Leadership

The “Unconscionable” UFC Flag Day Fight At The White House

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

For a long time, I have been sick of writing about Anti-Trump bias, anti-Trump hate, Trump Derangement and “Get Trump” indoctrination and propaganda the Axis media, I really have. After all, it has been more than a decade since the Post 2016 Election Ethics Train Wreck first jumped the rails. But these awful, unethical fanatic unethical people keep getting worse, lying, and saying increasingly crazy things. Among the worst of the worst, ex-CNN hack Jim Acosta, who CNN elevated to White House Correspondent during Trump’s first term, compared the court ordered erasure of the President’s name from the Kennedy Center to the fall of the Berlin Wall. He really did. These people don’t even realize how insane they sound to normal people. Wrote one wag on “X”: “I missed the time when people were SHOT DEAD trying to get into the Kennedy Center for 40 years.”

The Trump Outrage Du Jour yesterday was the Flag Day UFC cage match on the White House lawn. On PBS—BOY am I glad not a penny of my taxes go to that propaganda machine!—erudite professional intellectual David Brooks provided Exhibit A of the class snobbery that has always been the root of so much Trump hostility. Asked about the event, Brooks huffed,

“Well, I first thought of, like, who are the artists John F. Kennedy brought to the White House? It was like W.H. Auden, Robert Frost, Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein. And now we have got cage fighting. Don’t anybody say America’s in cultural decline!”

Got it. Because Brooks doesn’t enjoy the UFC, the White House hosting a popular sports event means America is in decline. I don’t care for either, but if I had an Uzi at my head and was forced to pick one, I’d take a UFC cage match over one of President Obama’s hip-hop artists he hosted when he was President. Funny, Brooks didn’t mention JFK’s preference for Robbins and Bernstein. Let’s see: Barack and Michelle feted Kendrick Lamar, Janelle Monáe: Common, Queen Latifah, Big Sean, and Chance the Rapper, among others.

You know who would have lovedthe cage match? Teddy Roosevelt. He was the first President I thought of when Trump’s spectacular was announced. Young Teddy was a boxer and a lieftime fan of “manly arts.” His most famous speech is titled “The Man in the Arena,” which I wrote about here.

Progressives don’t much care for Teddy, one of Trump’s favorite Presidents (and mine). They keep waxing poetic about Kennedy, who has a large mausoleum that holds cultural events for the rich glitterati of D. C. memorializing his largely negligible Presidency. Kennedy was also maintaining sexual affairs with the help of the Secret Service as he and Jackie posed as the ideal couple, but he pretended to be admirable well. And he went to Harvard.

Ann Althouse reports that, contrary to how the UFC event was reported as Trump celebrating himself (Flag Day is his birthday) didn’t have any birthday celebration vibe at all:

“The event was called UFC Freedom 250, and, true to that name, it turned out to be about the UFC and the United States of America. Three days before his birthday, Trump had said — quoted at USA Today — “You don’t have to wish me happy birthday because I’m not happy about that birthday that I’m having. That’s a number that I never thought really too much about. It’s not a number I like, but I’m here, nevertheless.” And at that huge event on the White House lawn on the evening of his birthday, last night, I don’t think there was even a passing mention of his birthday.”

Fact Don’t Matter, however. All that matters is to denigrate President Trump for anything and everything. What kind of nation has a news media that devotes itself to projecting hate on its elected leader? Answer: a very, very sick and confused one. Here is the current headline at Salon, the virulently leftist site:

Nice.

Rep. Jasmine Crocket On a Racist Rampage

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

And she was supposedly a rising star of the Democratic Party. Well, she’s better than Graham Platner…

Crockett, who lost her attempt to run for the U.S. Senate and now is a lame duck in the House, was in fine form this week. The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the evidence that the Southern Poverty Law Center was paying the “hate groups” it railed against. One of the witnesses called by the Republicans on the committee was Dr. Alveda King. Her father is Alfred Daniel King, the younger brother of Martin Luther King Jr., and she has broken ranks to be a GOP supporter and an advocate for President Trump.

After King’s statement, Crockett began shouting about how how “white men” had invited Alveda to the hearing and that those white men from the GOP wanted to “tell people of color who is fighting for who. People of color do not feel comfortable or welcomed within your party.”  

“That’s why you have to parade someone who has the name ‘Dr. King’ attached to them, so that people can be confused,” she continued. “Because I have been reading the comments online, and people are like, ‘Who is this Dr. King’ because you want them to believe that she somehow espouses who Dr. King was.” Crockett didn’t give this Dr. King an opportunity to respond, but the next speaker, Rep. Russell Fry (R-S.C.), allowed her to do so.

