Incompetent Elected Officials

Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month: Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Cal)

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

That clip from yesterday has “gone viral,” as it should. It is also signature significance for an incompetent member of Congress and a party with no ethical standards.

First of all, why the Democrats think it is responsible or wise to treat FBI whistleblowers with the kind f contempt usually reserved for pedophiles, human traffickers and Klan members is a mystery. Then there is the grander question of why the news media is supporting the Democrats in this: after all, at issue is a corrupt and out-of control law enforcement agency.

Second, and most embarrassing of all, is the ineptitude of Rep. Sanchez and her staff, which obviously was ordered to do a deep dive into the social media accounts of the whistleblower witnesses in the Weaponization committee hearings to find dirt that could be used to discredit them. They found the wrong Twitter account, and yet Sanchez, adopting the accusatory approach and tone of Joe McCarthy, used a tweet from it anyway, demanding to know if the witness “agreed” with the mystery tweeter’s sentiment. Then Sanchez ended her self-humiliating questioning as if she had proven something other than the fact that she is an unapologetic fool.

What she should have said, when the witness told her she had the wrong account, was “I’m sorry,” then shut the hell up. I was immediately reminded of the memorable line delivered by Albert Finney (as attorney Ed Masry) at the end of “Erin Brockavich.” I wish the witness being abused by Sanchez had slightly rephrased it, and asked, “Do they teach members of Congress to apologize? Because you suck at it!”

Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month: Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT.)

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

The Democrats have quite an array of incompetent U.S. Senators, though some of them have excuses. Diane Feinstein is so old she makes Joe Biden look quick, and John Fetterman is brain-damaged. Senator Murphy, however, is special. He hates the Second Amendment almost as much as he hates Donald Trump. His preferred method of persuasion is bullying and fear-mongering. (All of those links are from the extensive Ethics Alarms dossier on Murphy.)

It is fine that Murphy doesn’t like the Second Amendment, but he has no choice but to follow it. He doesn’t get that, it seems. It is fine that he wishes that the Supreme Court wasn’t around to stop Congress and the President from violating the Constitution to, but he doesn’t understand that either. Thus he says things like this, to NBC’s Chuck Todd during Sunday morning’s broadcast of “Meet the Press”:

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Res Ipsa Loquitur: Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month, Minnesota State Sen. Calvin Bahr (R)

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Stay classy, Senator.

Minnesota lawmaker Calvin Bahr took part in a Minnesota Office of the Legislative Auditor Zoom meeting that was streamed on YouTube yesterday. For some incomprehensible reason, he couldn’t be bothered to put on a shirt. When the time comes for him to vote on something or other, Bahr appears bare-torsoed with a School House Rock “I’m Just a Bill” background behind him, then the camera quickly switches off to show just his name on a black screen.

He appeared to be lying on his side. Maybe he’s sick: it doesn’t matter. He had an obligation to make an effort to be professional. He represents the citizens of Minnesota.

A few weeks before he died of cancer, John Wayne got out of bed, pulled on a wet suit to wear under his tux so his weight loss wouldn’t be so obvious, and appeared as a presenter at the Oscars. He got dressed because he respected the institution, his industry, and the American public he knew would be watching. Senator Bahr could have mustered the energy to pull on a damn shirt. That he appeared this way in an official meeting with his colleagues demonstrates an absence of dignity, decorum, respect and common sense.

Wait, WHAT? The White House Is Caught Rigging Biden’s Press Conference To Make Him Appear More Competent Than He Is, And The Washington Post’s Analysis is “Everybody Does It” And “Republicans Pounce”?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!

How do these people look at themselves in the mirror without retching?

Paul Farhi was the veteran Democratic operative (aka a MSM reporter) the Post assigned to spin this scandal. “President Biden was photographed holding a notecard Wednesday, revealing the stage managing behind many political media events,” he began. Oh, the euphemism is “stagemanaging,” is it? What the “notecard” was is called a cheat sheet, and what it signifies is cheating, and lying to the public.

