1. The whole evening and its contents spun into an ethics train wreck. My favorite? Vivek Ramaswamy deliberately evoked Barack Obama’s line calling himself a “a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too,” in his 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote speech when he was running for the U.S. Senate, despite the fact that 99% of Americans had forgotten about the moment and just about as many couldn’t care less. “Who the heck is this skinny guy with a funny last name and what the heck is he doing in the middle of this debate stage?” Ramaswamy said. What the heck was he doing? Comparing oneself to Obama isn’t great strategy at a GOP debate, and Chris Christie, who is alert to such things, responded, aptly, “The last person in one of these debates … who stood in the middle of the stage and said, ‘What’s a skinny guy with an odd last name doing up here?’ was Barack Obama,” Christie said. “And I’m afraid we’re dealing with the same type of amateur.” Touche!

But perpetually embarrassing Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, attending the debate as a “Trump surrogate” thought part of her job was to emulate MSNBC race-baiters. She said, “Greene: “I was pretty disgusted by Chris Christie and his racist comment towards Vivek Ramaswamy… He compared him to Obama. I thought that was pretty racist.” She actually said that. Several things come to mind:

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I’m feeling better now, sort of, so let us dig in to the hope-suffocating debacle that was last night’s Republican candidates debate. Why debacle? Well, thanks to the complicity of Tucker Carlson, there was no way for viewers to compare any of the candidates to the front-runner who thinks it’s ethical to sit on his lead. (Certain to achieved a .400 average by sitting out a season-ending double-header in 1941, Ted Williams, as a matter of integrity, insisted on risking the historical achievement and played both games anyway, raising his average to .406.) In the harsh glare of live TV, none of the assembled did what they had to do, which was convince substantial numbers of viewers that “Hey! This option is less obnoxious than Donald Trump and would beat Joe Biden!”

As a group, the candidates failed the easiest test, when they were asked by Martha MacCallum, “Do you believe in human behavior causing climate change? Raise your hand if you do.” None of the candidates had a sufficiently articulate and knowledgeable response, and having one should be hard. DeSantis used it to grandstand (We are not schoolchildren. Let’s have the debate…”) and then ducked the question. Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, meanwhile, ducked the question ANd fled into Fantasyland, saying, “First of all, we do care about clean air, clean water. We want to see that taken care of, but there is a right way to do it. The right way is first of all, yes, is climate change real? Yes, it is. But if you want to go and really change the environment, we need to start telling China and India that they have to lower their emissions.”

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This headline: “In Trump cases, experts say defendant’s rhetoric will be hard to police.”
No news organization where the ethics alarms ring beyond the janatorial staff would allow that to go out into the world unless it was confident that a totalitarian regime would soom be handing out favors.

Wrote Ann Althouse, in one of her better distillations of an ethics issue: “Rhetoric should be hard to police.” Funny, that creature of the First Amendment, the Washington Post, think it’s a problem, writing, “Advisers say the Trump campaign sees a benefit in him testing boundaries by publicly attacking judges and prosecutors — either he gets away with it, or he gets to play the victim for being censored by the courts.”

Ann’s reaction, in my terms, is “Good!” She comments, “It’s a great free-speech safeguard that restrictions on free speech generate the argument that there’s a violation of free speech. Those whose freedom of speech is violated should “play the victim.” If you don’t like your opponents “playing the victim,” one option is not to victimize them.”

Whatever sadistic god decided to make a repulsive creep like Donald Trump the target of the most ominous and dangerous attack on the democratic system and the Constitution in our history has a lot of explaining to do. It is essentially impossible to feel sorry for Trump, but fair and civically responsible citizens must rally to his side while condemning the mob pursuing him, at least on principle. It literally doesn’t matter whether Trump is a jerk, a secret cannibal or Jack the Ripper come to the 21st Century in H.G. Wells’ time machine. If we let the corrupt Democratic totalitarians silence and punish him to clear the field for what’s left of Joe Biden, nobody is safe. There has to be some way to punish the Left without letting a vicious, unaccountable creep sit in the place of Washington, Lincoln, FDR and Reagan.

Isn’t there? Please?

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Boy, who do you root for in a face-off like this?

Meta Platforms—that’s Facebook and Instagram— ended access to news on Facebook and Instagram for all users in Canada earlier this month in opposition to a new law requiring internet companies to pay news publishers. The Online News Act was passed by the Canadian parliament to force platforms like Google parent Alphabet and Meta to negotiate commercial deals with Canadian news publishers (including the government) for news content. Part of a global trend to make tech firms pay for news, both Meta and Google told Canada in June they would block access to news on their platforms in the country if the law wasn’t changed.

“News outlets voluntarily share content on Facebook and Instagram to expand their audiences and help their bottom line,” Rachel Curran, Meta’s head of public policy in Canada, said in a public statement. But, she said, “people using our platforms don’t come to us for news.”

Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge responded,”This is irresponsible. They would rather block their users from accessing good quality and local news instead of paying their fair share to news organizations. We’re going to keep standing our ground. After all, if the Government can’t stand up for Canadians against tech giants, who will?”

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