[Note:I apologize for the funky formatting here, but it’s not my fault: WordPress again messed with its (terrible) “block system” with no warning and I’m trying to figure it out.]
I’m posting the graphic above again because it is res ipsa loquitur, rebutting on its face what so many of the hysterical Democrats, elected officials, pundits and partisan reporters are screaming as they survey the results of their own corruption and hypocrisy.
As Ethics Alarms has been asserting (and proving) for a decade now, the Left cheats. Its “they go low, we go high” mantra has always been cynical gaslighting, but the somnolent Right allowed them to escape accountability (and their just desserts) far too long. Donald Trump, whatever his ethical flaws may be, has always understood the concept of fighting back. This time it really paid off, and all Americans should be grateful. Yes: we should fervently seek fair districting in every state. Maybe the current chaos will eventually lead to that. However, letting one party rig the system unanswered while the other party just sits and shrugs is worse than the chaos.
Scott Greenfield, defense lawyer, blogger, Jack-hater and progressive legal pundit, deserves praise for a nearly completely ethical and unbiased analysis of the Virginia Supreme Court decision striking down the dastardly gerrymandering trick Virginia’s “moderate” governor and its corrupt Democrats tried to inflict on half the state’s voters. He writes in part,
“The confluence of a few unfortunate circumstances resulted in the Virginia Supreme Court holding that the state constitutional amendment to allow the redistricting plan as a counterbalance to other states’ legislative redistricting plans to eliminate congressional districts deemed “safely” Democratic was unconstitutional. Wags and cynics will imagine this ruling to be the product of radical rightist activists. It was not…Neither the majority nor dissent took unprincipled positions, both having some merit to their position, but the point of a ruling is to reach a determination. The Virginia Supreme Court did so, in a principled fashion, and it ruled the redistricting amendment unconstitutional under the state Constitution. It was a crushing defeat for Democrats, but that doesn’t make it partisan or radical. Sometimes, you lose. While the combination of the Supreme Court’s Callais decision and this Virginia ruling has set in motion a partisan war that serves to make congressional elections a by-product of widespread cynical gerrymandering rather than a reflection of the will of the voters, perhaps one of the most noxiously anti-democratic efforts to rig an election possible, don’t blame the Virginia Supreme Court for “losing” safe districts for Democrats. The court did its job and its ruling, no matter what outcome you would have preferred, was grounded in a principled reading of the state Constitution.”
Good for Scott. He is still, however, a Trump Deranged, biased progressive (like most trial lawyers), so he also wrote…
“If you want to find blame, it’s in the legislatures that decided to sell out their citizens, their voters, at the open and notorious behest of Trump. For all his baseless bluster about rigged elections, we’re finally going to have one and Trump demanded the rigging.”
Bad Scott. Bad. Look at the damn chart above. Democrats had already rigged Congressional elections. Did you wonder why the predicted “red wave” in 2022 never materialized? Wonder no more. Nine Democrat-dominated state legislatures made it virtually impossible for Republicans to get elected. President Trump, that kingly fascist, had the sense and combative instincts to get his party to try to even the odds. The “red” states that did that through redistricting (gerrymandering) followed their constitutions. Virginia did not. Naturally, the losers blame Trump.
Former DNC chairwoman and current ABC contributor Donna Brazile naturally took the same dishonest path. Remember, Brazile was the Democrat who first tipped me off to her party’s cheating ways: as a paid CNN “contributor” in 2016, she used her insider status to tip-off Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton regarding the questions she would be asked at a CNN “town meeting.” This was so unethical even CNN couldn’t tolerate it, and she was fired. Yesterday Brazile joined GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw and HBO’s “Real Time”host Bill Maher to give a masterclass on double standards and leftist gaslighting. Republican redistricting efforts are, she said, “immoral,” while Democratic efforts are what “voters decided.”
Voters in Virginia “decided” on the gerrymandered map based on the referendum’s false statement, indeed exactly the opposite of reality, that the new map would “restore fairness.” Remember?
“Restore fairness” by making sure that a 50-50 party split would be represented by a 10-1 Democrat district map. Sure.