“Congresswoman, I am a bit emotional,” King began. “I’m going to watch what I say, but it seems as though you have suggested that I am a bastard to the King family legacy. I am legitimately the daughter of the Rev. Alfred Daniel Williams King and Dr. Naomi Ruth Barber King. We are a family who loves God. And I love you. God bless you.” 

Crockett walked out of the chamber in the midst of King’s statement. Nice.

She was just getting warmed up, though. Later that day, after the Karmelo Anthony guilty verdict was announced, the loud-mouth Congresswoman went on her “Clock It With Crockett”podcast and wildly distorted the facts of the case. She argued that the victim Austin Metcalf’s family couldn’t understand the pain black women have to endure daily. Crockett said that was made clear to her again while talking about the case to a friend who is a black mother. “Black women — especially black women who have black male children — live in fear and agony every single day,” Crockett said. “A fear and agony that I promise you, the Metcalfs probably never spent a day living that way.”

How ironic that their unarmed son was the one who was murdered, not the worried black mother’s son who stabbed him in the heart.

Crockett then expressed the revolutionary idea that Americans need to have “real conversations about race in this country,” as if such conversations aren’t usually hijacked by race-hustlers like Jasmine Crockett, making them divisive and useless.

Crockett, ignoring the evidence at trial, insisted that the stabbing was self-defense. “If a 300-pound man is beating me, like on top of me and beating me down, I’m not limited to fists,” Crockett said. She must have been thinking of Mike Brown. “Cuz I’m telling you right now, if you were twice my weight and got way more strength than me and you got me pinned down, I don’t believe I’m going to survive,” Crockett ranted. It was reported that Metcalf was 6’0, 200 pounds, and Anthony is 5’11 and 162 pounds. The latter was never “pinned down” nor was he in danger of being pinned down. Witnesses said that Anthony dared Metcalf to touch him, and stabbed him to death when he did.

Jasmine: “And when you look at like George Floyd, like George Floyd died, and they never took out a quote-unquote weapon. So this idea you can’t die is wild, right?” Wait, was Metcalf kneeling on Anthony’s neck? What was she talking about?

Then Crockett claimed the murder weapon (it was a knife with a five-inch blade) was too small.

“Well, I would have argued the size of it alone, you wouldn’t even think it’s a deadly weapon,” she reasoned. By definition, if the knife penetrated Metcalf’s heart and killed the kid, it’s a deadly weapon.

Jasmine then said that Metcalf confronted Anthony because “this is the culture that is being instigated,” where white people are “gettin’ real bold with us right now.”

I guess the solution is to kill more white people when they get too bold.

 

Ethics Dunces: Everyone Connected To The Justice Department’s $1.8 Billion Slush Fund Or Whatever The Hell It Was From President Trump On Down…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Wait, what was that?

Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, announced today that the Justice Department was withdrawing the $1.8 billion fund to compensate people claiming to be victims of unfair prosecution, supposedly the result of the settlement of President Trump’s lawsuit against his own Treasury Department. “We’re not moving forward with the fund, period,” Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, told lawmakers during a congressional hearing.

First of all, GOOD!, but second and most importantly, how in the wide, wide, world of sports did anyone think this offensive, conflicted, half-baked, stupid idea would be anything but condemned, attacked, ridiculed, mocked and ultimately blocked in the first place?

Any idiot could have figured out how unethical this thing was, so it should have been laughed out of the room the second it was suggested. I’m certainly any idiot, and I wrote three posts pointing out what shouldn’t have had to be pointed out at all. Here, I wrote in part:

“[T]his deal stinks, and should be challenged ethically if not legally. The whole Justice Department and the Treasury Department too had irresolvable conflicts, and should not have been allowed to make a settlement with their own boss.”

Here, I wrote in part,

“If you can process this whole astounding ethics debacle and come out anything but but disgusted and disillusioned, you apparently are capable of rationalizing anything…How can anyone defend any of this?…It needs to be widely condemned and stopped.”

And finally, I wrote here,

“I continue to think, or at least hope, that this abomination will be stopped. As I already wrote when asked in a comment, this, unlike the artificial offenses behind the two purely partisan impeachments in Trump’s first term, is a genuine impeachable offense.”

