Amazingly, this is the first time New York’s communist wacko Congresswoman, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has been designated an Incompetent Elected Official of the Month. Since her election, re-election and re-re-election, she has been honored here with (let’s see…) two Ethics Dunces, two Unethical Quotes, three Unethical tweets, and an over-all assessment as an ethics villain when she could have scored an Unqualified Elected Official, Ethics Dunce, Unethical Tweet, Unethical Quote, and a KABOOM! with a single blazingly moronic tweet. Ethics Alarms did award her a special Incompetent UNelected Official Of The Month in July of 2018 when she was first running for office. This was after she uttered the kind of brainless nonsense we are now accustomed to, saying that “Unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs.”
When the Monty Python satire “The Life of Brian” was released in 1979, conservative groups, calling it blasphemous, called for protests and boycotts in the U.S. and Great Britain. Now, as two of the living and not-completely-senile members of the comedy troupe, Eric Idle and John Cleese, prepare to launch a stage version of the movie, conservatives are complaining that they aren’t willing to make the adaptation edgy enough.
In one scene that has taken on more significance lately than it seemed to have 40 years ago, a discussion between “People’s Front of Judea” members Stan (played by Idle, on the left above) and Reg (Cleese) involves Stan saying that he wants to be known as Loretta and to have babies. ‘It’s every man’s right to have babies if you want them,” Stan insists. When Reg points out that, as a man, he can’t have babies, Stan protests, “Don’t you oppress me.”
To hear conservatives describe the scene now, one would think it was the funniest scene in the film. It wasn’t even the funniest scene involving the People’s Front of Judea. But I digress: apparently after trial readings of the script for the stage version, Idle and Cleese decided that they should cut the bit.
The good news is, as we are periodically reminded, this isn’t the U.K. (Thank-you, George, Tom, John, Paul and Ben!). The bad news is that the totalitarian virus embedded in The Great Stupid is contagious, and far greater threat to civilization than any pandemic. Great Britain has reached a level of unethical literary censorship—for the greater good, to eradicate “WrongThink,” you know—that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.
I thought the effort by British publishers to re-write the works of Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming was just a temporary outbreak, and that the miscreants had received so much ridicule and criticism that the madness had been contained. As is so often the case, I was tragically wrong. Now these ethics villains have come for…I can’t believe I am writing this…P.G. Wodehouse.
I can understand one dim bulb not realizing that this was a vulgar, juvenile, and offensive promotion. But an entire tourism organization? Nobody stepped up and said, “Wait a minute! Are you people nuts?”?
Wow.
Experience Regina, the tourism organization in Saskatchewan’s capital city of Regina, came up with an oh-so-clever idea for new tourism campaign slogan: “Show us your Regina.” They really did that. They had a second slogan too: “The city that rhymes with fun.” Get it??
Venus is a town in Texas, by the way. Just thought I’d mention it.
Back to Regina: oddly, many people found the two slogans inappropriate. Actually, just about everyone did, which again raised the question of how these locker-room level gags got past the first brain-storming session. So, because nobody involved possessed either good taste, the sense God gave an oyster, or the guts to stand up and make the tourist promotion equivalent of, “Uh, General Custer? I don’t think going down into the valley is such a good idea,”Experience Regina’s CEO had to release a quick abject apology. groveling,
“I want to start by apologizing, on behalf of myself and our team, for the negative impact we created with elements of our recent brand launch. It was clear that we fell short of what is expected from our amazing community with some slogans that we used.”
Now he needs to resign for assembling such an inept and sophomoric staff.
Incidentally, there is a Delores, Colorado. Maybe he can start over there…
Curmie’s typically erudite and perceptive Comment of the Day below made me happy and sad at the same time. Happy, because it is the kind of superb commentary Ethics Alarms readers excel at producing, making the site unique in the blogosphere whether a significant numbers of people take advantage of the resource. Sad, because I should have authored its equivalent in the first place, and might have come closer if I were not forced daily into squeezing posts into randomly distributed periods during the day that I don’t have to devote to earning enough money to keep the Marshalls from a future living in a cardboard box in the woods.
Curmie’s analysis also alerted me to something I had missed in the video, the mysterious statement “Not again!” from one of the anchors. This reminded me of the just-created whale in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” hurtling to Earth through space (along with a pot of petunias) that similarly thinks, also inexplicably, “Oh no, not again!”
I find this one fascinating for a variety of reasons. One of those is that I no doubt had a different reaction to seeing the event under the headline “BREAKING: CBS LA Weather Forecaster collapses live on air.” So I can’t say how I would have responded had I simply been watching that news show.