Then Brazile played the race card, as Democrats inevitably do when the facts aren’t in their favor. “I come from one of those states that all of a sudden, the Supreme Court said, ‘Well, we don’t like partisan gerrymandering. No, we don’t like racial gerrymandering.’ So, one out of three voters in Louisiana is a black voter. One out of three. And they are now thinking of eradicating. So, that says people from some parts of Louisiana can represent New Orleans better than the folks who are representing—or Baton Rouge. It is wrong, it is immoral, and it is unjustified.”
Well-said, mush-mouth. “They” are thinking of “eradicating” black voters? I think Donna was trying to say that the Jim Crow laws that were still in effect de facto if not de jure in Southern states in the early Sixties justifies “good racial discrimination” in 2026, 60 years later. You can read her logic- and law-free rant here.This is, however, apparently the fake narrative the Axis has decided to run with, proving with its attempted cover-up just how desperate and unprincipled it is.
On yesterday’s MSNOW propaganda-fest “The Weekend,” Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY) compared the 1857 Dred Scott ruling to the SCOTUS decision that the 1965 Voting Rights Act could no longer justify anti-white discrimination in the Southern states, and declared the Roberts Court “one of the most racist courts in American history.”Got it. If the Court doesn’t allow the Democrats to rig its Congressional maps to pack the House with as many blacks as possible, it’s racist. Morelle also parroted the “will of the voters” lie in attacking the Virginia Supreme Court’s rejection of redistricting referendum. Did the MSNOW host point out for its viewers that Morelle was misrepresenting both decisions? Is a bear Catholic? Does the Pope shit in the woods?
This how House minority leader Hakeem Jeffreys reacted to his party being foiled in its unconstitutional, dishonest power-grab in Virginia:
“The American Revolution was against the billionaires of their time.”
—-Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, talking nonsense, as usual
I don’t care too much if the Congresswoman is historically ignorant. I do mind that she keeps spouting false-history in public, because most of the American public is also historically ignorant, and they might assume that because she is an elected official of some status, she must know more than they do. She doesn’t. AOC epitomizes the Dunning-Kruger Effect, where stupid people don’t realize that they are dolts.
It also is infuriating that the Congresswoman made this statement on a stage at the Institute of Politics, and no one corrected her. I view that as the equivalent of ratifying fake history. Donors take notice!
Her latest garbage is particularly egregious. The American Revolution was fought against a monarchy, a nation and its Parliament, not “billionaires.” To characterize the Revolution as a revolt of peasants against the rich is typical Communist propaganda. John Hancock, one of the instigators of the rebellion, was considered the richest man in New England, a multi-millionaire in today’s dollars. Robert Morris, probably the richest man in the colonies, and worth nearly a billion dollars in today’s currency, contributed millions to fund the war. Another one of the richest Americans, probably in the $500-$600 range (again in today’s dollars) was the “Indispensable Man” who led the colonial forces on the battlefield, George Washington.
A cardinal sin to Ethics Alarms is making Americans dumber, and the sin is central to AOC’s political existence. I highlighted some earlier a-historical blather in this post, but a narrative distorting the nature of the American Revolution is particularly unforgivable.
I’ve checked this story out to the extent that it is possible. It could be apocryphal; that “photo” above is clearly A.I. But the tale fits what is known about the characters of the two superstars, and it’s a useful parable whether the story is strictly true or not. “Print the legend,” as the old newspaperman says at the end of “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”
Frank Sinatra is a complex figure, to say the least. He had mob connections and used them (even though “The Godfather” horse-head-in-the-bed story is almost certainly fiction), and had a reputation for dropping loyal friends like hot rocks when they displeased him. He is also credited with integrating Las Vegas hotels, refusing to perform anywhere that relegated black performers to second class status.
James Brown was one of those black performers who benefited from Frank’s stand, and he was appearing at the Sands Hotel in 1968. Brown had a one-week engagement at the Sands, where Sinatra was always treated as its main attraction. Brown, like Frank a seasoned pro who kept tight control over all aspects of his act, had arrived to find requested dressing-room features like mirrors, lighting, space to warm up and more absent despite his making his needs clear to management. Brown threatened to pull the show unless he got what he expected, while the Sands told him he risked forfeiting his fee and being sued.
Brown ultimately agreed to perform, but said he would not cut his set to 60 minutes as management told him Sinatra had directed. Then Brown went on stage opening night like his hair was on fire, and had the audience cheering well past the supposed one hour deadline. The next day, management again relayed Sinatra’s orders: keep the performance to the contracted 60 minutes. Brown defiantly extended his set again.
