Yes, I’m feeling this hopeless right now.

Contrasting in gravitas and significance this week have been at least three revelations that the Axis of Unethical Conduct will try mightily to keep out of the public eye and our consciousness. Instead, we will be bombarded with Rob Reiner’s wonderful movies, “the collapse of the Trump Presidency,”and, of course, Epstein. With an ethical Fourth Estate, however, and a POTUS who wasn’t determined to destroy himself, these stories would be leading the news:

1. Fulton County admitted that approximately 315,000 early votes from the 2020 election were illegally certified, then included in the final Georgia Presidential vote tally. This obviously places Trump’s claims that the election results were corrupted in a new light, especially his controversial appeal to Georgia’s governor to “find” the votes necessary to flip the state into Trump’s column. The margin in Georgia was a whole lot less than 315, 000.

The startling admission came during a Dec. 9 hearing before the Georgia State Election Board. Before that, as we all know by now, Trump had been accused of trying to “overthrow” the election and his lawyers have been disciplined for trying to halt the certification of what they believed was an unconstitutional election. No, Georgia alone couldn’t have stolen the Presidency, but this additional information certainly undermines the five year narrative, as well as the already dead-in-the-water state prosecution of Donald Trump.

The Federalist is covering the story. I have not seen any report in the Washington Post, the networks, or the New York Times.

2. Newly-declassified documents show that President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice pressured the FBI to conduct its 2022 raid of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home while the FBI repeated warned that such a raid was not justified.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) announced in an X post, “Received shocking new docs 2day from DOJ & FBI showing FBI DID NOT BELIEVE IT HAD PROBABLE CAUSE to raid Pres Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home but Biden DOJ pushed for it anyway.” “Based on the records Mar-a-Lago raid was a miscarriage of justice. Read for yourself,” Grassley added, linking to the documents posted online.

It was not a “miscarriage of justice,” it was a deliberate political hit job using law enforcement as a means to taking a Biden political rival out of the 2024 race. Who was the threat to democracy, again?

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Oh come ON.

“The Trump Kennedy Center?” As one of my Trump Deranged friends posted on Facebook, quite appropriately, “What’s next, The Trump Washington Monument? The Trump Lincoln Memorial? The Trump Jefferson Memorial…?”

I don’t even want to think about what’s next. Ugh. Ack. Yecchh.

You would think that after his Rob Reiner fiasco, the President would be just a teeny-weeny bit wary for a while. Clearly not.

If President Trump had any sense at all, he would thank the board but turn down the wildly inappropriate honor. But he doesn’t have any sense at all, not in these kinds of things.

I am aghast.

This is serious. The last week or so has been disastrous for the Trump Administration, almost entirely because of its own foolishness, recklessness, and lack of competence. As I have noted more than once in this period, its missions are too important to be placed in jeopardy by hubris and stupidity, but that is what is happening. This is a phenomenon for which the President himself is entirely at fault. I have scant hope that he is capable of either recognizing the peril he is placing the nation in, or reforming. The President and his hand-picked loose cannons aren’t just shooting themselves in the metaphorical foot. The photo above is more accurate.

First, of course, we have the President’s own cruel, useless, gratuitous post insulting Rob Reiner after the director and his wife were murdered. Trump might as well have hit himself in the face with a cast-iron frying pan on national TV. It gave people who already hate him ammunition to say, “See?” It made moderates question his stability, self-control and character if they already didn’t, and it put his defenders in the position of defending the indefensible, thus diminishing their credibility and influence.

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This elegant Comment of the Day by CEES VAN BARNEVELDT is short by COTD standards, but I had to honor it. Yes, the comment echoes a theme that has been covered on Ethics Alarms many times, because I am an artist myself as well as a critic and connoisseur of art, and because I feel passionately that art of all kinds has an independent life from that of the artist. It is a Cognitive Dissonance Scale challenge, to be sure, when an artist’s horrible words, views, conduct or character are underwater on one’s personal CD scale and that artist’s creative output is high in positive territory. But one has to try, and try hard, to separate the two. So much of my favorite music was written by flawed, cold, even sick people. So much of the literature I love, and that has formed a great deal of my perspective on life, was authored by terrible human beings, except for that spark of brilliance. I believe with all my heart in Thomas Jefferson’s vision of America, democracy and liberty, but find his personal conduct and hypocrisy nauseating. And don’t get me started on the performing arts: to take the most prominent example, I have spent a large chunk of my life celebrating, admiring, interpreting and promoting the talents and artistic output of Danny Kaye, who was, as I discovered late in the process, a misanthropic sociopath. That did not change however, the joy he brought to millions, his delightful performances in “The Court Jester,” “Hans Christian Anderson” or “White Christmas,” or the glory of Danny’s dazzling renditions of “Tchaikovsky” or “Anatole of Paris.”

