This news item has the added advantage for me of adding to my file, now voluminous, of ridiculous legal theories that nonetheless cannot be sanctioned violations of Rule 3.1: Meritorious Claims & Contentions, aka. “Frivolous claims” when they are used as the justification for lawsuits. (The profession’s aversion to punishing lawyers for Hail Mary lawsuits apparently applies to all lawyers accept those representing Donald Trump.) Mostly, however, it demonstrates how completely incompetent another progressive big city mayor is when it comes to dealing with crime.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) announced yesterday that his crime-ridden hell-hole of city, rife with property crimes and murder, will be suing automakers Kia and Hyundai for “their failure to include industry-standard engine immobilizers in multiple models of their vehicles.” This, the theory goes, is why there are so many car thefts in the Windy City.
Yes, it’s the cars’ fault that they get stolen! It certainly isn’t the fault of the car thieves, whom the new mayor wants to see treated with compassion, care and as little punishment as possible. Even though the crime explosion in Chicago was the main reason he defeated the previous mayor, Lori Lightfoot (that, and the fact that she was dishonest and incompetent), Johnson’s plan to stop crime is pure John Lennon wishery: defund as much of the police as possible, seek “restorative justice” and “treatment over punishment,” and have judges who will avoid handing down jail sentences.
Over the weekend, I got to watch (again) the nauseating spectacle of Detroit Tigers firstbaseman Miguel Cabrera disgracing his own legacy as one of the greatest players of all time. A guaranteed first ballot Hall of Famer with over 3,000 hits and more than 500 career homers, Cabrera is no longer even a passable performer at age 40, and hasn’t been since 2017. That year and every year since, Cabrera has been paid an average of $30 million a season for production that the Tigers could have gotten from a mediocre minor league journeyman playing for the Major League minimum salary. All weekend, the TV broadcasters were blathering on about what a wonderful human being “Miggy” is. If he were really wonderful, he would have retired as soon as he realized he was stealing his salary and hurting his team in the process.
Cabrera has graciously announced that this will be his final season, as if he had any choice in the matter. His long term contract is up: he’s squeezed over $200 million out of it without having a single season worthy of his reputation or his salary. He has one (1) home run this season, with less than a third of the schedule to go. The year he signed his contract, he hit 44.
But Cabrera isn’t the subject of this post; I already complained about him and other greedy, fading players here. There’s a worse offender in baseball now, believe it or not. The current miscreant is St. Louis starting pitcher Adam Wainwright, who had announced before this season that it would be his last. [Wainwright, by the way, has one of the more varied and interesting Ethics Alarms dossiers among pro athletes.] He is 41, and not only are 40+-year-old pitchers who still belong in the Major Leagues rarer than star sapphires, Wainwright’s 2022 season at 40 was not a harbinger of optimism, though he still was getting batters out, albeit not as he once had. But Adam Wainwright has pitched for the St. Louis Cardinals and only them for 17 years , winning just short of 200 games along the way. He is regarded as a hometown hero to Cardinal fans, who also wanted him aboard for one more campaign because they had reason to think their perennial play-off team had a real chance to get to the World Series again in 2023, and nothing is more valued on such teams as a grizzled old veteran who has been through the wars before.
It was a good theory, anyway. Unfortunately, Wainwright was done, through, cooked, out of pitches and excuses. This season his earned run average is almost 9 runs a game, which means he is pitching batting practice to the opposition. A starting pitcher without a long-term contract and with no reputation as a team legend is usually cut if he can’t keep his ERA below 6; under 4 runs a game is good, under 4.5 is considered acceptable. But 8.78, which is what Wainwright has delivered in 15 starts? A decent college pitcher could do that well, maybe a top high school pitcher too. And for this consistent failure, Adam Wainwright is being paid $17,500,000.
The AP story and ensuing controversy about Norwegian climber Kristin Harila and her decision, along with many other mountaineers, to leave a climbing companion dying in the snow on K2 immediately rang a metaphorical bell: Haven’t we discussed this issue before on Ethics Alarms? Indeed we have.
Back in 2011, I reposted a 2006 essay from the old (but still useful) EA predecessor The Ethics Scoreboard about the death of 34-year-old David Sharp on Mount Everest, after over 40 other climbers walked past him on their trek to the famous peak. It concluded,
The significance of the David Sharp tragedy is not that the mountaineers did the wrong thing. Of course they did the wrong thing. Nor is it that they are callous or unethical people, for they are probably no more so than you or I. The importance of the story is that it vividly shows how difficult it can be to make even obvious ethical choices when powerful non-ethical considerations are in our sights. Every one of us has a goal or a dream or a desire that could make us walk by a dying man. It is our responsibility to recognize what those goals, dreams and desires are, and to force ourselves not to forget about right and wrong as we approach them.