This conclusion didn’t require an ethicist, or any special expertise, or an IQ above 100. So how did this outrageous thing get to the public announcement stage? The fact that it did should shake public confidence in the Justice Department, the Treasury Department, the IRS, President Trump, Vice-President Vance and the entire White House staff. Did no one have the sense God gave a mushroom to tell everyone involved in this fiasco, “That’s ridiculous! It will make this administration look foolish, untrustworthy, corrupt and incompetent! It will undermine the President’s authority and the public trust! It will endanger the GOP majority in Congress and be a self-inflicted wound with no counterbalancing benefits! You can’t be this stupid! Come on! Think, dammit!” ???

I realized that Blanch’s statement was a perfect embodiment of Gilda Radner’s iconic catch phrase as addled “Weekend Update” commentator Emily Litella, which somehow had not been listed already in the Ethics Alarms Hollywood clip archive. But do you know what? Most of the 46 clips listed are appropriate to describe some aspect of this aborted, disgusting, self-indicting betrayal of trust. For example, here’s #18:

And #20…

And of course #15…

…as well as…

Let’s tote up all the clips that are directly applicable in one respect or another. We have twenty-seven, more than half: 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18, 20, 24, 26, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 38,39, 43, 44, 45, and, of course, 46. This episode was that bad, that unethical, that indefensible, and Ethics Alarms called it immediately, or as Fredo said in #16,

When Trump and Company do things this reckless and unethical, it humiliates everyone who try to oppose the Trump Deranged.

You know. Morons.

The Graham Platner Candidacy in Maine Reaches Signature Significance Status on Many Fronts

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Yikes.

I haven’t written much about the Graham Platner debacle in Maine. I will have to now, because he is a walking, talking, lying human ethics train wreck, and strong evidence of the contempt our political parties have for both the Republic and its voters. Democrats think they have a real shot at defeating long-time “centrist” Republican Senator Susan Collins, who is pretty much a NeverTrumper. The fact that Platner is running unopposed in the Democratic primary to be the party’s choice to oppose her has been looking for some time as if the Mad Left is whistling past the graveyard, and incidentally, desperate, deluded and nuts. I summarized Platner’s virtues exactly a month ago here, writing in part,

“He has said women who are raped are at fault. He said that blacks don’t tip. He has called called white, rural Maine dwellers stupid. He uses “fag” to describe gays. Platner praised Hamas, rationalized urinating on corpses, and has denigrated police officers. He once referred to Jesus as a “zombie” and the Virgin Mary as a “skank.” He also had a Nazi tattoo on his chest and defended it for years. On the plus side, Platner approves of political violence, so at least in that sense he’s a mainstream 2026 Democrat.”

And the hits just keep on coming for Platner. Today we learned that his supposed occupation as a small town Maine harbormaster—-See? He’s a real Maine-y blue collar guy!—is a rather wan resume item. The Washington Free Beacon reports,

“Platner’s town of Sullivan got by without a harbormaster from February 2022, when Platner’s predecessor resigned, until September 2023, when town officials tapped Platner to serve as “an interim Harbor Master until one could be hired,” records show. Platner had volunteered for the role in case Maine law required Sullivan to have one, though the town’s Harbor Committee noted at the time that it was “not clear” he was needed because “operations in the Harbors are handled by those who use the Harbors without dispute” and because the role’s “largest challenges are clerical” and “can be handled by the Harbor Committee.”Platner dropped the “interim” title in March 2024, when he completed the basic training required to be considered a “qualified Harbor Master.” He served in the role until the summer of 2025, when he launched his candidacy, according to Sullivan town manager Ray Weintraub, who told the Free Beacon that being town harbormaster generally consisted of collecting rent fees for Sullivan’s fewer than two dozen permitted moorings, where boats can anchor offshore. “We don’t really have any working waterfront, so to speak, other than a couple of boat launches,” Weintraub explained.”

Wow, this guy is really qualified to be a U.S. Senator! You wonder why “the country’s in the very best of hands” and ends up with idiots, crooks, fakes, poseurs and dolts in Congress? You know, like Republicans George Santos, Lauren Boebert, Margery Taylor Greene, and (oh, let’s pick a Democrat out of the hat) Ex-Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick of Florida, who resigned from Congress moments before the House Ethics Committee was going to sanction her, among other offenses, stealing nearly $5 million in Federal Emergency Management Agency funds for her campaign? It’s because parties keep nominating ridiculous, untrustworthy, unqualified people. Platner, however, is special.

He’s also been endorsed by Senator Bernie Sanders and AOC, another unqualified, incompetent boob.