Here is CEES’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Rob Reiner’s Legacy, Part I: The Artist,” which begins with a quote from Chris Marschner’s comment:

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Also res ipsa loquitur.

There is no excuse for this and those tempted to defend it should staple their lips shut and super-glue their fingers together.

Quick points that should be obvious:

• Trump has a political death wish exemplified by his determination to make his most irrational foes look like they have a good point about his character.
• The man literally doesn’t know how a President of the United States should act, or if he does, doesn’t care, which is worse.
• His administration’s many missions are too important for him to jeopardize them with petty, ugly, breaches of decency and dignity like this, just to satisfy a personal grudge against a man who just had his throat cut by his son.
• What an asshole. 

Scumbag @BennieGThompson says the horrific attack on our two great National Guard heroes in D.C. was just an "unfortunate accident."@Sec_Noem: "You think that was an unfortunate accident!? It was a terrorist attack. He shot our National Guardsmen in the head." pic.twitter.com/O4hEDvYDuT

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) December 11, 2025

Wow. The depth of uselessness of our members of Congress apparently knows no bounds. Who the hell is “Benny Thompson” and what cabal of morons elected someone like that to the House of Representatives? Normally I would have looked for a freestanding video of that moment, but in this case the X poster’s ad hominem attack is fair and just.

This self-indicting fool has been in Congress since 1993 representaing Mississippi’s 2nd congressional district. Wikipedia says he was an “educator” after getting degrees from two “historically black” institutions, meaning, in most cases, that the degree means even less than most college degrees. Then, after undoubtedly making hundreds of young minds dumber teaching the kind of critical thinking that leads a man to call cold-blooded murder an accident, Bennie went into politics.

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I’m avoiding most Christmas music this time around, though I will still post about a few favorites that warm my heart. And I will dutifully watch the same Christmas season movie classics that I always did with my late wife, whose love of Christmas combined with our awful last version of the holiday and her shocking sudden death are three ghosts too many to bear, even after almost two years. I just posted, with wan response so far, the updated Ethics Companion to “White Christmas,” which includes one of our five commenters Michael West’s entertaining analysis of the military sequence that begins the film. [You are welcome to update or re-think any of that, MW, and I’ll add it right in.]

I’ve been appreciating Bing, Danny, Rosemary and Vera-Ellen more with each viewing recently, perhaps because I’ve been taking them for granted. As narrator Frank Sinatra says in “That’s Entertainment,” the great MGM retrospective about the Golden Age of Hollywood musicals, “You can sit around and hope, but you will never see the likes of this ever again.”

Ol’ Blue Eyes was talking about an epic dance duel between Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell, but he just as easily could have been talking about The “White Christmas” Four. Or for me, I’m afraid, a sadness-free Christmas.

But enough of that:

1. Yup, she’s a con-artist, a law-breaker and a liar: now what? The Washington Free Beacon mounts an airtight case that Minnesota “Somalia First” Rep. Omar indeed married her brother and has lied about it for years. Why don’t Democrats care about this as much as the conservative press? I thought Democrats were the party of “no one is above the law”? The rubber-stamp response to all legitimate questions about this weird story always rebounds to Omar’s original claim that the issue was just “Trump-style misogyny, racism, anti-immigration rhetoric and Islamophobic division.”

2. Meanwhile, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a GOP embarrassment in the House, has been making a farewell tour apparently aimed at annoying as many Republicans as possible: for example, she cozied up recently to the far left fanatic group “Code Pink.” She seems less interested in principles than in setting herself up to be Liz Cheney,The Sequel, though GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert suggests that her soon to be ex-colleague is flying the metaphorical coop to avoid new regulations stopping House members from trading stocks. MTG executed over 450 stock trades since joining the House and bought $3.89 million in stocks in 2024 alone. She has a better success rate than most hedge funds.

A “Victory Girls” pundit ruefully writes, “I keep thinking about the people who defended her when it wasn’t fashionable. They absorbed the ridicule and trusted that beneath the mess there was something solid. Greene repaid that trust by posing with Code Pink and then turning around to sabotage her own party on the way out.” Funny, I keep thinking how Greene proved that her supporters, when she was an obvious self-promoting Dunning-Kruger victim who had no business being in Congress, were dupes, fools, and marks. It wasn’t hard to see how unqualified and unfit she was, if bias hadn’t made them stupid.

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