Journalism & Media

Graham Platner, The Human Smoking Gun

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments
@theroguednc

A Maine voter said they would not support Platner if he had an Israeli flag tattoo.

♬ original sound – RogueDNC

There is no more mystery to be solved about Graham Platner, whom the Democrats really and truly want to inflict on the U.S. Senate, the nation, and the dumb people of Maine (if they vote for Platner, they are by definition dumber than planaria). As David Brooks explained on PBS, “The guy is a moral degenerate. The abuse of women, the sexting, the Nazi tattoo, I don’t even need to say anything beyond his Reddit posts, which are not in the past, by the way. He did that for a long time, abusing rape — people who might have been raped, diminishing rape in the military, insulting fellow military officers, calling himself a communist. It’s just — it’s a pathetic empty guy who postures in a way that’s kind of repulsive.” There was no rebuttal from his fellow leftists on the show because there is no rebuttal to be made. Jonathan Capehart, who had just endorsed voting for Platner (because Trump, and all Democrats are by definition better than all Republicans, so there!) could only mutter “I agree with you” and then go on to try to rationalize the indefensible, sounding, as usual, like an idiot.

This is the quality of the character of those urging Mainers to vote for the most repulsive major political party U.S. Senate candidate in recent history. Yes, even worse than Roy Moore (R-AL, 2017) and worse than Todd Akin (R-MO, 2012). [You remember Todd, don’t you? He was the genius who said that a woman couldn’t get pregnant from being raped, because her body would reject the sperm of a bad person, or something.] The woman in the video above, incidentally, is a journalist, Caroline McCaughey, who was at a Platner rally. Nice.

The “resistance” /progressive/ Democratic Party position is that Platner is worthy of a Senate seat over a moderate Republican, Susan Collins, because he might give the Democratic Party a Senate majority to do all of the irresponsible, proto-totalitarian things they crave, like packing the Supreme Court. They would take the same position if he said things as stupid as Akin or stalked little girls, like Moore. (To be fair, Platner wouldn’t stalk them, he would just text them photos of his penis.)

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Update on the Update: “Trump Derangement Update: A Conversation With a Sufferer”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

This post, which attracted a surprising amount of traffic for a sleepy Sunday, was also the target of cherry-picking criticism from some quarter, because that’s what progressives, Democrats and the Trump Deranged do when they can’t debate fairly on the substance.

“Your friend never ends up on substantive outrages? Not one? Ever?” “Does that mean the discussion always ends up on non-substantive outrages and never substantive outrages?” The theme of the post was clear to anyone willing to consider it. A numbered point in the post also immediately became a current news flashpoint: I wrote,

4. The discussion keeps coming back to the Capitol riot and the fact that Trump keeps claiming that he “won” the 2020 election. My response is that it’s quite possible that he did win in 2020, though unlikely, and that nobody should care what he says he believes. (I suspect that Trump keeps saying this to drive people like my friend to the edge of madness.)

Now, see, let me be clear because there are readers out there incapable of fairly absorbing the issue. I regard the fact that Trump keeps saying that he won the election as non-substantive. It’s trolling. I regard his motivation for saying this very substantive. The Trump Deranged’s fury over his style and trolling technique is emblematic of how they (and the Axis that has indoctrinated them) are unwilling to focus on the serious, indeed dangerous, destruction of public trust that the Left’s assault on election integrity has inflicted on the nation. Here is a perfect example of where the reflex news media deflection to “Republicans pounce!” in order to distract the public from the unethical Democrat conduct that caused them to “pounce” is blazingly obvious.

When Trump walked out of the “Meet the Press” interview yesterday, the catalyst was his accusation that the primaries in California for Mayor of Los Angeles and Governor were rigged, just as the 2020 Presidential election was rigged. “Meet the Press” hostess Kristen Welker immediately, her face contorted with anger…

…took the Axis position: “You have no evidence!” But there is evidence. It is mostly circumstantial, but it is still evidence:

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Ethics Quote of the Week: President Trump

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“You ought to straighten out your press because you know what? A country can never be great with a dishonest press.”