The juiciest revelations about Platner came from his wife, who, the New York Times revealed, warned his campaign that her lovey-bug has a habit of sexting other women during their marriage. Classy! An Anthony Weiner wannabe! But that’s not all! Here is the transcript of the cringe-worthy video the Platner campaign persuaded his wife to post (hold onto your head!):

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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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No, John Brown Is NOT a Role Model For “Social Justice Reformers,” and Anyone Who Says So —Like Hakeem Jeffries’s Brother—Is Both Unethical and Dangerous

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I co-wrote a book about Clarence Darrow (you can buy it here: it’s cheap), and one of the points I made in the Introduction was that the U.S.’s most famous trial lawyer also believed in terrorism. Well, Darrow had his quirks, and he frequently argued that one of his murderer clients should be acquitted because the murder was justified (it worked, too!). He was ethically and morally wrong about Brown, as I asserted here in a post that republished a shortened version of Darrow’s famous eulogy for the anti-slavery vigilante. It was written long after Brown’s death, of course; Darrow used to deliver the speech on anniversaries of Brown’s birthday on May 8. The most famous section of Darrow’s passionate speech:

“The radical of today is the conservative of tomorrow, and other martyrs take up the work through other nights, and the dumb and stupid world plants its weary feet upon the slippery sand, soaked by their blood, and the world moves on.”

Darrow was an early progressive when the movement began, on the extreme end. In his “ends justifies the means” glorification of violence as a means of social change, we can see the seeds of where modern progressives have gone off the metaphorical rails and become a genuine threat to the rule of law and democracy. In Darrow’s time (he was active from 1890 to 1932) there were few progressives who would go as far as Darrow, though the anarchists did. They were the terrorists of the day, but Darrow defended labor leaders who also believed that murdering the exploitive capitalist here and there as well as their political enablers was the right thing to do.

Thus Darrow defended “Big Bill” Haywood (February 4, 1869 – May 18, 1928), an American labor organizer, a founding member and leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and a member of the executive committee of the Socialist Party of America. “Big Bill” was indicted for engineering the booby-trap murder of Frank Steunenberg, a former governor of Idaho. Darrow got “Big Bill” off (Just look at this guy! You just know he did it.)…

….but by arguing that even if he was guilty, its shouldn’t matter because he was on the right side. Fortunately, Darrow’s arguments in favor of just murder were confined to the courtroom and his John Brown eulogy once a year.

This week, Hasan Kwame Jeffries , an Ohio State University history professor and the brother of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, declared in a social media post that “John Brown understood that the only way to free Americans from the scourge of white supremacy was to get rid of white supremacists by any means necessary. He was right then. He is right now.” Gee, do you think Prof. Jeffries is at odds with his brother in this appeal to violence? I doubt it.

Prof. Turley has called out the Democratic House minority leader for encouraging violence on the Left, and lionizing John Brown is literally a justification of violence. If Republicans and the news media don’t confront Democrats and the party’s leaders with Prof. Jeffries’s words, they are being negligent and irresponsible.

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Oh Look, Pope Leo Presumes To Tell Us What To Do With A.I.! Ethics Observations, Part II

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

The summary of the Pope Leo’s open letter to “all people of good will” is at Part I, along with a link to the whole 42,000 word opus. News reports on the document can be read here, here and here.

1. The document appears to begin, as we would expect, from the basic socialist/Communist/progressive bias the Catholic Church has always displayed, which includes suspicion and contempt for capitalism. In the text, Pope Leo says that while “technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity,” he added that “the pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs.” The encyclical doesn’t resolve the obvious conflict that has always existed in that perspective: technology ideally improves the quality of life for humanity, saves resources and redistributes them elsewhere, and often reduces the costs of goods and services making them more affordable to all. One of my favorite inventors, Walter Hunt (inventor of the safety pin), invented the first practical sewing machine but didn’t patent or market it because he was certain that it would put seamstresses out of work. So Elias Howe patented the sewing machine instead. Were more jobs lost or created by the invention? I have no idea. This has been the inevitable sequence with new technology throughout human history: its ultimate impact is usually impossible to predict.

Ethics Lesson: Trying to develop rules and laws limiting the uses of emerging technology is stifling as well as futile, and foolish to boot.

2. A Pope using the Biblical fable of the Tower of Babel as his primary analogy to justify limiting the use of artificial intelligence is signature significance that makes me, for one, tend to roll my eyes at the entire document. That’s a story about the Old Testament God finding sinful the aspirations of mankind and sabotaging an effort by humans to cooperate in creating something ambitious and unprecedented. The encyclical demands acceptance of human limits, while science, capitalism and American individualism set no limits on human advancement. The Pope seems to be saying the equivalent of “If God had meant for us to fly, he would have given us wings.”

