...Trump might blow the race to Joe
By acting crazily.
Christmas Eve found Donald
Roasting no chestnut
Trump’s deranged for Christmas
He’s in a nasty rut!
Here is what the man who wants to be trusted to hold the most powerful job on earth sends out to the public…
—–Donald Trump, in the same stream of consciousness rant that produced his previous Unethical Quote of the Month in New Hampshire (the clip is here)
I don’t have to explain what’s wrong with this, right? I don’t have to explain it because if you read Ethics Alarms, you must have at least a sufficient number of functioning brain cells to know why this is a stunningly idiotic thing for Trump to say. Now, I might decide that it is interesting that Russia’s Machiavellian dictator is using the various prosecutions of Trump by Democratic officials and Biden’s Justice Department to point out the hypocrisy in U.S. democracy under Biden, and refer to that Putin quote (if it really is a quote) for that purpose. However, I would never use a Putin in an appeal to authority, which is what Trump did in New Hampshire.
‘You don’t believe me that Biden is a threat to Democracy? Well, even such a distinguished expert as the Russian dictator agrees with me, so there!’ is what Trump said, in essence. Putin cannot be used as an authority because Putin is a proven liar, and is especially useless for that purpose regarding the United States, which is, after all, supporting a nation Russia is currently fighting. What Trump said is literally as absurd as it would have been for Richard Nixon, running for President against Hubert Humphrey in 1968 at the height of the Vietnam war, to quote Ho Chi Minh or Chairman Mao saying that the Johnson administration was filled with warmongers and fools. Nixon didn’t do that, of course, because whatever else he was, Richard Nixon was a good lawyer, and knew that if you use an unreliable and discredited authority in a brief or oral argument, the court is going to think, “Wow, this guy is desperate. And an idiot…”
City-Journal, arguably the best of the conservative websites, has extensive coverage of the plagiarism allegations against Claudine Gay, whose presidency of Harvard was already on shaky ground following her awful testimony before Congress regarding the burgeoning anti-Semitism on campus. It is too detailed for me to summarize correctly, and if I cut and paste sufficient amounts of the piece I’ll be plagiarizing, so you should read all about it here. (You may have to register, but access is free.)
Disgustingly, the New York Times and the Washington Post have not reported this yet. That’s outrageous, and one more screaming example of how the Left circles its wagons any time an ally seriously screws up. Harvard is to progressive indoctrination in education what the Times is to progressive propaganda in journalism, but the last thing the mainstream media needs now is another Hunter Biden laptop fiasco. Harvard is very much in the news already for it’s ugly role in the Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck; Gay is now a central figure, and for the plagiarism development to be given the “nothing to see here” treatment by the news media is spectacularly foolish as well as unethical. [Update: This afternoon, after Harvard mentioned the plagiarism issue, both the Times and the Post finally reported on it its digital editions.]
But I digress…I had initially assumed that the accusations that Gay had violated Harvard’s own policies on citations, credit to other scholars and plagiarism were like past attacks on controversial authors like Ann Coulter, technical but non substantive, the sort that could be dug up on many published public figures by those seeking to damage their reputations. I was mistaken, however. Gay’s violations are substantive and substantial. Moreover, Gay appears to have appropriated material from one of the most significant scholars in the field of racial issues in American, now retired Vanderbilt professor and author Carol Swain.
One might view posting this today, on the anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, as being in questionable taste. I would argue that it is the perfect day to consider the legacy of President #35, John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1961-1963).
For JFK was saved from historical infamy by moral luck, once for certain, and maybe twice. The first was during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a culmination of blunders that could have started World War III and would have, if a less rational Soviet leader had been Kennedy’s adversary. The second was the assassination, recalling snide comments by various wags that the early deaths of Elvis and Truman Capote were “good career moves.” Kennedy’s death transformed him into an icon, frozen in youth and vitality, a brilliant leader whose death caused darkness to fall. In truth, Kennedy’s three years in office were marked by few successes and serious mistakes that outlived him, like his continuing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. In an era in which the news media were less inclined to keep secrets for a President, JFK might have been impeached. His obsessive adulterous escapades endangered national security: among his many conquests were a Mob moll and an Israeli spy.
Kennedy cannot be fairly judged one of the worst Presidents, however, because he filled the crucial role of President as Symbol of America and the living flag as well or batter than all but a few modern Presidents, in a small group that includes FDR, Eisenhower, Reagan, and Obama. This, plus the fact that he had less than three years to add something positive beyond the Peace Corps and the space program to his legacy, takes him out of the Worst President race.