Harila was on K2 to set a record, and she did: along with her Sherpa guide, Tenjin, they became the world’s fastest climbers by getting to the top of the world’s second highest peak, scaling the world’s 14 highest mountains in 92 days. But of course that mission had nothing to do with her decision to leave Mohammad Hassan, a Pakistani porter and father of three, to die after he slipped and fell off the narrow path to the summit. The Norwegian climber told The Associated Press on Sunday that “in the snowy condition we had up there that day, it wouldn’t be possible to carry him down.”
It was impossible! All righty then, case closed!
Drone footage showed dozens of climbers pushing past Hassan to reach the mountain peak, the path to which was unusually crowded that day (July 27), because it was the last day of the season for a possible ascent. The nerve of that guy losing it all up by falling!
Austrian climber Wilhelm Steindl, who shot the drone footage after he had abandoned the climb because of bad weather, told the AP that more could have been done to save Hassan. “Everyone would have had to turn back to bring the injured person back down to the valley. I don’t want to kind of directly blame anybody, I’m just saying there was no rescue operation initiated and that’s really very, very tragic because that’s actually the most normal thing one would do in a situation like that.”
Well, to be fair, it isn’t. What might have changed the way the climbers reacted would have been a strong leader with the personal magnetism and persuasive skills to reorient the climbers from pursuing powerful non-ethical considerations to embracing an ethical one. No doubt about it, trying to get the injured man down the mountain involved sacrifice and risk, and might not even succeed. There is, however, an ethical duty to try. A life was at stake.
As do I, and as commenters here have made clear, many believe that the best way to punish the Democrats for their unprecedented legal pursuit of the ex-President (which began when he was President-elect in 2016) is to, once again, elect the object of their undemocratic, indeed Soviet-style, assault on democracy as a protest and demonstration of contempt.
That may be appetizing, but at what price? More than once, most recently here, I have analogized the shock election of Trump in 2016 to the climax of “Animal House”:
Electing Trump certainly seemed stupid. Yet it served a purpose, indeed several purposes, just like the “stupid and futile gesture” that is the climax and operatic finale of “Animal House,” when the abused members of Delta House turn Faber College’s homecoming parade into a violent riot…
Voting for Trump was an “Up yours!” to the elites, the sanctimonious media, the corrupt Clintons, the hollow Obamas, and obviously corrupt Democrats like Pelosi and Harry Reid, machine Republicans like Mitch McConnell, and pompous think-tank conservatives like Bill Kristol.
“Americans got tired of being pushed around, lectured, and being told that traditional cultural values made them racists and xenophobes. They decided to say “Screw that!” by electing a protest candidate whose sole function was tobe a human thumb in the eye, because he was so disgusting to the people who had pretended to be their betters. Don’t you understand? It’s idiotic, but the message isn’t. It’s “Animal House”! and “Animal House” is as American as Doolittle’s Raid….In Germany, The Big Cheese says jump and the Germans say “How high?” In the US, the response is “Fuck you!” Obama never understood that…. I love that about America. And much as I hate the idea of an idiot being President, I do love the message and who it was sent to. America still has spunk.
But you can’t keep justifying repeats of the same stupid and futile gesture. Eventually, you have to get serious. (The Capitol riot was a more literal emulation of Delta House’s protest, but even more stupid and futile.) That so many people are actually considering a sequel is evidence of just how difficult it is to determine what the “right thing to do” is when ethics zugzwang looms. It can’t be the right thing to let the strategy adopted by the “resistance”/Democratic Party/mainstream media alliance (aka. “The Axis of Unethical Conduct,” or AUC) in the 2016 Post-Election Ethics Train Wreck succeed, but if the cure—re-electing Trump, another thumb in the eye— isn’t worse than the disease, it’s still reckless, risky and irresponsible.
So now what? The Ethics zugzwang theme is magnified by the competing theories about what the Democrats hope to accomplish by prosecuting Trump for anything they can think of. Is it as simple as trying to use the justice system to remove him from the field? Is the AUC really that stupid and naive? Of course this strategy enhances Trump’s status with those inclined to support him, just as the bogus impeachments did. Nah, it must be that the Left is playing three-dimensional chess…you know, like the deranged Custer of “Little Big Man…
I really don’t know what’s going on, and the many commenters on Ann’s post don’t agree either. For example….