—President Trump, after expressing frustration and contempt with the questions of “Meet the Press” hostess Kristen Welker and ending the interview.

Bingo. The President is exactly right, and the nation’s Founders would have agreed with him. The United States does have a dishonest press, untrustworthy, biased, partisan and irresponsible. As the Scott Pelley debacle this week proved vividly, most of Welker’s colleagues don’t even know how biased they are. The news media has become, as another Trump quote stated, “the enemy of the people.” Its corruption is undermining democracy, and making responsible citizenship difficult if not impossible.

This is a perfect coda to the previous post. The President showed Welker no respect because she deserves no respect, and neither do her counterparts on other TV news and commentary programs. Her facial expressions were hostile. Her body language was as well. Welker’s protests that she had gone to great lengths to meet the President for the interview should not have deterred the President from leaving, and didn’t. Bravo.

My tip for Kristin: if you want a full Presidential interview, be professional and don’t set out to deliver partisan talking points.

A “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Spectacular!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

1. In a clip from a post-firing interview, the unbearable Scott Pelley actually says that nobody on the “60 Minutes” staff, including Pelley, thought that the long-time left-leaning Sunday magazine show was biased. Pelley himself is living proof that the show was biased. Here’s a brief montage of Pelley being what he thought was objective and fair over the years,

2. Former National Security Advisor John Bolton pleaded guilty of deliberately mishandling classified documents, a deal that requires him to pay a $2.5 million fine. He pleaded guilty because he was guilty. ABC and NBC, however, framed the news as President Trump getting “revenge” on a critic.

“He was a prime target of President Trump’s retribution campaign, said ABC’s justice correspondent. “And tonight, sources tell ABC News Trump’s former National Security Adviser, John Bolton, is planning to plead guilty to mishandling classified information.”

That’s classic deceit and false framing for partisan purposes, but also typical of how the Axis networks cover news regarding the Trump Administration. On NBC, the same game plan was in view. “Bolton was national security adviser during Trump’s first term,” the nightly broadcast began. “Then became a fierce opponent of the President. Now, sources tell NBC News he plans to plead guilty to one count of retaining national security information. For a year and a half now, the Justice Department has been pursuing cases against the people you see here, those the President believes have wronged him…”

The investigation of Bolton’s crime began under the Biden Administration’s Justice Department. Both ABC and NBC got that in at the very end of their reports, which is deliberately reversing the priority of the facts. This was by definition not a “retribution prosecution” by Trump because it began under Biden. That information belonged at the start. The fact that Bolton was a Trump critic is of interest but not central to the story. Placed up front, however, it “poisons the well.”

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Trump Derangement Update: A Conversation With a Sufferer

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

I had another long debate with a Trump Derangement victim whom I know well, love and respect. This individual is a lawyer, mostly informed, but, like an amazing number of Americans who should know better, gets most of her news and commentary from MSNow. I have explained that this is bats, is making her biased and therefore stupid, and that her favorite platform has no interest in conveying objective, fair news and cannot, must not, be trusted. I have pointed this out before, though she has a good retort: MSNow reports news that reflects badly on President Trump before almost all other outlets, and way ahead of Fox News. She was the one who pointed me to the unconscionable self-dealing IRS law suit settlement that I first wrote about here. Of course the partisan hacks at MSNow were on that in an instant: if all you care about is potential sticks to bash the President with, you are likely to find them first.

Other revelations from the conversation (yes, I believe my debate partner is typical of the Trump Deranged, except that she is more reasonable and analytical than most of them) :

1. The Trump Deranged are incapable of talking about the Administration without getting furious and shouting. Incapable! My friend almost never shouts, but the yelling commences immediately when the topic gets near the White House. It’s a Pavlovian response.

