So Kamala Harris is “Exciting” Now? Fascinating.

I must confess, I have reached the point where the talking point memos going out to the Axis, its allies and useful idiots from the Democratic National Committee are so obvious that they are insulting. We have already been bombarded with the edicts from earlier memos: Trump is a “convicted felon” and a “threat to democracy.” If he’s elected, it will be our “last election” and “the end of American as we know it.” These memos are getting a bit frayed around the edges; the “threat to democracy” line is especially risible coming from a party that just chose a candidate for POTUS using no democratic tools whatsoever—no debates, no primaries, just a pre-rigged convention. This is the most Machiavellian choice of a Presidential candidate since a “smoke-filled room” produced a GOP Presidential candidate named Warren G. Harding—and didn’t that work out well! (To be fair to poor Warren, he was famously likable, which Harris is definitely not. Her staff had a 92% turnover in just three years; she is apparently roundly detested as a boss, almost as much as Donald Trump is.) These people really think Americans are idiots, and, sadly, they may be right. Since Joe Biden was kicked to the curb, I have heard double figures of delegates, Democratic officials and pundit describe the forced anointment of Kamala Harris as the party’s standard bearer in November described as either “exciting” or exhilarating.” This is only slightly more dishonest than the same people—and Harris—describing Joe Biden solving Rubik’s Cube blindfolded until they were shocked—shocked!—to discover that he was unable to maneuver through the complexities of Tic-Tac-Toe. For almost four years, the adjective to be most appropriately applied to Harris has been “embarrassing.”

Here at Ethics Alarms, I gave her a Julie Principle pass for the most part, meaning that I let dozens of absurd and dishonest, not to mention incomprehensible, statements by Harris go by without comment because it was obvious that—well, he’s how I put it before she was even sworn in, when she stole a Martin Luther King anecdote and claimed it was about her:

If, as many seem to assume, Harris is making stuff up to pander to the crowd, why fixate on this episode? We all know, or should, that the woman is shallow, has no core, and that saying whatever she thinks will endear herself to the most people at the moment is her defining characteristic. As Julie sang, “Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly”: Kamala’s gotta make stuff up to pretend she’s something she’s not for the gullible, the naive, the hopeful and the blind. This latest example doesn’t tell us anything we already don’t know.

Even with that call to be merciful, Harris ended up with a hilariously long (and terrifying) EA dossier , especially for a Vice-President. I had a post in March of 2022 musing about whether she was the dumbest Vice-President ever, which Newt Gingrich had claimed. Kamala made my head explode a couple of months later when she said at some public appearance, “We will work together, and continue to work together, to address these issues, to tackle these challenges, and to work together as we continue to work operating from the new norms, rules, and agreements, that we will convene to work together…We will work together.” That time I summed up Harris this way:

Her existence as the #2 elected official in the United States is a profound embarrassment to the nation, the public and the democratic system. That such a clueless dolt was chosen purely because of her gender and race insults that gender and those ethnic communities unintentionally complicit in her creation.

That the news media refused to enlighten the public about just how incompetent she is proves its uselessness.

That Harris and her supporters have the astounding cheek to cry “racism” if criticism is aimed her way, when she routinely insults the public by presuming that first-grade level verbal pablum is good enough to feed them because she doesn’t have the capacity to offer anything better, impugns everyone responsible for her presence in place of someone minimally responsible and trustworthy.

Wait, when did she become “exciting” and “exhilarating”? How did I miss that? It must have been like “Charlie,” the now forgotten movie that earned Cliff Robertson an Oscar for playing a—oh, what’s the acceptable term now? To hell with it: in the movie he was referred to as “retarded”—man who suddenly became a genius after taking an experimental drug. Then his IQ starts slipping away—like Biden’s—and by the end of the movie he has the mind of a four-year-old and is playing on a swing.