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The Low Chair Trick

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Kudos to Ann Althouse: she flagged the use of the old chair dominance trick by Xi to make sure he appeared higher in his chair than President Trump.

Ann’s sketchy popular culture literacy was also exposed again: most normally-acculturated Americans would immediately think of the famous scene in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” where George Bailey (James Stewart) bargains with town bully Mr. Potter in a chair that reduces him to the stature of a child. Ann’s mind went instead to the scene in “The Great Dictator,” a far less well-known Chaplin film, where satirical versions of Mussolini and Hitler (Chaplin) keep raising their chairs’ heights during a meeting. Ann’s choice makes the point better, but she often posts about not having watched a lot of old movies, and it shows. (I have watched too many old movies, and it also shows.)

But kudos to Ann again for tracking down a December 2, 1987 David Letterman show when a young Donald Trump called out Letterman for having his guest chairs lower than the host’s, complaining, “How come this seat is at such a low level? You know, I’m looking at him. He’s got this stage rigged, folks…. That seat is a good six inches higher than my seat.”

Notes:

  • In law school I took a negotiation course from Adrian Fisher, then the Dean of Georgetown Law Center and known as a key U.S. negotiator in both SALT Treaties. Fisher had an exhaustive knowledge of negotiation mind games, and mentioned the chair trick as such a well-known and devious tactic that attempting it would be regarded as an insult by professional diplomats.
  • Trump had the good sense not to mention his annoyance with the chair trick in China. This indicates to me that he is capable of self-restraint when he chooses to exercise it, which is, obviously, not nearly enough.
  • Read (at Ann’s link above) the exchange between Letterman and Trump from 40 years ago. I detect no difference in Trump’s discourse from what we are used to today. One of the more irritating Big Lies the Axis (including my Trump Deranged Facebook friends) keeps pushing is that Trump’s rhetoric indicates cognitive decline (so he should be removed via the 25th Amendment.) He’s always talked this way.
  • Letterman has also always been an asshole. And a liar. When Trump points out that Letterman’s chair is “a good six inches” higher than Trump’s chair, Letterman says “And so am I” suggesting that it’s an illusion because he’s taller than Trump. Letterman is (or was) 6’2″ and Trump is (or was) an inch taller.
  • I blame Letterman for late night TV turning into the all-partisan-propaganda-all-the-time blight on society epitomized by Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert. He’s an Ethics Villain.
  • Trump proved in that exchange that he, like Fisher, knew the negotiation game well.
  • Note also in the transcript how a Trump was talking about the same international trade grievances in 1987 that he has tried to address in his second term.
  • Letterman meanwhile, like any good class-obsessed left-winger, keeps trying to bring the discussion around to Trump’s wealth because, after all, as AOC tells us, billionaires are the cause of most of America’s problems.

Letterman’s wealth is estimated to be only 400 million.

__________

Pointer: Ann Althouse

Ethics Dunce and Incompetent Elected Official: Florida Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.)

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Florida Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.) missed the last 43 House votes and hadn’t been seen for a month, several news reports noted yesterday. Moreover, her office had been mum on the matter. The eight-term incumbent is 83 years old, and her last recorded House vote was on April 17. House reporter Jaime Dupree noted on BlueSky Wednesday that she “missed all 10 votes on Wednesday in the House,” leading to the questions being raised yesterday. “80% of life is just showing up,” Woody Allen supposedly said. That’s a low bar, and Wilson still hasn’t cleared it.

Last night, Wilson surfaced at last and explained that she is recovering from eye surgery. “Following left eye surgery, my priority has been ensuring a full and responsible recovery,” Wilson said. “Although I am currently unable to fly under my doctors’ orders, my work has not stopped for a single day. While recovering in the district, I have continued carrying out my official duties, meeting with leaders, local organizations, city and county officials, and constituents.”

Nope, not good enough, not hardly. Normal people can’t just disappear from work for a month without adverse consequences, and elected officials have a duty to their constituents to be on the job or to inform the public and the news media why they aren’t. Wilson’s X timeline showed no change since she disappeared four weeks ago, and her staff was apparently under instructions to keep everyone in the dark about her whereabouts, in one case posting a photo of her represented as recent that was really a year old. That’s unacceptable.