The card in Biden’s hand—he’s so diminished mentally that he can’t even cheat competently–read “Question # 1,” and directed the President to call on Los Angeles Times reporter, Courtney Subramanian. The card included Subramanian’s name, a pronunciation guide, her affiliation and a headshot. The card also included Subramanian’s question: under the heading “Foreign Policy/Semiconductor Manufacturing,” the card read, “How are YOU squaring YOUR domestic priorities — like reshoring semiconductors manufacturing — with alliance-based foreign policy?”

Biden called on her for the first question, she asked what she was supposed to, and Biden offered an uncharacteristically detailed and coherent response. Farhi’s spin: “White House press office employees have routinely polled reporters about their priorities and interests in advance of news meetings to anticipate what their boss might be asked while on the podium. The practice is also common in news conferences with Cabinet secretaries, such as the secretary of defense and secretary of state.” Fine, that’s their job. And it is an ethical reporter’s job to say, “Sorry, you’re just going to have to find out when I’m called on.” Sure Presidential aides want to brief POTUS on what the likely topics are. Rigging the questions in advance, however, is something completely different. It’s called cheating. This is particularly true in this case, when much of the pubic is concerned about the President’s cognitive abilities. Presenting him as able to whip off a detailed answer to a reporter’s question when in fact he was tipped off and the reporter was in cahoots with the White House is pure deception.

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Oh For God’s Sake…A 6th Grader Should Know This Law Is Unconstitutional, And The Texas Senate Doesn’t? [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Texas Senate Bill 1515, introduced by Sen. Phil King (R-Weatherford), an ethics dunce, is on the way to the Texas House for consideration. Given the degree of right-wing derangement in Texas, a fair match for Woke Derangement in California, New York and other states, it’s a better than an even bet that public schools in Texas will be required to prominently display the Ten Commandments in every classroom starting next school year. Next up, I suppose, will be a Texas law requiring citizens to say the Lord’s Prayer every morning and to pass a yearly Bible literacy test or be forced to wear sack cloth and ashes. There is no chance, zip, nada, uh-uh, zippo, that the Ten Commandments law survives a legal challenge. None. That is not, as Mona Lisa Vito states under oath in “My Cousin Vinny,” an opinion. It’s a fact.

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Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month: Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY)

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Just listen to this guy! He’s just screaming and ranting, in a public place, adding no substance other than signalling to whatever apathetic, emotion-driven, lizard-brained fools who would vote for such a hack that he wants Congress to “do something” about gun violence. He isn’t persuading, he isn’t making a case, he isn’t informing anyone. This is a member of the U.S. Congress exhibiting the same level of social skills and civility as the typical Jerry Springer guest. He should be disciplined under the House ethics code for violating the very first rule on the list:

“A Member, Delegate, Resident Commissioner, officer, or employee of the House shall behave at all times in a manner that shall reflect creditably on the House.”

He won’t be, of course. Democrats won’t hold him to a higher standard than a reality show contestant in a staged meltdown because they have no integrity or shame, and Republicans don’t want to be accused of being racists, or, as Jamaal would doubtlessly say “caring more about some damn rule than they do about dead kids!”

Br proud, 16th District! Take a bow, Democrats, progressives and anti-gun rights voters! This idiot is your representative. Res ipsa loquitur.

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An Unethical Quote Spectacular!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

There are a lot of really unethical people saying some astounding things lately. Such as…

1. Incompetent Elected Official Of the Month Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-TX), who completely beclowned herself in the The House Weaponization Subcommittee examination of Twitter Files heralds Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger. She was determined to discredit them for daring to reveal the efforts by her party and its allies to bury the Hunter Biden laptop story and censor critics, and apparently did no research into te topic of the hearings at all, announcing that she didn’t know what “a substack” was and showing complete ignorance regarding Bari Weiss. (Ah, if only she read Ethics Alarms!) Meanwhile, all of a sudden Democrats oppose journalists’ desire to protect their sources.