A short COTD for a change—Michael R., whose first comment was on this post in 2009, not long after Ethics Alarms was launched, has made a trenchant observation that seems obvious once you read it, but had never occurred to me in this degree of clarity.
His comment follows yesterday’s post about the New York Times being sued for discriminating against a white, male job applicant. The paper is denying it, of course, but as I asked in the post, “Does anyone believe that the woke, left-biased, victim-mongering, knee-jerk Democratic New York Times, after declaring that its staff was “too white” and “too male” has not been systematically discriminating against whites and men?”
Interestingly, Ann Althouseoffered a poll to her readers on exactly that question…
…and here are the results as I write this:
Michael’s observation slapped me across my metaphorical face with the realization that approving of “good discrimination” is the result of the societal embrace of the Golden Rationalization, “Everybody does it,” in epidemic proportions. This is ironic, because the same unethical reasoning is what supported slavery and, after that, routine anti-black discrimination and prejudice for so long.
I worked in the administration of an institution that was all-in on “affirmative action”-–note that this is one of the great cover-phrases of all time, like “pro-choice,” allowing something that is unethical and illegal to be framed as something else—in the late Seventies when it took the culture by the throat. The institution was Georgetown Law Center, which is still committed to the self-contradictory policy Michael R.’s comment focuses upon: you may recall that its Dean essentially dismissed a new faculty member for daring to suggest that Justice Jackson, the DEI nomination of Joe Biden, was taking the place of more qualified candidates.
There was once a utilitarian argument for affirmative action; indeed I made it myself once upon a time. But a nation founded on equal justice and individual responsibility cannot maintain integrity while accepting any form of racial and gender discrimination without end. The fact that so many of our friends, relatives and colleagues can’t figure this out points to a widespread lack of ethical analytical skills. It is, I think, the same faulty and unethical reasoning that has spawned the rationalization of illegal immigration.
I have tried to explain why racially discriminatory programs are wrong to people at my institution, but it just doesn’t work. It is impossible to get them to understand that they can’t discriminate based on race. Most of them have grown up in a world where the courts have ruled that race-based discrimination is permissible. Explaining to them that it was illegal the whole time is just incomprehensible. I mean, it does seem implausible that every single federal and state court in the entire country ruled that the law that said you can’t discriminate based on race ruled that you could discriminate against SOME races. Explaining that they never made it legal, they just ruled it was permissible makes it worse. How can judges give people permission to violate the law for 60 years?
Remember, the Milgram experiment showed that as few as 10% of the population is capable of critical thinking. Most of those people are dismissed as troublemakers by society for their crime of critical thinking.
The short video clip above shows Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar referring to World War II as “World War Eleven.” The clip has been reposted by numerous social media accounts and has collectively drawn millions of views. Some versions leave out the Congresswoman quickly correcting herself and smiling at her own gaffe.
Omar’s “speako” has also spawned many memes, like…
All in good fun…except that if Donald Trump made a gaffe like that my Trump Deranged Facebook friends would be screaming that it was time to invoke the 25th Amendment. I am willing to accept the protests of Democrats that Omar’s incident was a forgivable momentary botch with no greater significance and not proof that she misunderstands Roman numerals or lacks a basic knowledge of history…if they stop using Trump’s occassional verbal stumbles as evidence that he is demented.
And you know they won’t.
On the other hand…what the hell? How can someone who has read anything about World War II and seen the numbering as often as educated Americans do—what, hundreds of times? Thousands?—make that mistake? Several years ago, a local news hostess was fired after making the same error; the assumption was that she must be an idiot. Maybe because my sister and I were immersed in World War II history, lore and memorabilia from the time we could speak, this particular gaffe seems particularly weird to me. If Omar pronounced “USA” as “ussa,” would it be reasonable for us to shrug it off as a mistake any member of Congress could make? This is an elected official, after all, whose American bona fides are tad shaky.
Now, now, Jack. You have exonerated Obama for saying there were more than 50 states, and yourself for mixing up this guy…
….with this guy…
so let’s not jump to conclusions about Rep. Omar just because she has said her first duty is to Somalians.
