Everyone knew that Donald Trump was a low-life, belonging in the political genus containing human leaches and anthropomorphic pond scum, long before he even announced his candidacy. They knew or should have known, to apply a common legal standard. I’m no genius, but the millisecond his joke candidacy for President began smelling viable back in August 0f 2015, I wrote here what GOP leaders with any sense or integrity should have known without me having to write a word. They needed to tell Trump to go haunt a casino somewhere, because he wasn’t fit to represent the Republican party as a candidate—not as President, not as dogcatcher, not as a gag on a Saturday Night Live skit.
Nahh! GOP Chair Reince Priebus —Fun Fact: Did you know that “Reince” means “spineless tool”? Well, it does now!-–apparently thought Trump would bring a little pizzazz, publicity and new voters to the GOP primary campaign. Well, it sure did that, didn’t it, Reince, you pathetic failure as a leader, manager, Republican and an American? Continue reading →
Donald Trump is making it clear that he isn’t going to study, prepare, prep or train seriously for Sunday’s presidential debate. Well, why not? After all, without substantive or appropriately focused preparation for the first debate, he was…oh, right, he was lousy. Donald doesn’t think so, however, and that’s what matters. He is now mocking Hillary Clinton for doing what anyone would do who understands the crucial mission at hand, and the importance of hard work. She is preparing, just as she would if she wasn’t going to be debating an ignorant buffoon.
One thing the Clintons cannot be criticized for is their determination and diligence. They both always work hard, and are thoroughly prepared for whatever they do. Trump, in contrast, has prospered his whole life by bluffing, bullying, posturing and faking. He had his career and a fortune handed to him by his father, and really is the embodiment of Ann Richards’ famous jibe at George H.W. Bush that he was someone who woke up on third base and thought he had hit a triple. Continue reading →
At a Hillary Clinton town hall yesterday in Haverford, Pennsylvania, a 15 year old girl was supposedly chosen at random to ask a question of her own devising. She delivered a carefully worded query that she read from a script:
“Hi Madam Secretary. I’m Brennan and I’m 15 years old. At my school, body image is a really big issue for girls my age. I see with my own eyes the damage Donald Trump does when he talks about women and how they look. As the first female president how would you undo some of that damage and help girls understand that they’re so much more than just what they look like?”
Clinton responded,
“I’m so proud of you for asking that question. You are right — my opponent has just taken this concern to a new level of difficulty and meanness. And, it’s shocking when women are called names and judged solely on the basis of physical attributes.* My opponent insulted Miss Universe. I mean, how do you get more acclaimed than that? But, it wasn’t good enough. So we can’t take any of this seriously any more. We need to laugh at it. We need to refute it. We need to ignore it. And we need to stand up to it.”
Investigation yielded the fact that that the “random” participant was child actress Brennan Leach Her father is Pennsylvania democratic State Senator Daylin Leach, a Hillary Clinton ally. Brennan has performed in her father’s campaign ads, and also in a commercial release: she has an entry in the Internet movie data base. Thus it was a lie to present the girl as a randomly chosen questioner, and it was a lie to create the illusion that Clinton was answering a spontaneous question.
Then the news media took the falsely presented episode and spread the lie far and wide as truth.
And by the way, nice hair color…very natural, Bill. I believe it like I believe you’re a libertarian.
The Boston Globe reported that former GOP Massachusetts governor turned Libertarian Party vice presidential nominee William Weld told its reporters that he would be focusing his campaigning against Donald Trump because he did not want his Libertarian ticket to undermine efforts by Clinton to defeat Trump. This follows Weld’s earlier statement that “I’m not sure anybody is more qualified than Hillary Clinton to be president of the United States.”
Has anyone told Bill that the objective of a presidential ticket is to win the Presidency, and that when a party nominates candidates for the two top leadership jobs in the nation, it is supposed to represent an assertion that they are the best people for those jobs? Apparently not.
How about loyalty? Has anyone explained the ethical value of loyalty to Weld? See, that means that when a Presidential nominee asks you to run with him, by accepting his invitation you agree to assert that he should be President, not a candidate he’s running against. If a candidate’s running mate doesn’t unequivocally support him as the best candidate, why should anyone else? If Weld thinks Hillary is the most qualified individual to be President (Nonsense: WELD is more qualified), then he should endorse her and drop off the ticket. Indeed, many reporters, including Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame, have reported that Weld has considered doing just that.Continue reading →
Tell me more about how drug use is a victimless crime. I’m sure these assholes loved that argument
Lally 25, and Dilly, 26, were found dead of overdoses in the den of their McKeesport, Pennsylvania home this week, with three young children elsewhere in the house. They had recently posted on Facebook about how much they loved their children.
Not more than getting high, of course.
The parents may have been dead for a day or more before their bodies were found, after their 7-year-0ld daughter had told a school bus driver that she didn’t want to go inside her home because she couldn’t wake up her parents before dressing herself and heading to school. The bus company notified the school, and school officials called the police.
The girl, her 9-month-old girl, a 3-year-old boy and a 5-year-old boy were examined at a hospital, and social welfare officials assumed custody of the children. All in all, this is a good development for the children, whose parents were irresponsible, irredeemable, reckless fools. Continue reading →
“If Hillary signed off on a private investigator, let’s call it a minus. It wouldn’t change my support for her because there are so many pluses for her, like her stance on abortion.”
–—Feminist attorney Gloria Allred, responding to a New York Times report regarding Hillary Clinton’s efforts to intimidate and discredit her husband’s various female accusers.