2. Not included in the video above was an offensive question by serial unethical House hack Debbie Wasserman Schulz, the former DNC chair who rigged the 2016 primaries for Hillary Clinton. She accused Matt Taibbi of profiting from authoring the “Twitter Files” reports, implying that he was motivated by persoanl profit, saying: “After the ‘Twitter Files,’ your followers doubled … I imagine your Substack readership … increased significantly because of the work that you did for Elon Musk.”

These people really lash out when they’re exposed, don’t they?

3. Over to the Republican side: Jenna Ellis, one of President Trump’s lawyers in the post-election push to have the results examined, admitted in Colorado Bar disciplinary proceedings that she deliberately engaged in the following misrepresentations “for selfish reasons”:

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Unethical Quote Of The Week: Jill Biden

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

“Ridiculous…“We would never even discuss something like that. How many 30-year-olds could travel to Poland, get on the train? Go nine more hours, go to Ukraine, meet with President  Zelensky? So, look at the man. Look what he’s doing. Look what he continues to do each and every day.”

—First Lady Jill Biden, after being asked during a CNN interview about Nikki Haley’s proposal that politicians over the age of 75 undergo mental competency testing.

In related news, Lance Armstrong declared that testing competitive cyclists for doping is “ridiculous,” and O.J. Simpson opined that DNA technology was “ridiculous.”

Fortunately, all we need to do to determine the competency of First Ladies is to analyze a cretinous answer like that one to a flamingly easy question. We are looking, Jill. And it’s not pretty. The words the First Lady was searching for were not “ridiculous,” but responsible, necessary, and “a matter of common sens

The United States has already courted disaster with Presidents continuing in office after their mental faculties have been damaged or declined. President Pierce was impaired by grief, crippling depression and alcoholism during his single term in office, which occurred at a crucial point in the deadly run-up to the Civil War. Woodrow Wilson infamously remained President after being crippled by a major stroke. There is evidence that President Reagan’s cognitive stability was declining during his presidency.

As for Jill’s human meal-ticket, no modern President has shown so many signs of mental decline and confusion, and this frightening development has come after a career in public office unmarked by intellectual acuity at its zenith. Every responsible Presidential candidate should be required to pledge to take such competency tests on a regular basis and agree to resign from office once a thorough, non-partisan diagnosis confirmed by multiple physicians concludes that there is significant cognitive decline.

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Ethics Dunce: President Biden

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

I suppose the theory is that if you can’t do anything else right, grandstand. From a political perspective, that’s not a stupid theory for a US President (which is why you don’t see Sidney Wang from the Ethics Alarms clip archive), but it is a desperate one, and it only is responsible leadership if there is no substantive risk of something really bad happening to the country you are leading as a result. Biden’s been grandstanding a great deal of late, such as shooting down harmless balloons like crazy to make up for the fact that he let the Chinese spy balloon travel across the U.S.  For perspective, reasonable estimate is that it cost about $2 million to shoot down the Lake Huron balloon that may have cost as little as $12, but to be fair, the Biden Administration is operating under the assumption that money doesn’t matter, so this doesn’t qualify as “harm” in their eyes.

The much ballyhooed “surprise” trip to Ukraine for photo ops, however, had an undeniable potential downside: the President could have been killed. As he “stepped out into the streets of Kyiv”  the New York Times reported, “an air-raid siren sounded, a dramatic moment that underscored the investment the United States has made in Ukraine’s independence.” Thanks, Times flaks, good pro-Biden spin and propaganda there! You’re doing your job, or at least what fake journalists today consider their job. Nevertheless, let me return to reality:  the “dramatic moment” underscored how stupid and reckless Biden’s visit was. Continue reading →

Presidents Day Hangover, Jimmy Carter Edition: A Popeye, A KABOOM! And An Epic Comment Of The Day. Part I, The Popeye And The KABOOM!

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

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 #64 on 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.”

Well, KABOOM!

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