2. The discussion always ends up on non-substantive outrages. The Kennedy Center. The Ballroom. The reflecting pool. The proposed arch. None of these will be significant in the historical assessment of this Presidency. The Trump Deranged default to these because the smart ones know they are just wrong on the important policy issues, or no longer have metaphorical legs to stand on. They can’t defend illegal immigrants. They no longer have climate change hysteria and fake “science” to fall back on. They know DEI is illegal. They don’t buy the “men with naughty bits who call themselves women should be able to throttle biological women in sports” lie. They can’t defend the Biden dementia cover-up, and they know Kamala Harris was, in James Carville’s immortal words, “like a seventh-string quarterback starting in the Super Bowl.”

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Scott Pelley’s Self-Immolation Proves How Corrupt and Biased the “60 Minutes” Culture Was

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

A year ago I wrote, after Scott Pelley gave a full-Trump Deranged commencement speech at Wake Forest,

“Scott Pelley has long been the most openly biased and partisan of the ’60 Minutes’ team (well, he and Leslie Stahl), and his speech is an instant “It isn’t what it is” classic. His arrogance and fury reveals a destructive, untrustworthy profession beginning to realize that the jig is truly up: they have betrayed their nation and its ideals, and nearly everyone knows it, or as President Trump so wisely observed, our journalists are indeed ‘enemies of the people.’ It is rumored that Pelley is likely to be dumped at CBS: Good.”

Well, it took a year and a turnover in management, but Pelley is finally out. The speech is fun to look back on today, because the pompous Pelley intoned, “America works well when we listen to those with whom we disagree and when we listen and when we have common ground and we compromise….To move forward, we debate, not demonize. We discuss, not destroy.” Yet when a new regime led by New York Times refugee Bari Weiss began the task of reforming the rotten “60 Minutes” Democratic propaganda machine that had embarrassed the network by editing Kamala Harris’s interview a week before the 2024 election to make her seem (sort-of) coherent—not an easy task—Pelley was no longer interested in listening, discussing, or compromising. He was determined to demonize. In a meeting called by Nick Bilton, the new executive producer of “60 Minutes,” Pelley accused Bilton’s boss, Weiss, of “murdering” the iconic Sunday news program. “She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that,” he said, adding, “She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”

He went on to mock Bilton’s assurances that he cared about the program. If Pelley had been trying to get fired, he could have hardly done a better job. And sure enough, he got his wish, as Bilton delivered the following “Bye-bye!” letter in short order:

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On Capital Punishment Porn From The New York Times

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

“For 90 Minutes, I Watched an Execution Go Horribly Awry” [Gift link!]is an unethical opinion piece. It is manipulative and an appeal to emotion, while pretending to make a persuasive argument against capital punishment using deflection and misdirection, tying three separate ethics issues together as one. The author’s methodology is to argue that killing someone can be icky. So?

The author is a criminal defense lawyer, so you might think I should cut her some slack. I won’t. It is acceptable for a lawyer to use trickery, logical fallacies and rhetorical cheats to convince a jury, because that is what defense lawyers have to do to zealously represent their clients. A newspaper’s readers, however, are not jurors. A publisher and paper’s editors should maintain journalistic standards, which demand truthful communication that is not calculated to deceive or confuse. The New York Times, however, is not an ethical newspaper, and is interested in advancing agendas, not fair and responsible punditry. Even the headline is deceitful. Her client’s execution by lethal injection was botched, but he survived. His execution was delayed for a year by the governor. She doesn’t reveal that little detail until the next to last paragraph. Surprise! The execution attempt went ‘horrible awry,” but there was no execution.