This is the language of corruption and ethics cowardice, and it is very close to a majority mindset among Americans., who increasingly rationalize away what should be taken as unquestionable proof that a leader or potential leader is untrustworthy and therefor unqualified to lead. In respect to the Clintons, this is a flashback: feminists like Gloria Steinem betrayed their central principles to make rationalizations for Bill Clinton during the Monica scandal (which was a about workplace harassment and a President lying under oath, not about illicit sex), again because he supported abortion.
Here, on Ethics Alarms, the never-ending debate concerns whether leaders should be chosen based on their positions, or their character. That the two parties are officially all-in betting that character is both irrelevant to governing and to the voting public is proven by the disgusting Clinton-Trump choice. The message is that character doesn’t matter at all, which makes it more than strange that the news media and the Clinton campaign’s primary focus is on attacking Trump’s character. If character mattered as it once did and should, Trump wouldn’t be nominated, and neither would Hillary. If sufficient numbers of voters cared that the standard bearers of their pet policy positions were dishonest, ruthless, cruel, cynical, incompetent and manipulative human beings with little genuine regard for fairness, honesty, responsibility, integrity, respect or citizenship, this election would be literally impossible, except in some hideous alternate universe. Continue reading →
The The GOP accidentally released a statement congratulating Pence on his victory in last night’s Vice-Presidential candidates debate about two hours before the debate started.
Observations:
1. The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza mentioned the embarrassing release but brushed it aside as “sausage-making.” No, the word for it is lying. The statement implies that someone actually “fact-checked” what had not taken place when that was obviously impossible….unless, of course, the GOP really has a time machine.
2. Does anyone believe this junk? They must, or nobody would issue it. Thus it is intentional deception.
3. It also shows how incompetent the Republican Party is that this lie would be released before the debate. But we knew that...
4. Apparently Pence did win the debate, mostly because of Kaine’s obnoxious performance and the blatant bias of the moderator. You don’t think…?
5. The really depressing thing is that so many journalists and voters also decided who won the debate before it occured.
I’m not going to include the traditional KABOOM! graphic of a head exploding, since the explosion that has evidently occurred inside Libertarian Presidential candidate Gary Johnson’s head is the issue here. Normally I wouldn’t care about a third party candidate and few others would either, but many voters who recognize how certifiably disgraceful the choices presented to us by the two major parties. They are desperately looking for an alternative. How nice, and timely, and opportune it would have been if the Libertarian Party had come through in the clutch and nominated someone who presented themselves as competent, honest, and trustworthy! Unfortunately, it nominated Gary Johnson.
Asked on MSNBC to explain his twin failures to show that he ever reads the World News section (showing complete unfamiliarity with the epicenter of the Syrian disaster in one interview and not being able to name a single world leader in another—he has yet to offer any explanation for his bizarre tongue episode), Johnson took another leap into weirdness. Instead of offering one of the excuses his supporters defended him with on Ethics Alarms and elsewhere (“It was a simple lapse;” “it wasn’t significant;” Trump and Hillary are so bad that he’d be a better choice if he couldn’t remember his own name…), Johnson came up with the head-exploding argument that it’s good for him to be ignorant. He really did., espousing this original theory to Andrea Mitchell
“The fact that somebody can dot the i’s and cross the t’s on a foreign leader or a geographic location then allows them to put our military in harm’s way,”
The explanation is simple. The National Football League has no values, just assorted and unrelated reactions dictated by money, expediency, fear of activist groups, and stupidity.
This was the most recent example:
Washington Redskins cornerback Josh Norman was flagged after his fourth-quarter interception Sunday in a win over the Browns. He pretended to shoot an arrow from a mimed bow–veteran MLB relief pitcher Fernando Rodney has done this after every save his entire career–and was penalized for the unsportsmanlike foul of ” shooting a bow and arrow,” as announced by the ref. Fox analyst Mike Pereira explained to the TV audience that “Shooting a bow and arrow is just like simulating shooting guns. It’s a foul and it’s not allowed.”
The NFL refused to allow the Dallas Cowboys to commemorate the Dallas officers shot in a Black Lives Matter fueled massacre of police. Then it announced its support of the ridiculous Colin Kaepernick’s grandstanding protest of the National Anthem because, he says, “the United States systematically oppresses African-Americans.” Next, it submits the name of Darren Sharper—one of those oppressed African Americans, by the way— as a nominee for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He is serving 20 years in prison for drugging and raping women. Now it deems a bow-and-arrow gesture as so offensive to the sport that it requires a major game penalty.
Meanwhile, the league still officially denies that the concussions it routinely inflicts on its players are the cause of their brain damage when they cease to be able to function and slide into depression and dementia in middle age.
Those who continue to support the NFL knowing all of this (you put money in the league’s coffers by just watching the games) are allowing their own values and their children’s to be compromised and corrupted in exchange for a few visceral thrills.
CNN this morning showed a reporter asking giggling college students and others to identify photos of Tim Kaine and Mile Pence. Many of them couldn’t and the ignoramuses and the reporters had a good laugh about it. Then a CNN panel and Carol Costello, beaming themselves, discussed the phenomenon, which isn’t remotely funny. Why are so many Americans ignorant about their own elections and government? Why do those Americans think their ignorance is amusing? Why does CNN encourage such ignorance by refusing to present it as the disgrace to democracy that it is?
Apparent, according to a survey, a full third of potential voters can’t identify either Vice Presidential candidate. That’s nice. One reason, of course, is that the news media has spent so little time focusing on either of them. Huh. Yet Sarah Palin’s candidacy was covered as a threat to the civilized world by these very same organizations. Well, that’s because her running mate was so much older than the 2016 can..actually, McCain wasn’t significantly older was he? How can the qualifications of VPs be so irrelevant now, but so newsworthy then?
I’ll stop being coy. The answer is that journalists have no integrity. Continue reading →