In the weekend’s interview on The Steven Speirer Show, I explained the distinction between morality and ethics in part by noting that ethics, unlike morality, is constantly evolving over time, and thus requires constant reflection and reassessment. This was the theory behind my now defunct professional theater company in Northern Virginia, The American Century Theater, which revived older American plays and musicals now considered “dated” by the theater community. Old art is never dated, because we have to know where we have been in order to understand how we got where we are and where we are going.
A fascinating time capsule in this vein is “Bye Bye Birdie,” the 1963 film of the hit 1961 Broadway musical. That show, the “Grease” of its generation, was a current events satire of the rock idol phenomenon, inspired by the cultural uproar when Elvis Presley, at the peak of his first wave popularity, was drafted. The Broadway show launched the careers of Dick Van Dyke and Paul Lynde, and included several hits songs (“Put on a Happy Face,” “I’ve Got a Lot of Living To Do,” and others by Adams and Strouse, who later wrote “Applause” and “Annie”) as well as one of the most famous opening numbers in musical theater history, “The Telephone Hour.”
For a number of reasons, I was moved to watch the movie again for the first time since I saw it in a movie theater. Naturally, when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I’ve got some other tools to evaluate performance art, but the ethical issues raised by the film are many.
Most notably, the casting of Janet Leigh in the role of Rosie DeLeon, struggling songwriter Dick Van Dyke’s long-suffering girlfriend, would be castigated today. The role on Broadway was played by Chita Rivera, and this was considered a break-through: no Latina had ever played the romantic lead in a musical before. Rivera was already a major stage star and was nominated for a Tony for her performance as Rosie, but while Dick Van Dyke and Lynde from the original cast were carried over to the film version, Rivera was replaced by Janet Leigh of “Psycho” fame, in an unbecoming black wig.
Leigh was a movie star and considered good for the box office, and Rivera was not movie close-up beautiful by Hollywood standards. Nevertheless, this would be called “whitewashing” today. Rivera was crushed by the decision, but such injustices in the translation of shows from stage to screen were and still are standard practice, one of the most famous being Audrey Hepburn taking Julie Andrews’ place as Eliza in the movie version of “My Fair Lady.”
2. If you want to see this orgy of hate and violence without the annoying commentary, here’s a link I couldn’t embed.
2. How does a mush-mouth like Topping have the gall to host a show of any kind? Jeeeez, whatever your first name is, get a coach! Learn to speak clearly. Slow the hell down. Not only are you hard to understand, your speech pattern is excruciating to listen to. This is malpractice.
Why hasn’t anyone told him?
3. Look at the hate on this crazy old bat’s face! What could possibly justify that?
4. There are several places on the web where one can purchase Trump pinatas. Here, for instance.
5. The onlookers cheering her on epitomize the description “angry mob.” The Axis of Unethical Conduct made them this way, hammering away at “Trump is a Nazi” and related slander and libel, day after day, for ten years. And it has caused brain damage. The remedy to speech is, we have decided as a nation, more speech, and “hate speech” is still protected speech. Inciting riots, however, is not protected speech. Nonetheless, inciting riots in slow motion, over long periods of time, by repeating demonizing and violence-triggering propaganda and rhetoric over and over again until it is embedded in weak minds, is legal. It is also unethical.
6. Do you think the crazy woman doing this while wearing a shirt that extols kindness on the front and the Golden Rule on the back recognizes the double standards she is embracing? It it intentional satire? Is she just an idiot?
7. Democrats cheer on this kind of lunacy while insisting that their “8647” rhetoric plays no part in the repeated assassination attempts. The only President I can find whose avatars were subjected to such vicarious and symbolic violence was Abraham Lincoln during protests like the draft riots in New York. (Confederate equivalents don’t count.) True, he wasn’t…
Oh. Right.
8. I react emotionally to people attacking and defiling images of the President of the United States. just as I do to flag burning. It is an attack on my nation, its institutions, its history and its values. The conduct shows civic disrespect that cannot be rationalized away.
To put a final period on this fiasco, we should recall that Trump’s idea was tried before.
The Hall of Fame for Great Americans was established in 1901. It was the country’s first hall of fame, inspiring the Cooperstown baseball hall and all the rest. For a while, it was a tourist attraction. Located at the uptown campus of New York University (now Bronx Community College), there were bronze busts of Presidents, generals, scientists, artists and scholars. Then it fell out of date, new inductees were not inducted, and The Hall of Fame for Great Americans was ignored and forgotten, as were many of the names on the busts. Who, for example, was Sidney Lanier?