Author Maria DeLiberato is a mission lawyer, meaning that she takes cases to accomplish a personal objective, in her case, opposing the death penalty. She begins by telling us that she believes Tony Carruthers, her condemned client, was wrongly convicted. That issue is 100% irrelevant to the focus of her article, which is that executions in Tennessee (and presumably elsewhere) are often botched and excruciatingly painful as a result, making them “cruel and unusual punishment,” an 8th Amendment violation. She argues that Carruthers was innocent, which is a different ethical issue entirely. A botched execution is exactly as painful and torturous whether the condemned is guilty or not. Like a good lawyer (but an unethical writer) DeLiberato pre-sets the dial to sympathy and indignation by framing Carruthers’ ordeal as an unjust one. But even a perfect, quick and painless execution of an innocent individual is wrong beyond redemption: it doesn’t become more wrong because the killing takes longer.

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Unethical Trigger Warning Of The Month: Citizens Free Press

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

That’s one of Elon Musk’s biological sons (he has a lot of them) above, now a trans-female model—not there’s anything wrong with that— named Vivian Wilson. The Daily Mail has a very tabloid story (as in “Who the hell cares about this stuff?”) telling us that Vivian is featured as a model in the latest Savage x Fenty new Pride-themed collection. Be still, my beating heart!

You can read the story here, if your sock drawer is in order and you have no life, but my concern involves how the link to the story was presented by Citizen Free Press, the conservative news aggregator that took over that market from the Drudge Report when Matt went woke and NeverTrump a decade ago. Here’s how the site described the link:

Elon Musk biological son poses for female lingerie ad — Warning, photos are disturbing

I expected Vivian to be posed on disemboweled kittens or famine victims with that trigger warning. No, the photos that are supposed to be “disturbing” are shots like the one above. How much of a weenie cum snowflake would someone have to be to find that photo upsetting enough to mandate a trigger warning? It’s a standard issue fashion shot. Is it supposed to disturb us because its a model with a y chromosome? If that’s the point, then I view the warning as legitimizing transphobia. Even trans-themed photographs that cause my ethics alarms to go off—remember this one, of a Disney “fairy godmother”?—

shouldn’t be considered so trauma-producing that people need an advance warning lest they be struck blind or something.

The somewhat less obnoxious explanation for the “warning” is that it’s a clickbait trick by the site; you know, if it requires a warning, everyone will be curious and click on it. Well, that’s dishonest. As an ethicist, I find the gratuitous trigger warning, indeed trigger warnings in general, far more disturbing than a photo of a biological male doing a convincing female model impression. Good for her! Brava!

It is episodes like this that create needless erosion of respect for conservative values and sensibilities.

Ethics Villain: Jill Biden [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

There are lively debates among historians regarding who was the best First Lady (I view it as a dead heat between Abigail Adams and Eleanor Roosevelt), but the contest for the Worst First Lady Ever is settled. It’s Jill Biden, easy. Edith Wilson hid her husband’s stroke from the nation but at least she wasn’t complicit in letting an unfit and mentally declining man run in the first place. Woodrow was a terrible human being, but until his stroke he wasn’t an incompetent one. Michelle Obama was and is loathsome, but she didn’t do much substantive damage while she was in the White House. She left that to her husband.

I’m going to give you a gift link to the New York Times’s notably uncritical report on Jill’s new spin on her husband’s crack-up during that fateful debate with Donald Trump, when the mentally declining President descended into authentic frontier gibberish. The Times:

“I don’t know what happened,” the former first lady said in an interview with “CBS News Sunday Morning.” “As I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.’ And it scared me to death.” In a 30-second snippet of the interview, which is scheduled to air in full this weekend, she said that she had never seen her husband have a meltdown like the one she saw when he took the debate stage in Atlanta. Next week, she is releasing ‘View From the East Wing,’ a memoir of her time as first lady.”

I call bullshit, and so should everyone else. There is so much wrong with that fake narrative if boggles the mind:

1. She’s lying. Everyone had seen Biden freeze, become disoriented, mumble and get confused repeatedly for nearly four years. Months before, Special Counsel Robert Hur released a 388-page report on President Biden’s retention of classified material. In opting not to bring charges, Hur said that Biden would appear to the jury too befuddled to find guilty of the requisite intent. “We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur wrote. “Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.” Sure sounds like a man every American should feel secure having his finger on the nuclear button! Yet the Axis chorus of partisan hacks continued to tell the public that Joe was “as sharp as a tack.”