Verdict: DISQUALIFIED.
#36, Lyndon Baines Johnson (1963-1969), also doesn’t make the cut. For all the pain and national scarring the Vietnam War inflicted, Johnson didn’t start it (or end it), and few Presidents, maybe none, would have been able to successfully negotiate the cultural A-Bomb of the Sixties.
Anyone who doubts LBJ’s effectiveness should listen to the archived phone tapes of his personal maneuvering, cajoling and threatening former Congressional associates to get his Civil Rights bill passed. For some reason historians like to say that Kennedy, if he lived, would have signed a similar law; that’s a dubious assumption. Kennedy probably wouldn’t have won in 1964 by a landslide: Nelson Rockefeller might have been the next President, and it was the Southern Democrats, Johnson’s cronies, who were the main obstacles to civil rights. You don’t have to agree, with the benefit of hindsight, with all of “The Great Society” to agree that Johnson was one of our most skilled Presidents, though a flawed and unlucky one.
Verdict: DISQUALIFIED.
Now, at last, we come to a genuine contender for Worst President Ever: Richard Milhous Nixon, #37 (1968-1974). Even he’s problematic: although he is the only President so far who would have been legitimately impeached and convicted, Nixon was, before the Watergate conspiracy, another very skilled and effective President. He was one of our smartest White House residents (but then so was Wilson), and understood the office from the start as few have. Nixon had many important policy achievements as well, and those accomplishments came in the teeth of strong opposition and bias from the news media (though nothing as extreme as Republican Presidents have faced in this century), and almost unanimous hate from an entire generation.
Surprise! You thought I had forgotten, didn’t you? It has been a long time, almost a year, since the last installment of this series, inspired by President Joe Biden’s spectacularly awful, divisive, incompetent and destructive first two years. Now it’s approaching three, and Biden looks worse than ever. I admit to being paralyzed after considering Woodrow Wilson in Part 3. It is hard to imagine a President being much worse than Wilson, which is remarkable, considering how long Democratic historians maintained the myth that he was one of our greatest chief executives. This fills me with hope that eventually history’s verdict on Barack Obama will align itself with objective reality, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Since May on 2022, when I began this inquiry, the performance of President Biden has only worsened. Nonetheless, he still has more than a year to go, and that’s assuming that he does not get re-elected to a second term. To be fair, I should have divided this competition into two divisions, one for single term Presidents (or less), and the other for those who served more than one term. After all, Woodrow Wilson, the current head of the leaderboard, couldn’t possibly have done as much damage if he hadn’t been re-elected in 1916 with the now mordantly ironic slogan, “He Kept Us Out of the War.” I must admit, however, Biden has done a spectacular amount of harm in less than three years. It’s impressive.
Following Wilson came a President now routinely ranked as one of the worst, Warren G. Harding, #29 (1921-1923), and he didn’t make it through even three years, dying suddenly of cardiac arrest at the youthful age (by today’s Presidential standards) of 57. I began my lifetime fascination with the Presidency reading that Harding was tied with Buchanan and Johnson for the bottom of the barrel. The record just doesn’t support that assessment. While Harding was alive, he enjoyed more popularity than all but a few Presidents while in the White House. His low ranking is attributable to first, the eruption of several scandals, notably the Teapot Dome scandal, in his cabinet after his death, and second, the sordid accounts for Harding’s remarkable sexual profligacy and adultery. While no historian has asserted convincingly that Harding was himself corrupt or complicit in the scandals, he did appoint the crooks, and was accountable. Like Donald Trump, he appointed many cronies and allies who lacked the character and qualifications for public service. There was plenty of smoke that a more attentive POTUS would have sniffed out. As for the sexual misconduct, presumably post-Harding revelations about Bill Clinton and Jack Kennedy should place this in proper perspective. As several commentators have noted in recent decades of Harding historical rehabilitation, many of his accomplishments are impressive.
—-GOP Presidential nominee hopeful Nikki Haley, taking her feud with debate troll Vivek Ramaswamy to the next, uncivil, level in last night’s debate.
Nice. I suppose this is a victory for feminism, as the first Presidential candidate debate participant to resort to direct personal insults is a woman. Yay! I knew they could do it! Prior to this, the limits of what had been considered over-the-line personal denigration had been Barack Obama’s snotty “You’re likable enough” faint-praise shot at Hillary Clinton, and, though technically a Vice-Presidential debate, Lloyd Bentsen hitting Sen. Dan Quayle below the metaphorical belt by saying that he was “no Jack Kennedy.”
