Oh, I get it. Trump ran through six Defense Secretaries in four years (a record) and had an adversary relationship with the Pentagon. As with so many other Departments, entrenched resistance to Trump’s leadership flourishes there, and there are cultural issues as well.
The sort-of new President has learned a hard lesson, and wants a loyal outsider to tackle the Defense Department. Harry Truman once described the department as a feather bed where you punched a problem in one part of the bed and another problem would pop right up.
DOD is huge, a labyrinth of interlocking bureaucracies, and managing it requires superb leadership skills, diplomacy, organization and more. There is no reason to believe that Pete Hegseth possesses any of these.
He didn’t have to be gracious. Few would have blamed him if he was not. He could have followed through with the obligatory meeting between an outgoing POTUS and an incoming one from the other party stiffly, coldly and as formally as possible. After all, Donald Trump had refused to extend the courtesy of such a meeting to him, when Biden won the election in 2020.
But instead of tit-for-tat, payback, bitterness or resentment, President Biden said, “Welcome back.” Never mind that this is an odd thing to say to man whom his party (and Biden himself) had pronounced a fascist and an existentialist threat to democracy. Trump, himself addicted to outrageous hyperbole as a lifestyle, knows more than most that this was just a campaign ploy, albeit a particularly divisive and unfair one. “Welcome back” is as close as President Biden could come to saying, “It’s over, you won, and no hard feelings,” even if the hard feelings are there, for how could they not be?
It is supremely ironic that Joe Biden’s most remembered quote as President will be this one, uttered as he his administration is going out not with a bang, but a whimper. (George Washington also had a famous quote acknowledging his successor: “I am fairly out and you fairly in! George said to John Adams. “See which of us will be happiest!”)
At the end of ” MacBeth”Malcolm says of vanquished Thane of Cawdor, “Nothing dignified him in this life more than his leaving it.” It may be said of Joe Biden that “Nothing so dignified his Presidency as his leaving it.” I suspect that it will be.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a troubling, if not unexpected report, “Cheating Has Become Normal: Faculty members are overwhelmed, and the solutions aren’t clear.” It begins with an anecdote that would be funny if it weren’t so apocalyptic. A professor caught a student cheating, and warned him that the next time this happened, he would be failed in the course. The student wrote an abject apology, full of contrition and assurances. Then his next assignment was found to be composed by an AI bot. Then, just for giggles, the prof asked the same bot to compose a letter of apology for a student who had been caught cheating. The bot produced exactly the apology the student had submitted, word for word.
“I think our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done.”
I can’t find the date of that speech or the context of the quote, but what possible context could justify it? If that isn’t pure Big Brother, what is? “Can’t let the truth get in the way of progress!” This is the totalitarian mindset that (I hope) was one of the things enough voters rejected a week ago. This is the ends justifies the means ideology embraced by the Axis of Unethical Conduct, including the news media that lied, dissembled, covered up and broadcast false narratives during the campaign and, of course, long before.
Three days ago, the Daily Wire broke the news that a FEMA employee ordered workers to bypass the homes of Trump supporters as they surveyed the damage caused by Hurricane Milton in Florida. This was a damning story in many respects; among them, Republican claims that this was happening were “fact-checked” by the Democratic Party allied media and declared “misinformation” before the truth came out.
The Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro’s conservative website, broke the story because the mainstream media was probably burying it, but once it was out, every outlet had to report it and credit the Wire. Well, almost every outlet. NBC Breaking Newsreporter Mirna Alsharif, formerly of CNN,used the Daily Wire reportwithout giving credit to the source. Hey, maybe she should apply to be President of Harvard! Then she omitted key information to try to make the scandal less clear.
But social media pounced, as it should have. The reporter’s responses were unprofessional, to say the least. Then she killed her Twitter account after being thoroughly exposed….
Odd. One would think that the editor of a (once) respected science magazine would not resort demonology to explain her own conduct. Indeed, one would think that such conduct would disqualify said editor from continuing in her position.
Laura Helmuth, a woke activist who has destroyed the credibility of Scientific American by politicizing its content, went bonkers after Trump defeated Kamala Harris and tweeted,
How professional! How trustworthy! How scientific! Who wouldn’t trust the analysis of a science magazine edited by someone who makes such declarations in public?
In the scene above, which has already made it onto many lists of American cinema’s best ending scenes, Michael Clayton, a law firm fixer who has survived a murder attempt paid for by the general counsel of a chemical company that presents its products as boons to civilization but which is really covering up a massive pollution scandal, confronts the general counsel with his survival, knowledge of her and her company’s crimes. Unknown to her Clayton is wearing a wire, and her incriminating responses to the confrontation will bring down the company. Arthur, Clayton’s friend whom he refers to, was the whistle-blowing lawyer that the general counsel had murdered to prevent him from revealing the smoking gun company document Clayton is holding, evidence of the company’s knowing contamination that harmed or killed millions.
It is ironic that George Clooney, in what is easily his best movie and best performance, played a central role in the failed Democratic Party palace coup that resulted in the disastrous campaign and defeat of Kamala Harris. The unhinged and folish reactions of the now re-loading “resistance,” Democrats and their corrupt media allies (“The Axis of Unethical Conduct” in Ethics Alarms parlance) brought this scene to mind. You should show it to your deranged Facebook friends and relatives, but here’s a guide for you to use if they are incapable of grasping the lessons it holds…
Hack American University historian Allan Lichtman could have chosen to enlighten his audience with genuine perspective on why the 2024 election didn’t fit in his little election-predicting formula. Instead, as I’ve written about here, here and here, he chose to parrot partisan talking points and excuses because, sadly, he is a biased, publicity-seeking hack. Thus I’m forced into doing his work for him. Well, that’s okay. I’m qualified, and unlike him, I have integrity.