Non-political junkies hadn’t paid any attention to Harris, who also looked “exciting” and “exhilarating” when the Axis media designated her its favorite to be the Democratic nominee at the head of the 2020 ticket in 2019. Then she started debating, and talking, and showing her smug and obnoxious personality. Her unimpressive background started coming out too, how she rose to prominence in California by being California political boss Willie Brown’s mistress, how she was a law-and-order, anti-woke prosecutor until she ran for Senator, and suddenly morphed into a radical progressive to get elected.

Harris’s candidacy didn’t even make it to 2020 because her polling sank to Titanic levels the more the public listened to her. The Democratic field was hardly a stellar batch (which is how Joe Biden ended up as the nominee), but Harris impressed less than such stars as Andrew Yang and Amy Klobuchar. Tulsi Gabbard mopped the metaphorical floor with Kamala in the pre-New Hampshire primary debate.

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Ethics Dunce: MSNBC (In Related News, Night Is Dark!)

MSNBC, the fake news champ, expanded its unethical practices to deceptive broadcast settings for the Republican National convention this week. MSNBC’s prime-time coverage of the Republican National Convention looked familiar to the other networks and what veteran viewers are used to from past convention coverage: anchors at a desk positioned above the convention floor. Rachel Maddow, Nicolle Wallace, Jen Psaki, Joy Reid and the rest of the MSNBC anchors were not inside the convention hall as it was designed to appear, however. They were in a Manhattan studio. That backdrop of the convention floor was being projected on a screen behind them.

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More Weird Tales of The Great Stupid: Post-Debate/Post-Assassination Edition

It is astounding what obvious garbage one can hear and read officials, journalists, pundits, activists and academics state in public for popular consumption these days…

1. In an interview shortly after her Secret Service failed its mission and disgraced itself, Kimberly Cheatle actually said that one of her top priorities was to attract more diverse applicants to the agency.

Ethics Note: The interviewer, a standard issue hack, naturally didn’t ask the obvious follow-up question: “Why is diversity a priority at all in an agency with the assignment of the Secret Service? Who cares what gender, ethnicity or color the agent is who saves the life of a President? Why does it matter? If every agent was a 6’4″ black man who can run a 4 minute mile, dead-lift 400 pounds, score 160 on an IQ test and shoot a wing off a fruit fly at 300 yards, why would the director feel that isn’t an ideal force for the job her agency is committed to do?”

Her only priority should be ensuring that the Secret Service has competent and well-trained agents, and she’s failed at that.

2. Kamala Harris said that J.D. Vance was picked to be a “rubber stamp” for Trump’s “extreme agenda” and that “he will be loyal only to Trump, not to our country. If elected, he will help implement the extreme Project 2025 plan for a second Trump term.”

Ethics Note: One would think that Harris, having been Vice-President, might be aware that the VP has no power to “rubber stamp” or even help implement anything. Every Vice-President is completely loyal to the man who chose them as #2: I can find no example in history of a Vice-President not working, for whatever good it does, to accomplish the President’s polices. (I don’t count Pence refusing to try to stall the 2020 election certification, which was the equivalent of Trump asking him to fly to Jupiter by flapping his arms.) Meanwhile, Harris, as a VP who actively deceived the public—you know, our country?— regarding Biden’s fitness to serve is ethically estopped from complaining that anyone else might put loyalty to the President over duty to country, especially a Marine like Vance.

“Joe Biden is extraordinarily strong,” Harris told CNN’s Anderson Cooper after Biden’s disastrous debate performance, a Jumbo for the ages.

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Today’s “Nah There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” (Or “Nah, The Mainstream Media Doesn’t Want to Rig The Election!”) Note Of the Day…[Expanded and Corrected]

From Axios…

Nice.

There have been a lot of iconic or otherwise memorable photographs of Presidents over the decades that placed a sitting POTUS in a positive or sympathetic context. They were all liberally used to promote that President’s leadership and popularity. Such as…

and…

and

and…

and…

and..

and…

and…

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“Platforming Ignorance!” What a Useful and Descriptive Term….

