaves that way.
1. I saw that meme on Facebook today. Is that the kind of misinformation social media platforms are supposed to censor, or is there value in learning that one’s Facebook friend is a moron?
2. On today’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade broadcast on NBC, three separate hosts mispronounced “Rockettes.” One called them the “Rockets,” another said “Rockeets,” and a third said “ROCK-ettes, with the accent on the first syllable. The Radio City Music Hall iconic kick-line dancers have been part of the parade for decades, and NBC has had broadcast rights for the event all year. Yet their “journalists” couldn’t bother to check to see what the perennial act is called? (Or learn to read?)
The facts: As of this date, Trump has about a 1.5% edge in the popular vote, and a decisive win, 312 to 226 over Harris in the Electoral College. By any analysis, it was a very close election. A single percentage point of votes flipping would have given Harris the popular vote lead, though her winning the Electoral College would have required pinpoint distribution of those votes.
What is a fair and ethical interpretation of this? Who’s lying, spinning, exaggerating or telling it like it is?
1. Today stories came out about Harris’s staff saying that internal polls showed her behind Trump from the start, and that they knew everything would have to break right for her to win. This in part is the campaign ducking responsibility: if Harris lost by only 1.5%, obviously she could have won. They are saying, absurdly, “It wasn’t our fault, the deck was stacked against us!” Harris ran a terrible campaign, and still came close. If she had run a better campaign, and got better advice (that she paid dearly for) that 1.5% would have been within reach. If she had competently answered a soft-ball question she got on “The View,” for heaven’s sake, that might have been enough. Or if she had agreed to the interview with Joe Rogan (and not fallen flat on her face, which is a big if). If she had not chosen The Knucklehead as her running mate. Any of these might have allowed Harris to prevail despite everything else.
Ethics Alarms 