Let’s begin with this fact nobody has mentioned: only three men before Trump were elected President after losing a Presidential election. Three. Andrew Jackson was the first, but he gets an asterisk: Andy won the popular vote when he ran the first time but lost to John Quincy Adams in the House of Representatives. Like Trump, he said the election had been stolen from him. The second time a defeated Presidential candidate came back to win was in 1892, when Grover Cleveland, like Trump, ran again after losing his first bid for re-election to win the White House back, thus becoming the 22nd and 24th President. He has the same asterisk as Jackson, however. Grover the Good (in truth, he wasn’t all that good) never lost the popular vote: Benjamin Harrison defeated him with the first fluke Electoral College victory (Rutherford B. Hayes doesn’t count, but that’s another story.) So Cleveland won the popular vote in all three of his Presidential elections.
Richard Nixon is the third member of this odd club. He lost a squeaker to JFK in 1960 ( or maybe he didn’t, but unlike Trump, Nixon refused to challenge the result “for the good of the nation.” If Trump had only followed Nixon’s example, he would have won a real landslide this week), and then came back eight years later to defeat Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace to finally win the Presidency.
When we last left American University Allen Lichtman, he was smarting from his obviously incompetent and biased prediction that Kamala Harris would defeat Donald Trump proving to be spectacularly wrong. On Wednesday after Election Day, Lichtman told USA TODAY, “Right now after a very long night I am taking some time off to assess why I was wrong and what the future holds for America.” That was enough for me to enshrine him in the “Bias Makes You Stupid” Hall of Fame.
So Lichtman thought and he thought, and he reviewed his over-hyped formula that had delivered 9 out of 10 correct predictions in races that anyone could have predicted with no formula at all (Lichtman’s: go with who looks like the obvious winner, and when in doubt, pick the Democrat), and he applied his training and skills as a an American Presidential historian, and guess what he figured out! No, really, guess. I’ll give you time to think…
Ready?
On his YouTube channel, Lichtman that voters were not “rational” or “pragmatic,” succumbed to “disinformation” and Trump’s promotion of “xenophobia,” “misogyny” and “racism”!
Gee, the Ladies of “The View” came up with that, and they’re all biased, Trump Deranged morons. The voters were stupid, the brilliant Democratic message was muted by social media lies, and half of all Americans wouldn’t vote for a black woman as President because of bigotry.
I think the professor should have “assessed” a teeny bit longer. But it probably wouldn’t have done any good.
“I think two things this year, and maybe going forward, broke this premise of a rational, pragmatic electorate, and these are trends that are not new but have exploded this year beyond anything we’ve ever seen before. First is disinformation,” this clown said. “Always had disinformation, but we’ve never had anything remotely on this scale, where billionaires — I don’t know how much Elon Musk is worth, I’m sure more than a hundred billion dollars — who control critical sources of information for the electorate. I mean, Elon Musk owns X, and I’ve seen reports that his disinformation that he’s put out, has been viewed by two billion viewers, vastly more influential than New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, CBS… the incredible explosion of disinformation…makes it very difficult for a rational, pragmatic electorate to operate.”
“Then add to that that we’ve seen Trump and his allies exploit, far more than ever before — even 2016 and 2020 — trends that run deep into American history and still resonate at this time: xenophobia, fear of foreign influences … We have never seen, in recent history, xenophobia to this level, and it digs deep into a trend in American history. It’s not something brand new, and it’s not just white people, you know?” Lichtman said. “People of all races and ethnicities can be subject to xenophobia. And finally, there’s racism, one of the deepest, most pervasive trends in American history. And we have seen, just as Trump and his allies have brought misogyny and xenophobia to a new level, he’s also brought blatant racism to a new level … So we see then the explosion of disinformation and these three dark trends from American history, and that calls into question the whole premise behind the keys of rationality and pragmatism.”
Wow. What a hack!
If I had a son at American, this would be sufficient to have me seek another school to send him to, because such a complete lack of perception, analysis and accountability shouldn’t be permitted on any faculty, in any department.
“Experts” like Lichtman will now validate the fact-free rationalizations of the current Trump-Derangement victims and Democratic Party leadership seeking ways to duck responsibility for running a terrible candidate (whom everyone paying attention knew would be a terrible candidate before she was “selected). He blames Elon Musk? Did Musk magically make Harris sound like an evasive, babbling phony who couldn’t function without a script or a teleprompter? That’s a neat trick! Isn’t part of a college education to learn the life skill of recognizing when you’ve screwed up and learn from the mistake? Clearly Lichtman won’t teach his students that.
Small wonder that Lichtmas thinks Harris was the “rational” choice for President: he’s almost as much of a phony as she is.
Jeez, somebody tell her! Nobody believes this myth any more. That she would even say that on national TV justifies the public’s lack of trust in the mainstream media, the Post, and Rampell. Props to Jennings for not falling off his chair in helpless laughter and rolling on the floor.
Ethics Alarms 