2. After Biden’s embarrassment in the debate, Jill went into full cover-up mode. “You answered every question!” she exclaimed, treating the President of the United States like a second-grader. His gibberish was bad enough that she thought he had a stroke, she says now, but not bad enough to have him checked out. Biden had refused to have a cognition test: after this episode, wouldn’t a caring wife be obligated to insist on a medical examination? Of course she would, except that the reality was that Biden’s debate performance was not out of character at that point. His staff and family were thinking, “Oh no. I was afraid this would happen.” Their response after the debate, joining in the agreed upon narrative that “he had a cold…he was tired….he just had a bad night…it could have happened to anyone…he’s always had a stammer…Trump rambled too!” proves that there was no new concern for Biden’s well-being, only concern that the jig was up.

3. In February of 2020, I wrote in part…

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From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files:

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Nice.

I’d say that qualifies as an unethical tweet, wouldn’t you?

It doesn’t matter what the Democratic Party’s social media account was responding to, does it? (Stephen Miller referred to Democratic Party candidate for Texas governor as “trans.” Not that there’s anything wrong with that..) What does matter is that the party that has (often justifiably) condemned Donald Trump for immoderate social media posts, lack of self-control in his rhetoric and an addiction to ad hominem attacks stooped well below anything Trump has ever tweeted with a “Sopranos-esque” “Shut up you ugly fuck!”

That doesn’t mean the President won’t eventually go that low, but for the nonce, I really don’t care to hear anyone from that party (or that pimps for it, like, you know, the news media) criticizing the President for unpresidential language.

The tweet also tells us, as others have, what the character and attitudes of young Democrats are. If you don’t like mis-installed ethics alarms of current Democrats and progressives, just wait for the ones coming up the ranks.

In related news, Chicago’s WGN reports:

“An alderperson for the City of Waukegan was charged after allegedly mailing in a vote on behalf of her dead mother. Dr. Sylvia Sims Bolton was charged with knowingly falsifying election material, a felony, and disregarding election code, a misdemeanor.The investigation began in March, according to the Lake County clerk’s office.According to election records, a vote by mail ballot for Mary Sims, her mother, was issued and mailed by the Lake County Clerk’s Office on Feb. 5.On Feb. 12, the Lake County Clerk’s Office processed the cancelation of Mary Sim’s voter registration after receiving notification of her death record from the Illinois Department of Public Health.

The ballot was returned on Feb. 26

During a review, election officials identified that the voter’s death record had been processed prior to the return of the ballot. After evaluating the returned envelope and confirming that the ballot had been submitted after the voter’s recorded date of death, the matter was escalated internally and reported to the Lake County Sheriff’s Office for investigation.

Bolton is accused of voting for her mother after she had passed away. She surrendered Wednesday morning.

‘The safeguards and verification procedures in place within our election system worked exactly as intended,’ said Anthony Vega. ‘Our staff followed established protocols, identified the irregularity, and immediately coordinated with law enforcement to ensure this matter is thoroughly investigated. Protecting the integrity of our elections remains our highest priority.’

The investigation did not uncover any facts linking the above allegations to her city duties as an alderperson.”

Gee, I wonder what party the “alderperson” belongs to? Since the media report doesn’t say, I’m assuming she’s a Democrat. (She is.) And how ironic that the only person who uses the mail-in ballot system to cheat happens to be an elected official!

Okay, I’m being arch. The Democratic party likes cheating and gaslighting. Just as Biden’s Homeland Security Secretary said under oath that the Southern border was secure and the entire party (as well as its media enablers) insisted that President Biden was “sharp as a tack,” it has claimed for years now that there is “no evidence” of widespread voter fraud and the more secure election procedures are “a return to Jim Crow.”