Ramaswamy and Haley have been spitting criticism at each other from the first debate, but when the tech entrepreneur accused the former South Carolina governor of hypocrisy for criticizing his having a TikTok account while her adult daughter also uses the the platform, the feud escalated quickly.
“She made fun of me for actually joining TikTok while her own daughter was actually using the app for a long time,” Ramaswamy said. “So you might want to take care of your family first before preaching to anyone else.”
“Leave my daughter out of your voice!” Haley said, doing her best imitation of Will Smith after he slapped Chris Rock at the Academy Awards. When her derivative line prompted a few claps after his remark had sparked some boos, Ramaswamy added, “You have her supporters propping her up — that’s fine.”
“You’re just scum,” Haley responded wittily.
Nice. Be proud, Republicans! It was only moral luck that we were not treated to an ensuing exchange of,
“Bitch!”
“Asshole!”
“Slut!”
“Dickweed!”
—House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), the man every Democrat in the House voted for to be Speaker, “explaining” why Rep. Bowman shouldn’t be censured by the House for breaking the law, indeed two laws, as well as violating the House ethics code.
To be blunt, this statement by Jeffries exhibits the approximate ethical comprehension of a Cocker Spaniel. It reveals him to be a shameless liar and an ethics corrupter:
New Harvard President Claudine Gay can be expected to issue a fourth clarification of her initial reactions to the University’s large anti-Semitic contingent cheering on the Hamas massacre of Jewish citizens on October 7. To read Gay’s inaugural speech upon becoming the new president of America’s oldest and most storied educational institution, one would think “all is well” at Harvard, as Faber College student Kevin Bacon futilely screamed in the epic finale of “Animal House.” In marvelous ramalama-dingdong fashion, the standard issue race-obsessed progressive scholar babbled, predictably as Harvard’s first black President, about “this institution’s long history of exclusion and the long journey of resistance and resilience to overcome it.” Then she proved incapable of reacting forcibly when Harvard’s long history of anti-Semitism suddenly revealed itself not to have been resisted enough. Indeed, Harvard’s relentless efforts at woke indoctrination guarantee that it will flourish.
As discussed here, 31 Harvard campus organizations famously announced that Israel was fully responsible for all the violence erupting in and out of Gaza. Then, after efforts were made to reveal the names of the participating pro-terrorism and historically ignorant students so potential employers could cross them off their lists, we learned how well Harvard imbues its students with the ethical virtues of integrity, accountability, honesty, loyalty and prudence, along with such enabling virtues as fortitude, courage, and sacrifice. At least ten of the groups announced that they no longer endorsed the letter, now that there might be consequences attached to signing it. Some student members swore that they never approved the letter that their groups signed; others proclaimed that they didn’t really mean to say what the letters said, or that they hadn’t read it carefully.
Got it: you’re incompetent, irresponsible and cowardly fools. These reactions do not enhance your attraction as potential employees.
—–Former President Barack Obama, sticking his nose into a matter that he should have no say in, and further enhancing his established record as a foreign policy incompetent.
The former President’s advice comes in an annoying post on Medium titled, “Thoughts on Israel and Gaza.” Primarily, his comments are stupid, but individuals with out-sized influence on public opinion, like irrationally popular ex-Presidents, have an ethical obligation to avoid allowing their stupidity to infect public affairs. How could anything “further harden Palestinian attitudes for generations” when for generations Palestinians have wanted to kill as many Jews as possible and wipe their nation from the map? Is Obama warning Israel that they risk really, really making Palestinians hate them? And nothing Israel does that isn’t suicidal will assist “efforts to achieve peace and stability in the region.” There will be peace and stability when the Palestinians genuinely condemn terrorism and accept that Israel is a legitimate nation…in other words, never.
I would quit any union that started behaving in the fascist manner of The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.
The labor union representing approximately 160,000 media professionals worldwide is currently on strike, and as labor unions seem inclined to do, is making nutsy-cuckoo demands of its members. They have been assimilated, after all, and resistance is futile.
Yes, as that graphic from the unions shows, members have been told that they are doing a bad, anti-labor thing by dressing up as characters from “struck content,” meaning any movie or TV show, recent or ancient. That means they can’t be King Kong, Dracula (but a generic vampire is OK), Abe Lincoln, or Barbie, or else.
Morons. Worse than that, autocratic morons abusing their power.
Ethics Alarms 