The term, which I had never heard before or at least had never focused on, is featured in an essay by Jonathan Tobin at the Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) titled, “Candace Owens is a cautionary tale about platforming ignorance.” Indeed she is: I had written about how Owens has embarrassed conservatives by, as I put it last November, “being revealed as an ignoramus” by her embrace of Palestinina propganda after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. More recently I listed her as one of the political performance artists (Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Bill Maher, James Carville, Ann Coulter, yada yada) who cannot be trusted to provide genuine opinions because they calibrate what they say and write according to what they think will get them the most clicks, eyeballs, gigs, and cash. Clearly, I was giving Candace far too much credit.

She is a genuine, bona fide idiot, whose recent self-outing as a virulent anti-Semite ( the inspiration for the JNS piece) is just the tip of a really stupid iceberg. As conservative collective AG noted on “X,” Owens has recently declared that…

  • Israel was involved with 9/11
  • The earth may be flat
  • It’s absurd to believe dinosaurs roamed the earth and were killed by an asteroid
  • Macron’s wife is secretly a man
  • Jews were behind the Bolshevik revolution and it was secretly a genocide targeting Christians that was worse than the Holocaust
  • The Holocaust is either fake or severely exaggerated
  • The crimes of the allies in WWII and post-WWII were worse than anything the Nazis did
  • The deportation of ethnic Germans from the rest of Europe post-WWII was worse than The Holocaust
  • US dropped the bomb on Nagasaki to target Christians
  • Israel/AIPAC/Jews were secretly behind the JFK assassination
  • A secret cabal of Hollywood Jews were behind the death of Michael Jackson and people around him.

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An “Enemy of the People” Indictment

Over at PJ Media, conservative writer David Strom provides a vivid overview of just how complicit the mainstream media has been in assisting Democrats and the White House as they deceived the public, both to elect Joe Biden President and protect him from suspicions that he was not able to do his job. “A Short History of the Coverup” should have been published in the New York Times; if that paper were a serious pursuer of ethical journalism and “all the news that’s fit to print,” it would make a thorough investigation of this scandal its top priority. It didn’t and it won’t, however, because that would involve implicating itself.

Strom writes at one point, “We can’t let them off the hook. We need America to face the fact that the media really IS the ‘enemy of the people.’ I hated that phrase in 2020; I think it is 100% true now. I was wrong.” Good for him; at least he admits it. This comment of Trump’s, one of his most important, is regularly used by the “Trump is Hitler” chorus to show that he’s an enemy of democracy. To the contrary: the enemy of democracy’s enemy is democracy’s friend. Ethics Alarms flagged Trump’s undiplomatic remark as spot on immediately, I will point out, patting myself heartily on the back.

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7/11 Convenient Ethics Notes…[Updated As The Evening Unfolds]

1. It is now 7:15 pm, E.S.T. as I write this. The “big boy” news conference , we were told, would begin at 6:30. Wouldn’t you think the President, or whoever pulls his strings, would make sure he was ready to go on time? I have images of make-up artists, doctors with needles and last minute electronic devices being planted. Doesn’t everybody?

2. Oh yeah, this is a good sign: Speaking at the NATO summit in Washington, D.C. today, President Biden introduced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky by saying, “And now, I want to hand it over to the president of Ukraine, who has as much courage as he has determination. Ladies and gentlemen, President Putin.”

3. Landing very briefly on Fox News during “The Five,” I heard a black reporter I’ve never see before express annoyance that Kamala Harris is being called a “DEI Vice-President.” When a member of the panel asked, “Why was she chosen then?” He answered immediately,”Because she was qualified!” Shameless. Biden made it clear from the beginning that he was going to nominate an African-American woman. There were even three widely publicized finalists: the indefensible Stacy Abrams, the ridiculously unqualified Cory Bush, and Harris, who might have been the best of the three, which is like saying Moe was the smartest Stooge. How do members of the Axis media get away with lying like that, openly, in defiance of known facts, on national TV? Are they depending on public amnesia? Stupidity? The fact that Democrats will accept outright dishonesty if that’s what it takes to win?

