While searching for Pete Rose posts in preparation for this one, I ran across an ethics multi-issue post from February 11, 2020, shortly before the Wuhan virus messed with our economy, our democracy, our laws, our health, our social interactions, our culture, our health and our sanity (but it was racist to blame it on China. Don’t get me started….). I don’t remember writing it at all, so I was fascinated to read this:
One might be tempted to add “incompetent,” but we shall see.
That ridiculous photo above of Harris supposedly on the FEMA briefing is signature significance. Witness the serious, troubled look on her face, the pen, the pad of paper, as she listens intently while flying over the hurricane destruction.
Except she isn’t listening, because the earbud dangling from her ear isn’t attached to the phone. Well, but maybe she has the phone on speaker….but what kind of inept staff allows a staged photo like this to be so messed up? And what kind of qualified national leader isn’t alert enough to know it’s going to make her look like a dufus?
“I was just briefed by @FEMA_Deanne Criswell on the latest developments about the ongoing impacts of Hurricane Helene, Harris captioned this photo. “We also discussed our Administration’s continued actions to support emergency response and recovery. I also spoke with @NC_Governor Cooper about the ongoing rescue and recovery efforts in North Carolina. Our Administration will continue to stay in constant contact with state and local officials to ensure communities have the support and resources they need.” Oh, I don’t doubt she had those conversations. But that’s not a photo of her doing so, and she’s telling the public that it is while the evidence that it isn’t is there for anyone alert to see.
Problem: Judges getting adverse public scrutiny for not reporting potential conflicts of interest and avoiding the appearance of impropriety.
Solution: Lower the standards for conflicts of interest and the appearance of impropriety.
Problem solved!
Yecchh.
—Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, expressing his anxiety about this week’s debate with Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance.
I can’t bring myself to believe that this debate will have any impact on the election at all, and I have made up my mind pretty securely about both Vance and Walz, neither of whom were responsible choices to be “a heartbeat from the Presidency. ” At least Walz, unlike Vance, has some executive governing experience, and at least Vance isn’t a parody of a woke idiot. But Walz’s comment pings so many ethics alarms that attention must be paid.
Let’s see…
Scary. Newsbusters walked down a dark memory lane with this collection of the vitriol aimed at Trump and the prospect of Trump victory eight years ago:
I quit Twitter with all my accumulated thousands of followers after it became clear to me that the platform was a progressive propaganda organ that censored users and tweets it didn’t like, notably President Trump. I returned (here) as a show of support for Elon Musk, who bought the platform and (largely) eliminated its tendency to content-based censorship. This Ethics Quiz has special interest for me.
X, as Twitter is now called ( I miss the little birdie logo) suspended left- “journalist” Ken Klippenstein when he linked to an article of his that contained a hacked document with negative, private and otherwise provocative information about Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance. Klippenstein used to write for the crypto-Communist The Nation, and was a senior investigative reporter for the far-Left online news program “The Young Turks.” Needless to say, he has an agenda.
The 271-page dossier on Vance has been traced to a hack by Iran. Most media outlets refused to publish it, but Klippenstein, who has a substack to sell, grabbed the opportunity. Musk took to his own platform to decry the document as “one of the most egregious, evil doxxing actions we’ve ever seen.” He went on, “Presidential candidates are not speculatively in danger – there have already been two attempts on @realDonaldTrump’s life. Moreover, the doxxing included detailed information on the addresses of their children.” X explained that Klippenstein violated its policy against posting “unredacted private personal information,” including Vance’s physical addresses and part of his social security number.
Nice. Matt Yglesias is allegedly a journalist who has had many left-wing publications give him a platform. He also co-founded the relentlessly left-biased propaganda site Vox. Here’s a signature significance moment from Yglesias that I flagged in 2016, in which he said that lying to advance a policy or position is “the right thing to do.” Yes, he really did. Yglesias has had periodic attacks of integrity since, however. Occasionally.
In that tweet above, he asserts, from the position as a prominent journalist, a pure opinion as fact. Many readers inclined to be gulled by their own confirmation bias will immediately take it as fact. It is not fact.
One of the posts I have most frequently referred to was this, in which I predicted that if Donald Trump was elected President, the entire culture would coarsen, become more uncivil, and, in essence, “rot from the head down.” And I was right, though I did not predict that that the Left’s anger at Hillary’s shock defeat and its eight year determination to destroy Trump “by any means necessary” would play such a large role in the process. After all, it was a Democratic member of the House (and a woman!) who said, “Let’s impeach the motherfucker!” It was another one who urged “the resistance” to make themselves obnoxious by confronting members of Trump’s administration on the street. Robert DeNiro, an anti-Trump fanatic, has been the most publicly vulgar celebrity by far and far more MAGA cap wearers have been the victims of assaults and confrontations than purveyors of it: people like Jussie Smollett have had to manufacture pro-Trump attacks.
Then again, the Right is responsible for a popular coded chant that means, “Fuck Joe Biden.”
Whatever the reason, The Coarsening, as it would be called if this were a horror movie, has come. I just did an ethics program for a federal agency that asked me to concentrate on civility, because it was deteriorating there.
All of which brings me to my trip to Walgreen’s today.
…which is not to say that it won’t sink even lower. The slobbering Kamala Harris coverage by MSNBC may be the nadir so far: Is the network’s openly biased MSNBC host Stephanie Rule the symbol of the pre-2024 elections news media corruption, or is it ABC’s anti-Trump hacks Lindsey Davis and David Muir, who made the Harris-Trump debate a three-against-one affair?
Before being Harris’s choice for a friendly, softball interview, Harris said on “Real Time With Bill Maher” that it didn’t matter to her if Harris evaded questions and refused to clearly delineate her policy positions. Why? “Kamala Harris is not running for perfect, she’s running against Trump.”
Ruhle further rationalized, “We have two choices, so there are some things you might not know her answer to. And in 2024 — unlike 2016, for a lot of the American people –we know exactly what Trump will do, who he is, and the kind of threat he is to democracy.”
That’s journalistic objectivity in 2024. She “knows” what Trump will do? What, like letting mobs of illegals cross the borders? Prosecute political opponents? Explode the national debt? Appoint people for their ethnicity, sexual orientation and skin color rather than their ability to do the job? Refuse to fire even the most flagrantly incompetent? What is she talking about?
I don’t grant the 10-year-old this honor because of his assessment of Harris, but because he had the guts and the integrity to give that answer, without blinking, to a CNN propagandist.
I fervently hope after our indoctrination factory in the public schools get their hooks into him, he maintains the fortitude and independence he declared here. Oh, I’m sure it’s likely that his parents would answer the same way. Nevertheless, it was a bracing moment. There is hope.
I’m surprised CNN didn’t “factcheck” him….
Ethics Alarms 