I was looking for an appropriate “Night Before Christmas” post and found this instead, a parody I wrote on Christmas Eve in 2009, the very first year of Ethics Alarms, in reaction to the ethically-tainted passage of the “Affordable Care Act,” which didn’t make health care affordable. I knew the bill was smoke and mirrors and that it would not accomplish what it was supposed to do. I knew that we would be in one mess or another as a result of the ugly thing, supposedly the signature legislation of the Obama Administration…and sad thing is that it probably was. What does that tell you?
I was struck, as you will be, how much of my mordant satire seems relevant today, and how little has changed.
So let’s travel back to that halcyon year, and the day before Christmas…
Because he is angry at President Trump and the Kennedy Center board for adding the President’s name to the cultural center, musician Chuck Redd cancelled the Christmas Eve jazz concert at the Kennedy Center that has been a tradition for more than 20 years. “When I saw the name change on the Kennedy Center website and then hours later on the building, I chose to cancel our concert,” Redd told The Associated Press . Redd is a drummer and vibraphone player who has presided over holiday “Jazz Jams” at the Kennedy Center since 2006.
Well, jazz musicians aren’t known for their critical thinking skills or ethics acumen. Let me get this straight, Chuck: you think a fair way to punish Trump and the board for the name change is to disappoint jazz fans in the Washington area who had nothing to do with the decision. Nice.
I began by titling this depressing post “Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: President Trump,” but that seemed inadequate somehow. Maybe there’s no heading that could adequately express what an awful week the President had, how it was entirely unnecessary, how all of his deep political wounds were self-inflicted (okay, his clueless Chief of Staff helped), how much harm it did to his administration, influence and prospects of success, and how much he helped the Axis of Unethical Conduct when without his assistance the serious news would have had it staggering. <Breathe, Jack, breathe!>
EA covered three of the epic fiascos, but now I have to cover the fourth. The others were, in chronological order,
1. Trump’s petty, cruel, stupid attack on beloved director Rob Reiner immediately after he and his wives were stabbed to death by their son. I believe that his infamous Truth Social post may prove to be the tipping point in his administration. Recall that the Bush II Presidency was sent into a death spiral even before the 2008 economic crash because he was vacation when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans and flew over the devastation. Then the inept Democratic mayor of the city, with help from Kanye West, successfully created the narrative that Bush shrugged off the disaster because he “didn’t care about black people.”
3. Trump allows his hand-picked Kennedy Center board to add the President’s name to the landmark, launched as a memorial to President Kennedy in the wake of his nation-shattering assassination, and to quickly plaster it on the front of the building. This was so stupid and gratuitous that I don’t want to think about it, but it sure gave my Trump Deranged theater friends on Facebook ammunition.
The complaint filed yesterday in the Southern District of Florida states:
‘In the BBC Panorama documentary titled “Trump: A Second Chance”… first broadcast on October 28,2024, the BBC intentionally and maliciously sought to fully mislead its viewers around the world by splicing together two entirely separate parts of President Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021…. The Panorama Documentary deliberately omitted another critical part of the Speech in such a manner as to intentionally misrepresent the meaning of what President Trump said. The Panorama Documentary falsely depicted President Trump telling supporters: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”…
President Trump never uttered this sequence of words. This fabricated depiction of President Trump during the Speech was false, deceptive, and defamatory given that President Trump’s actual and full remarks during the Speech were (a) “Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down. Anyone you want but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressman and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them” (Remarks made on January 6, 2021, 12:12p.m. Eastern Standard Time, 14:52 into the Speech), and then, much later, (b) “[B]ut I said ‘Something’s wrong here, Something’s really wrong, can’t have happened.’ And we fight, we fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” (Remarks made on January 6, 2021 at 1:07 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, 69:30 into the Speech).
“Moreover, the BBC purposefully omitted President Trump stating, less than one minute after urging supporters to cheer for their senators and congressmen, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard” (Remarks made on January 6, 2021, 12:13 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, 15:48 into the Speech).”
“Yesterday I watched Florida Governor Rick Scott give his pre-hurricane warnings, or tried to, since standing next to him was a signer for the deaf, gesticulating and making more elaborate faces than the late Robin Williams in the throes of a fit. I have mentioned this in the context of theatrical performances: as a small minority, the deaf should not be enabled by political correctness to undermine the best interests of the majority. What Scott was saying was important, and could have been adequately communicated to the deaf citizens present by the signer standing off camera. TV viewers could and should have been able to watch a text crawl following Scott’s speech, or closed captioning. Public speaking involves verbal and visual communications, and having a vivid distraction like a professional signer—many of whom feel it is their duty to add broad facial expressions to their translations—is unfair to both the speaker and his or her audience. This is one more example of a sympathetic minority bullying the majority to establish its power.”
I generally check out Althouse’s blog every few days because 1) she’s a smart and independent moderate, and a source of objective and unbiased takes on political events and media coverage of them 2) she’s a retired law professor with time on her hands, and thus finds possible ethics topics that I might normally miss and 3) she’s really, really weird, with obsessions about word usage, Bob Dylan, her blog’s tags (almost nobody uses the tags, reading her blog or this one), Saturday Night Live, drawings of rats (thankfully expired) and, lately, Grok. But she wouldn’t even add Ethics Alarms to her list of useful blog links (I asked), then decided not to have any blog links.