There are 98 busts in the Hall. How many can you idientify? (And yes, Robert E. Lee is among them…)
John Adams
John Quincy Adams
Jane Addams
Louis Agassiz
Susan B. Anthony
John James Audubon
George Bancroft
Clara Barton
Henry Ward Beecher
Alexander Graham Bell
Daniel Boone
Edwin Booth
Louis Brandeis
Phillips Brooks
William Cullen Bryant
Luther Burbank
Andrew Carnegie
George Washington Carver
William Ellery Channing
Rufus Choate
Henry Clay
Grover Cleveland
James Fenimore Cooper
Peter Cooper
Charlotte Cushman
James Buchanan Eads
Thomas Edison
Jonathan Edwards
Ralph Waldo Emerson
David Farragut
Stephen Foster
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Fulton
Josiah Willard Gibbs
William C. Gorgas
Ulysses S. Grant
Asa Gray
Alexander Hamilton
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Joseph Henry
Patrick Henry
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Mark Hopkins (educator)
Elias Howe
Washington Irving
Andrew Jackson
Stonewall Jackson
Thomas Jefferson
John Paul Jones
James Kent
Sidney Lanier
Robert E. Lee
Abraham Lincoln
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
James Russell Lowell
Mary Lyon
Edward MacDowell
Horace Mann
John Marshall
Matthew Fontaine Maury
Albert A. Michelson
Maria Mitchell
James Monroe
Samuel Morse
William T. G. Morton
John Lothrop Motley
Simon Newcomb
Thomas Paine
Alice Freeman Palmer
Francis Parkman
George Peabody
William Penn
Edgar Allan Poe
Walter Reed
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt
Augustus Saint-Gaudens
William Tecumseh Sherman
John Philip Sousa
Joseph Story
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Gilbert Stuart
Sylvanus Thayer
Henry David Thoreau ]
Lillian Wald
Booker T. Washington
George Washington
Daniel Webster
George Westinghouse
James Abbott McNeill Whistler
Walt Whitman
Eli Whitney
John Greenleaf Whittier
***
I rate this selection, despite being 125 years old, as far better than the proposed members of Trump’s “Garden of Heroes.”
Warning: My head exploded several times while writing this part.Also: For some reason WordPress insists on listing the names weirdly. I tried to fix it once. I’ll keep trying. Sorry.
One of the stunning aspects of the proposed list of 250, other than its general incompetence, is that there was so much DEI pollution of the various categories. For example, there are very few, if any, respectable legal scholars who regard either Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Thurgood Marshall as belonging among our most admirable jurists. Marshall was the first black Supreme Court Justice, but that alone doesn’t make him a hero. Why is his trail-blazing credentials sufficient to get him a slot as one of the 250 “heroes,” but Ginsburg gets the nod over the first female Justice, Sandra Day O’Connor? What landmark ruling did Ginsberg produce.
This is a terrible list. I would hope (probably in vain) that a well-educated freshman at a state college could do better. Well, on with the critique…
4. Jurists: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Robert H. Jackson, Thurgood Marshall, William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia.
Comment:Ugh. In addition to the absurd inclusions (Rehnquist? Why?), the omissions are striking and unforgivable. John Marshall (no relation) is the most important and influential Chief Justice as well as the longest serving. Marbury v. Madison is the basis of the Supreme Court’s modern power. Where are the acknowledged giants of the Court: Benjamin Cardozo, Louis Brandeis, Hugo Black and both Harlans? Earl Warren was probably the second most influential and consequential Chief Justice, and the Warren Court, liberal as it was, still hold the record for transformative rulings. I’m not a big Oliver Wendell Holmes fan, but even his detractors (like Popehat’s Ken White) would concede that he was a major legal theorist who deserves to be listed among the greats. Moreover, nobody but a legal illiterate would believe that only SCOTUS members are great judges. Judge Learned Hand was dubbed “the Tenth Justice” and “the greatest judge never to be appointed to the Supreme Court.” His opinions and quotes are standard fare in law school. Judge Richard Posner, more recently, was an acclaimed legal thinker; so was Robert Bork, robbed of his place on the Supreme Court when the Democrats decided to violate a “democratic norm.”