4. Biden finally arrived and immediately launched into a Trump bashing campaign speech. Has a President ever begun a press conference that way before? It’s cheating, a bait-and-switch. Biden is exploiting the network coverage to get a purely partisan speech broadcast, one that he is reading off a teleprompter. Republicans should demand equal time.

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Ethics Quote of the Month: Mark Judge

“The media are not trusted, and all the conferences and articles in the world are not going to help them out of their hole. What will help is if the media industry learns to do what it once did with some honor: Apologize for mistakes.”

—–Mark Judge, reflecting on the current Joe Biden cover-up disaster that has implicated the mainstream news media and lowered its already abysmal level of public trust even further

Judge makes a profound point. If reporters, journalists, publishers and editors acknowledged their mistakes, ethical lapses and instances of incompetence, bias, dishonesty or worse, there would be at least some sense that they recognize their deficiencies and are committed to correcting them. Judge writes,

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The Radio Host’s Firing: What’s (Really) Going On Here?

Over the weekend after President Biden’s less-than-reassuring interview on ABC, radio hosts Andrea Lawful-Sanders and Earl Ingram appeared on CNN. Both had held radio interviews with the President after his disastrous debate performance as part of the White House’s rehabilitation program. “Were those questions given to you by the White House, or the campaign, or did you have to submit questions ahead of this interview?” CNN host Victor Blackwell asked Lawful-Sanders.

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Ann Althouse Jumps the Ethics Shark!

Oh-oh. This is more depressing news.

Althouse’s shtick is beginning all of her blog posts with a quote from another article, then she weighs in. Let me start this post the same way: here is part of what Ann writes regarding the news media’s rapid rush to condemn President Biden’s debate performance, what she calls ” a stampede.”

I’d really like to know who decided a stampede was the right approach and unleashed it while the President was still on the debate stage. Immediately after the debate, CNN’s John King was cued up to describe a stampede already in motion…As King described it, it’s hard to see how they even watched the debate. They seem to have gone into cabal mode to capture the post-debate narrative. Was it — to use Solnit’s phrase — “a sort of insider coup”? Who did this without knowing that they could — via stampede — drive their own candidate out of the race?…I want to know who led the “deep… wide… very aggressive panic” that “started minutes into the debate” and communicated it to John King and motivated CNN to present this as the narrative, right after the debate, preempting any normal post-debate analysis and throwing the Democratic Party into chaos. Did someone decide to risk everything to shock and awe Joe Biden into submission? Who could do that? Who would do that? And how did that old man — that supposedly broken down hopeless old man — resist? How could he resist? Who’s helping him with his hero story, which is going strangely well against the deep, wide, aggressive panickers… whoever they are?

What the hell?

It must be hard being a relentless contrarian, which is Althouse’s brand There is an obvious peril in working to say the opposite of what the conventional wisdom is, which is that occasionally the conventional wisdom is right, and a contrarian looks ridiculous. I hope that’s the explanation for that passage; if not, one of my long-time favorite bloggers has lost her frick’n mind.

What led her into this morass was an essay at The Guardian titled “Why is the pundit class so desperate to push Biden out of the race?”

It’s a dumb article by a climate change activist (among other things). Maybe Ann was having trouble finding blog topics; it’s happened to me. But come on: isn’t it clear why anyone with eyes, ears and a brain would be desperate to push Biden out of the race? He’s sliding into full dementia, that’s why; it’s been obvious for a long time, and dementia-sufferers shouldn’t be President of the United States!

The “pundit class” has another very good reason to “stampede”: trying to somehow salvage a scrap of public trust after being exposed as fully complicit in the Democrats’ Soviet-style cover-up. Is this so difficult to figure out? For Althouse? A lawyer, social critic and law professor Emeritus?

Apparently it is. Althouse’s commentary quoted above is at least as laughable—and ethically warped— as the Trump-Deranged Guardian article that inspired it:

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