Joe Biden’s Secretary of Defense went AWOL too, though only for ten days, in 2024. He should have been fired, but Joe didn’t fire anybody, no matter how useless, incompetent or unqualified he or she might be. Wilson should be fired by her district’s voters in November, but of course she won’t be.

If you cant trust your Congresswoman to show up to vote or let you know why she isn’t, then you can’t trust your Congresswoman, period. Wilson’s party is claiming that Jim Crow is back and blacks are being “disenfranchised” because the Supreme Court won’t allow “good discrimination” to guarantee majority black districts. Wilson represents one of those districts, and not showing up in Congress to vote really does “disenfranchise ” her constituents.

Of course, Wilson now assures us that she was “carrying out [her] official duties,” except for the only one that is absolutely required. Why would anyone believe her?

From The EA Archives: The Trump Presidency And “The Caine Mutiny”—A Reminder

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

I watched “The Caine Mutiny” last night with a friend who had never seen it. I realized that I had written during Donald Trump’s first term about how the rebuke Navy lawyer Barney Greenwald (Jose Ferrer) delivers to the acquitted mutineers fit 2019’s “resistance”  like the proverbial glove. It fits today’s  Axis of Unethical Conduct even better. I’ll have some brief comments after the post.

* * *

Turner Movie Classics ran “The Caine Mutiny” again last night. It reminded me of what I wrote two years ago, when I really didn’t think that the “resistance” and the Democrats would continue on the destructive path they have for this long. I even wrote, foolishly, “This is the last time I’m going to try to explain why the fair, patriotic, ethical and rational approach to the impending Presidency of Donald Trump is to be supportive of the office and the individual until his actual performance in the job earns just criticism. Attempting to undermine a Presidency at its outset is a self-destructive act, for nobody benefits if a Presidency fails.” Of course, it was far from the last time I returned to the topic. In my defense, how could I know, at a point where the term “the resistance” hadn’t even surfaced yet, that the unparalleled assault on a President would not only continue, but escalate to the point where a newly minted Congresswoman would announce to a cheering mob, “We’re going to impeach the motherfucker!”?

Watching the movie, however, was striking. I know it well; I can recite many of the lines from memory. Yet the parallel with the Trump Presidency struck me smore powerfully than ever before, and sent me back to that previous post, in which I wrote,

“In The Caine Mutiny, a film version of the stage drama and novel “The Caine Mutiny Court Martial,” Captain Queeg (Humphrey Bogart), a man whose war-shattered nerves and self-esteem problems have rendered him an erratic and an unpopular officer, falters in his command during a storm. His officers, frightened and already convinced that their captain is unfit for command, mutiny. At their military trial, their defense attorney causes Queeg to have a breakdown on the witness stand, winning the case for the accused mutineers. Later, however, at the post trial victory party, the lawyer, Barney Greenwald (Jose Ferrer),  shames his clients. He represented them zealously, but he tells them that they were, in fact, at fault for what occurred on the Caine:

Ensign  Keith: Queeg endangered the lives of the men.

Greenwald: He didn’t endanger any lives.You did. A fine bunch of officers.

Lt. Paynter: You said yourself he cracked.

Greenwald: I’m glad you brought that up, Mr. Paynter, because that’s a very pretty point. I left out one detail in court. It wouldn’t have helped our case. Tell me, Steve, after the yellow-stain business, Queeg came to you for help, and you turned him down, didn’t you.

Lt. Maryk: Yes, we did.

Greenwald: You didn’t approve of his conduct as an officer. He wasn’t worthy of your loyalty. So you turned on him. You ragged on him, you made up songs about him. If you’d given Queeg the loyalty he needed, do you think all this would have come up in the typhoon? You’re an honest man, Steve, I’m asking you. You think it would have been necessary to take over?

 Maryk: It probably wouldn’t have been necessary.

Keith:  If that’s true, we were guilty.

Greenwald: Ahhh, You’re learning, Willie!  You don’t work with the captain because of how he parts his hair…you work with him because  he’s got the job, or you’re no good.

Exactly.

      Or you’re no good.

Donald Trump is in over his head. He knows it, I think. Maybe, just maybe, with a lot of help, a lot of support and more than a lot of luck, he might be able to do a decent job for his country and the public. It’s a long-shot, but what’s the alternative? Making sure that he fails? Making him feel paranoid, and angry, and feeding his worst inclinations so he’s guaranteed to behave irrationally and irresponsibly? How is that in anyone’s best interest? That’s not how to get someone through a challenge, especially someone who you have to depend on.

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