During a speech at a high school gym in Windham, New Hampshire, former President Donald Trump was discussing recent polls that show him leading—Trump loves polls, ratings, IQ scores—- when he referenced former (and disgrace) New Jersey governor Chris Christie. “Christie, he’s eating right now,” Trump riffed. “He can’t be bothered.”
That guy Trump is a regular Mark Twain with that rapier wit of his.
Someone in the crowd picked up on Trump’s erudite insult, to which our ex-President responded to the laughs of the assembled, “Sir, please do not call him a fat pig! I’m trying to be nice. Don’t call him a fat pig. You can’t do that.”
Democrats and the mainstream media decided to go nuclear with the false accusation that the new Florida history guidelines, championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, want schools to teach that slavery was beneficial to enslaved African Americans. It’s an outright lie, as anyone who reviewed the guidelines could see, and as Ethics Alarms explained. The Vice President of the United States made the accusation in multiple venues before African American audiences. (Yes, she’s an idiot, but she’s still Vice-President, and her statements are publicized widely). The usual race-baiters and liars among the partisan punditry, like MSNBC’s vile Joy Reid, repeated the lie, and even a GOP Presidential hopeful, weak, cowardly Sen. Tim Scott, gave it credence.
Far from being evidence of racism, white supremacy or prejudice, the guidelines are really evidence of how extremism succeeds by producing “compromises” that are irresponsibly radical anyway. The slavery history teaching guidelines require an absurdly disproportionate emphasis on slavery in grade school, and will result in inadequate instruction on many other more essential topics and skills. Never mind though: as Hitler and Goebbels explained, the purpose of Big Lies is to get a damaging narrative widely distributed, so much so that the target has to respond to it, giving the lie legitimacy and keeping it in the public consciousness.
The New York Times gave us the chart above, in an article about how the “he could shoot someone at high noon in central park and we wouldn’t care” Trump “base” will make a Republican effort to nominate a responsible, respectable, competent candidate for President difficult if not impossible. Look at that array! And my sister, a Democrat, complains that her party’s options are terrible, which they are.
How can a nation this large and diverse have no leaders who seem capable of doing the top job ethically and well? This is a societal, cultural, systemic failure.
That a character like Donald Trump, former POTUS or not, can have that kind of overwhelming support in the midst of indictments, the long, long trail of ridiculous and offensive statements, and his disqualifying conduct of refusing to accept his electoral defeat yet tells us that something is deeply rotten in the state of America. And whatever that state of rotteness is, returning either Joe Biden or Trump to the White House would be an invitation to too many disasters to contemplate.
But let’s start from the bottom of the list, where hope blooms. Nobody wants Chris Christie to run. Good. He was an ethics villain in 2016, knocking off Trump’s adversaries in the debates when he had the rhetorical tools and ammunition to take out Trump the way he reduced poor Marco Rubio to a laughing stock. Then Christie endorsed Trump, whom he knew was unfit, in a corrupt quid pro quo deal, probably to be Vice-President, which Trump reneged on. Then Christie was out to get Trump again, but it was too late. The one-time rising GOP star’s star was already permanently tarnished by his George Washington Bridge fiasco anyway. He’s running to get headlines and speaking fees, I guess. That he has almost no support speaks almost as well for the Republican voters as their support for Trump is damning.
Vivek Ramaswamy is the GOP equivalent of tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang in the last cycle for the Democrats. He’s not a serious candidate, and anyone who thinks he is doesn’t understand the American Presidency. Like Christie, he’s just static in the race, and a distraction. In a very important election like the one approaching, causing static and distractions is unethical.
…he would announce that he was withdrawing from the Presidential race immediately, because the prosecutions he faces, just or unjust, will be a destructive distraction from the election as well as an impediment to him serving as President if he were nominated and elected.
And if I were an aardvark, I could save money on groceries by eating ants and termites.
Trump won’t do this, of course (that is, drop out, not eat ants and termites), but it is the only ethical alternative. A lawyer facing a single serious indictment would step away from his or her law firm. An ethical judge would resign. A doctor facing indictments would take a leave of absence. A general facing such legal jeopardy would retire. The United States cannot have a Presidential candidate laboring under the shadow of multiple criminal prosecutions any more than it can afford to have a mentally declining President who serves as a puppet for aspiring totalitarians. Trump continuing his candidacy increases the likelihood of both.
If Richard Nixon had been like Trump—a toxic narcissist—he wouldn’t have resigned, and the nation would have been roiled and scarred by a genuine impeachment process. Clinton is like Trump—maybe a teeny-weeny bit less of a narcissist, but not much—and he should have resigned as the truth of the Monica Lewinsky allegations emerged. The nation and the Presidency—and his party—would have been far better off today if he had, and Clinton’s scandal was not even in the same metaphorical ballpark as Trump’s, which also includes a sexual assault civil ruling.