Part of my response is also based on the initial movement, the slow bend forward toward the desk. That seemed almost choreographed, as if she was going to pound her head on the desk as some sort of statement on the imminent forecast, described by the co-anchor as “the calm before the storm.” It’s the slide out of the chair that changes the dynamic. That’s definitely unstaged.
More importantly, I’d read your statement that she’s recovering at home before I viewed the video. This takes us very close to the notion of aesthetic distance, that unspoken understanding that what we are watching isn’t actually happening. Hence, we don’t run for cover when the bad guy in a play or a movie appears with a gun and looks threatening, and we’re not confused when the actor who played Hamlet is miraculously alive to take a curtain call even though the character is dead. Or, in this case, that she suffered an episode, but is on her way to recovery.
As Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot faced a humiliating defeat (and blamed racism for her fate), the conservative Townhall Media political cartoonist used the iconic scene from “King Kong” to lampoon her.
Bill Clinton was subjected to the grossest jokes. Donald Trump was treated the most disrespectfully. But Joe Biden has triggered the most below-the-belt verbal tactics yet, beginning with the childish “Let’s Go Brandon!” jeer. This might be worse; I’m not sure. I have to take a shower first.
Greg Price, the senior digital strategist at XStrategies LLC, posted a video of diversity White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre making a fool of herself, as she does virtually every time she appears. Price, clever 7th grader that he apparently is, changed his Twitter handle to “Joe Biden Showered With His Daughter” in the posting, setting a trap that White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates walked right into. Bates retweeted Price’s tweet as he quoted Karine’s lame “whataboutism”‘” retort to criticism of Pete Buttigieg’s characteristic negligent and lazy handling of the Palestine, Ohio train derailment. (It’s not the issue in this post, but Trump’s DOT head never oversaw a derailment that appeared to be poisoning a community in its aftermath.) So Bates, one of Joe’s loyal paid liars, posted this on Twitter…
….thus further spreading the unsubstantiated tale that the once-nicknamed Creepy Joe showered with his daughter, as her abandoned diary seemed to claim.
Now all the right-side websites are snorting and sniggering like the jerks who affixed the “Kick me!” sign to George McFly.
Yes, I know. Democrats, progressives and the resistance permanently lowered the previous standards for acceptable Presidential mockery and hate. I agree: Ethics Alarms warned about how this was going to harm a lot more than Donald Trump.
That doesn’t make it any more ethical.
I’m so old, I remember this thing they used to call “The Golden Rule”….
I view this as similar to the “It’s OK to be white” controversy. It’s a veritable Rorschach test that provokes thought, consideration and discussion, and any business that does that without being pompous and annoying (Like, say, Starbuck’s) is making a positive contribution to public discourse.
Santino’s Pizzeria hung the banner outside its Columbus, Ohio, store a few months ago, partially in frustration over new staff not taking their jobs seriously. “A lot of the people we’ve hired just don’t want to work,” Jayden Dunigan, whose familiy owns the restaurant, told reporters.“There is no work ethic behind them, so that’s the meaning behind the ‘non-stupid.”
“I had a high school student who thought it was okay to bring a Nerf gun in with another employee here,” the shop’s manager added. The other motivation for the sign was humor. Yet some critics on social media are “offended.” Is the sign a subtle shot at DEI? Is the shop saying people are stupid?
On balance, I’ve decided it’s a constructive and courageous message, especially in the Age of The Great Stupid.
I was going to post Steve-O-in NJ’s record-setting ( over 4700 words!) essay on the presidency of Jimmy Carter yesterday, and should have, but trips back and forth to the hospital (my Dad had his fatal heart attack in the midst of doing that, and now I know why) interfered with my best laid plans.
Then, last night, I read a head-exploding column by progressive Democratic historian, Kai Bird. His piece is an “it isn’t what it is” classic, as he tries to argue that Carter wasn’t the crummy President he unquestionably was. Bird can’t really do it, since the facts are so damning, the best he can muster being, “His presidency is remembered, simplistically, as a failure, yet it was more consequential than most recall.”
That evokes another terrible rationalization (“It isn’t what it is,” Yoo’s Rationalization, is #64on the list), #22, The Comparative Virtue Excuse, or “There are worse things,” of which “It could have been worse” and “It’s not as bad as you think” are sub-categories. This statement, however, demanded a “Popeye” (“It’s all I can stands, ‘cuz I can’t stands no more!”):
“Jimmy Carter was probably the most intelligent, hard-working and decent man to have occupied the Oval Office in the 20th century.”
Ethics Alarms 