Military Heroes and Patriots, defined as “Defenders of freedom who risked everything on the battlefield to preserve the Union and protect the innocent.”
1. Revolutionary & Early Era: Crispus Attucks, Joshua Chamberlain, David Farragut, Nathanael Greene, Nathan Hale, Henry Knox, Tadeusz Kościuszko, the Marquis de La Fayette, Paul Revere, Robert Gould Shaw.
Comment: I see Paul Revere turned up here. If he’s here, so too should William Dawes, who shared the task of alerting town a around Boston that “the British are coming!” Why is Crispus Attucks any more of a hero than the Samuel Gray, James Caldwell, Samuel Maverick, and Patrick Carr, who were also victims in the Boston Massacre? Oh, right, he was black. Got it. Race equals heroism. Similarly, why is Shaw on the list for losing an obscure battle with black union soldiers? Generals Sherman, Sheridan, and Hancock deserve the honor more. So, in fact, does George Armstrong Custer, as I explained here. Andrew Jackson won the most decisive military battle in U.S. history against crazy odds at the Battle of New Orleans. And what are non-Americans doing on the list, when deserving Americans are missing?
2. World War Leaders: William “Wild Bill” Donovan, Jimmy Doolittle, Gabby Gabreski, William Frederick “Bull” Halsey, Jr., Douglas MacArthur, GeorgeMarshall, George S. Patton, Jr., John J. Pershing, Matthew Ridgway, Hyman Rickover, Norman Schwarzkopf, Maxwell Taylor.
Comment: Where’s Admiral Raymond Spruance, who won the Battle of Midway? Where’s Dusty Kleiss another hero in the same battle, as the dive bomber who managed to hit the Japanese fleet with sub-par airplanes? Omar Bradley had far more to do with the U.S. victory than McArthur. Why are the officer heroes of D-Day omitted, like General Theodore Roosevelt Jr, and Gen. Norman Cota? Didn’t Trump watch “The Longest Day”?
2.Medal of Honor & Valor: Roy Benavidez, Desmond Doss, Audie Murphy, Alvin C. York
Comment: I get it, the only Medal of Honor recipients who count are the ones who have movies made about them.
3. Athletes and Competitors (Champions who demonstrated the American virtues of discipline, perseverance, and sportsmanship): Muhammad Ali, Herb Brooks, Kobe Bryant, Roberto Clemente, Lou Gehrig, Vince Lombardi, Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth, Jim Thorpe, Cy Young.
President Trump’s method in some of his madness is to restore and reinforce the core American values that have been eroded, corrupted and in some cases denied by the ethics and cultural rot wreaked by the Far Left’s capture of our national institutions. The motives deserve applause, but his execution in many cases, like his “National Garden of American Heroes” obsession, is often hopelessly flawed. I’m being too nice: the theory that it is possible to create a fair and historically valid list of “American heroes” is, as Sidney Wang (Peter Sellers) so sagely remarks above, is stupid, and ultimately harmful.
The latest plans for the monstrosity include reflecting pools, dining facilities and an amphitheater alongside 250 life-size statues of notable Americans. It will require a significant redevelopment of West Potomac Park in D.C., and the statues alone could cost more than the $40 million approved for the project by Congress. But never mind all that: the fact is unavoidable that choosing just 250 Americans to be honored as “heroes” guarantees exorbitant praise for some prominent Americans and unjust exclusion for others. There are probably thousands of American lives that meet the Ethics Alarms criteria for the public to have a “duty to remember” them. Furthermore, perhaps reflecting President Trump’s limited public vocabulary, not all important and productive Americans qualify as heroes, and not all American heroes had much effect on the country and its history. Is the proposed “garden” intended to honor character, achievements, or both? Finally, the choices of who to honor in such a project will be distorted by bias and politics. In fact, that has already occurred.
The list of 250 that has been published confirms all of these fears; indeed, its even worse than I expected. Here are the current proposed “heroes” by category; the list is introduced as being categorized by their primary contributions to our national story, representing “the tapestry of American greatness, men and women who, through faith, courage, and hard work, built the United States into a beacon of hope and industry.”
Ethics Alarms 