Well to begin with, it is “fake news,” Counsellor. It is a news item presented by a journalist as news, and Ann herself agrees it isn’t news: that’s fake news by definition. Now I have regrets that I never completed my promised compendium of all the varieties of fake news engaged in by our biased and corrupt news media. I know I promised that a long time ago, and yes, I still think it’s relevant and important. “Fake news” is one of Trump’s most valuable additions to our lexicon, and he’s had several.
I hate that I am tempted to write this every day now, often several times a day, but how can anyone of good character and admirable values continue to support a political party, whatever its claimed beliefs are, that behaves this way?
Yesterday EA discussed the desperate Democratic Party tactic of picking 19 photos (out of thousands) that showed a young Donald Trump (and other progressive hate-objects, like Alan Dershowitz and Steve Bannon) in the company of sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein when he was known as just another billionaire on the celebrity party circuit or in the company of unidentified women. These were described in some of the Axis media as “bombshell” and “explosive” photos, though it is unclear when and where most of the photos were taken, many of them had been publicly released before, and none of them suggested any criminal, illicit or even unethical activity.
Despite that, political hack Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) had the gall to say, “These disturbing photos raise even more questions about Epstein and his relationships with some of the most powerful men in the world. We will not rest until the American people get the truth.”
He might as well have added, “And we won’t stop lying about this phony Epstein scandal either until we Get Trump!”
Today Professor Jonathan Turley, a one-time Democrat who is obviously disgusted with Democrats, pointed out that what his former party has done with the photos is a classic example of a tort known as “false light,” where true photos are presented in a misleading and harmful way to damage a reputation or otherwise harm an individual via innuendo . It is essentially photographic deceit. He writes,
…showing her that her hysteria is based on lies, bad stats, politicized “science” and hooey?
I admit it, that headline sucked me in to reading “Social Q’s,” a Times advice column that puts wokeness over wisdom, causing me to put it on the EA blacklist.
“My wife has become an eco-warrior,” a married weenie writes. “She has strong feelings about the environment and other people’s carbon footprints. She challenges our friends repeatedly about their lifestyle choices. I agree with her in principle, but I can’t support her moral outrage. …Help!“
Predictably, the column’s proprietor, Phillip Galanes, begins by saying, “I would begin by praising her, rightfully, for her commitment to an important issue.” I’ll fix it for him: “an important issue that nobody really knows much about, especially indoctrinated progressives who are passionate about what their bubble-mates are passionate about regardless of facts.”
I had missed this story until one of Trump Deranged Facebook friends made an arch comment about me teaching “Presidential pardon ethics.” Huh, I wondered, what this old fool blathering on about now? It can’t be Biden’s advance pardons of his whole corrupt family because this guy never criticizes Democrats, so it must be something Trump did!” The Deranged have their uses: if Trump has done anything that by any possible stretch of the imagination could be bitched about, these people are like human Geiger-counters.
Sure enough, an op-ed in the Times came out yesterday called “The Pardon That Represents the New Era of Corruption.” [Gift link!] Wait, would that be President Clinton’s outrageous pardon of international fugitive from justice Marc Rich in exchange for a huge donation to the Clinton Library by his ex-wife? No. Democratic federal prosecutors Molly Gaston, who was part of the “Get Trump!” DOJ prosecution, and J.P. Cooney, special prosecutor Jack Smith’s deputy at DOJ, wrote the opinion piece because the President pardoned Representative Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat awaiting trial on federal bribery charges. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say the wrote the opinion piece because they could see the potential in the story to impugn President Trump.
For good measure, to style the partisan hit job as “non-partisan,” the two prosecutors also attacked Hakeem Jeffries for praising Trump’s pardon of a Democratic House member. “Rather than be critical or perhaps stay silent, the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, welcomed the pardon and engaged in shameful pandering, apparently to maintain Mr. Cuellar’s party loyalty,” they write. “Most disturbingly, Mr. Jeffries did so by attacking the legitimacy of the criminal case against Mr. Cuellar, publicly dismissing the indictment against him as “very thin.” As former federal prosecutors who spent our careers rooting out public corruption, we see this for the wagon-circling that it is. The jury’s detailed, 54-page, multicount indictment against Mr. Cuellar was anything but thin, and he should have had to stand trial before a jury of his peers.” They continue, “Mr. Jeffries’s embrace of Mr. Cuellar was a disturbing sign that Democratic leaders, when it is politically advantageous, may be willing to join in Mr. Trump’s degradation of the justice system.”
As with the Axis news media’s refusal to investigate or admit that Joe Biden was Demented POTUS Walking (sort of) while he was winning the Worst President Ever competition, as with the Hunter Biden laptop cover-up, as with so much that it was complicit in distorting or hiding from the American public during the past 5 (6…7…8….9…) years in alliance with America’s proto-totalitarians, the New York Times was either deliberately or negligently asleep a at the metaphorical switch as Biden’s Administration opened the floodgates at our southern border. (Yikes! What a long sentence!)
This was an illegal immigration crisis created by the Democrats, not “actions on immigration.” And, as usual, the emphasis is on the Republican response to the Times’s favorite party’s misconduct, blurring the real issue. The problem with Biden’s indefensible failure to enforce our immigration laws and keep the border secure is that it allowed millions of unvetted, dangerous, illegal foreigners into the U.S. to the detriment of Americans, making it expensive, burdensome and divisive to kick them out, and not that the dereliction of duty “created an opening” for Trump.
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