At this point, Trump continuing to seek the Presidency can only do damage, and the question is just “How much?” I don’t want to think about how much. His entire career has been built on a foundation of stubbornness, resilience and a refusal to admit defeat: quitting his quest for redemption goes against his core. Real patriots and great leaders, however, can muster the character and courage to do what needs to be done even when it violates all of their baser instincts. Unfortunately, I am not an aardvark, and Donald Trump is neither a real patriot or a great leader.
In a depressing AP story about a poll supposedly showing that a large majority of Americans don’t believe democracy is working as it should in the U.S. today, one disillusioned voter, a “moderate Republican,” singled out the GOP’s investigations of Hunter Biden as a prime example of misplaced priorities.
“Hunter Biden — what does that have to do with us?” he asked, neatly demonstrating why the Founders decided that a pure democracy was dangerous, and that a republic was much safer in many respects.
Hunter Biden is not important at all isolated from what he represents, which is strong evidence that the President of the United States is 1) lying 2) abusing power and influence to assist his pathetic ne’er do well son 3) possibly benefiting from his son’s influence peddling 4) corrupting the justice system to protect his family, and 5) untrustworthy, because he is willing to place other priorities above the interests of the United States of America. The fact that the “moderate Republican,” whose argument is that the President’s son has “nothing to do with the economy,” can’t comprehend this, is a perfect example of how most U.S. citizens don’t understand the basic concepts of ethics, government and law.
Consider the White House cocaine fiasco. A white substance in a plastic bag was found in the White House library and identified as cocaine. Hunter Biden had been to his father’s abode three days before the discovery. Hunter has been a cocaine user in the past, and there is video and photographic evidence of that. From the beginning, the White House made every effort imaginable to keep the public and the media’s suspicions going to the obvious place. On July 5, less than 72 hours after the discovery, a law enforcement source leaked to Politicothat the owner of the drugs would likely never be known. National security adviser Jake Sullivan suggested the drug could have belonged to construction workers renovating the West Wing Situation Room, and Joe’s paid liar Karine Jean-Pierre flipped into indignant “How dare you!’ mode when a reporter asked if the envelope might have belonged to a Biden. She also said, laughably, insisted that the Secret Service would never allow the President to dictate how they handled delicate matters at the White House. “We are not involved in this,” Jean-Pierre said. “This is something that the Secret Service handles. It’s under their protocol.” Sure. Who believes this?
On July 13, the Secret Service concluded its investigation without naming a suspect, saying that it could not narrow the group of people who had access to the area to “a person of interest.” Hunter was never questioned. The Secret Service briefed members of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee on its findings.
Senator Tom Cotton had an amusing analogy to this narrative.”This is like if the Hamburglar lived in the White House, all the hamburgers disappeared, and they said they didn’t have any suspects or no one they could question,” he said. Meanwhile, conservative pundit and former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino says that his former colleagues are furious, and that they know who brought the cocaine into the White House, adding,
“So there’s probably less than 200 people who could have left this cocaine, by the way, in a bag which is plastic, which is non-porous, meaning it’s probably not that hard to pull a latent print. They’ve got to know who did it. The question is, who’s pressuring them to not find out who did it? Andit’s gotta be coming from this White House. This is terrible. Don’t destroy this agency like the FBI. It’s really unbecoming. A lot of my former colleagues at the Secret Service who retired, they are absolutely furious about this. Oh yeah, yeah, I can tell you, I got 50 emails, communications, texts from people. ‘This is embarrassing, humiliating.’ These are good guys, man, guys who worked for Obama and Bush, non-partisan guys, most of them aren’t even political. This is embarrassing. They know exactly who it was.”
And sports bookies are releasing odds on who owned the drugs.
I don’t understand. The Biden Administration has declared that opponents of his policies are threats to democracy. The current Justice Department has sought extreme and excessive punishment for the protesters and rioters at the Capitol in January of 2021 while ignoring the violent and disruptive acts of the George Floyd Freakout rioters and demonstrators. The Democratic Administration sought to intimidate parents who were critical of woke school boards seeking to inject sexual politics and CRT ideology into public school curricula. And yet when Boston’s mayor Michelle Wu admitted that her staff compiled a list of her most vocal critics and protesters to hand to local law enforcement authorities, the public, which in Boston is primarily Democratic and progressive, howled in outrage.
This is how their increasingly totalitarian party operates in 2023. This is what they voted for. What are they complaining about?
Ethics Alarms 