It is hard to imagine what kind of deranged arguments, claims, accusations and theories Democrats and the news media will resort to over the next few days. The exhibition could be mordantly amusing, and it could be scary. I can say, however, that based on what I saw channel-surfing while suffering from insomnia at the Boar’s Head Inn and Resort in Charlottesville last night and this morning, no political party has ever sunk so low, or so vividly revealed to anyone capable of paying attention that it regards ethics as a disposable commodity. The main rationalization, after “It isn’t what it is,” of course (Crime? What crime? Inflation? What’s that?) is # 31. The Troublesome Luxury, or “Ethics is a luxury we can’t afford right now.”
Late start today; just got back home after a 2.5 hour drive from Charlottesville (where there a lot of fine people) after an early morning ethics CLE presentation for the Virginia Bar.
That hilarious screen shot from the same MSNBC session that gave historian Michael Beschloss a platform to claim that Republicans are planning on arresting and killing children is too rich to pas up. What a great sanctimonious, “I’ve been warning” you scowl from Rachel Maddow’s protege, Chris Hayes. I wonder if that deadline to save America is as reliable as Al Gore’s and Greta Thunberg’s deadlines to save the world? How did people this ludicrous get in a position of influence?
But I digress. The simple matter of questioning the eminently questionable Joe Biden won the 2020 election has been somehow blown into some kind of apocalyptic phobia by the Axis of Unethical Conduct, and “election denier” has become almost as ubiquitous and versatile smear as “racist.” Here’s CBS’s “criteria” for labeling someone currently running as an “election denier.”
Democrats questioned the legitimacy of Bush’s two elections and Trump’s, and in Trump’s case, many of them never conceded that Trump was elected at all (they don’t think the Electoral College is legitimate). But you can question the legitimacy of an election and still accept the fact that the candidate was elected, just as one can question the legitimacy of a baseball game decided by an umpire’s bad call (Game 3 of the 1975 World series comes to mind, for some reason), but accept the fact that the game is over and the luckier team won. Continue reading →
Is it racist to expect people who provide communications-related services in the US. to speak competent and understandable English? We have been harassed in recent weeks by one unsolicited phone call after another offering guidance on health insurance matters during the current enrollment period. A particularly incomprehensible barely English-speaking agent called my wife today, who had to keep asking her to repeat what the woman was trying to say. She finally said that she was “a socialist.” We presume she meant a “social worker.” Grace replied, tartly, that she might want to look up “socialist” before she told any other people that’s what she was. Then she said, “good-bye.”
“[A] historian 50 years from now – if historians are allowed to write in this country and if they are still free publishing houses and a free press – which I’m not certain of – but if that is true, a historian will say what was at stake tonight and this week was the fact whether we will be a democracy in the future, whether our children will be arrested and conceivably killed.”
What happened to this guy? He really used to be a respectable Presidential historian; I’ve read, and enjoyed, some of his books, like “Eisenhower: A Centennial Life” (1990) and “The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960–1963” (1991). Then somewhere before 2016 he snapped like Larry Tribe, or bias made him stupid, or something. He was the “expert” who said Hillary lost to Trump because parties almost never hold the White House three terms in a row, which is non-historical offal more worthy of an uneducated dolt like Bette Midler. His statement from last night is even worse, and an abuse of his reputation and position. No one can trust the analysis of a historian who defaults to partisan hysteria. As Thomas More might say, “But Michael, it profits a man nothing to gain the whole world if he should lose his soul… but for MSNBC?”
Here’s proof on how far Beschloss has sunk: He essentially channeled Rob Reiner:
To that, Federalist editor Molly Hemingway replied, “This type of rhetoric seems more like an IQ test than political persuasion. Like, how stupid does a grown adult have to be to find this type of argument compelling?” Well, as stupid as an acclaimed Presidential scholar, I guess… [Pointer: Chris Marschner]Continue reading →
Oh, gee, I guess by using the old folk song “If I had a hammer”to suggest that the Democrats are wildly and absurdly exploiting a lunatic’s one-off hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband as a life-preserver while a metaphoric drowning in a red sea next week looms,I have joined a “brutal mob.”
That’s the sentiment of The Atlantic, which bloviates, “Laughing over a hammer attack on an old man, the GOP has completed its transition from a political party to a brutal mob.”Meanwhile, according to the New York Times, mockery of the Democrats’ obsession with the attack as if it has any larger significance at all (the party hacks surely aren’t interested in the crime-ridden cesspool their policies have created in San Francisco, where mentally ill vagrants like Pelosi’s attacker roam and play like the deer and the antelope), means I am simpatico with Republicans “who conclude that, like Mr. Trump, they will pay no political price for attacks on their opponents, however meanspirited, inflammatory or false.”
Wow. That accusation takes a lot of chutzpah after six years of daily “meanspirited, inflammatory or false” attacks on Donald Trump, his wife, his children, his staff and his supporters, culminating in a “democratic norm” shattering prime-time TV speech by a Democratic President labeling Trump’s supporters as clear and present dangers to democracy,
“Inflammatory attack? What inflammatory attack?”
They can all bite me. I’m not accepting any part of such criticism from Democrats and their mainstream media mouthpieces for calling their framing of the weird Pelosi episode exactly what it is: cynical, dishonest, and frantic.That was the point, a fair and valid one, of my use of the song. (“Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” was runner-up), The Left’s silly game is to force everyone to express horror and condemnation over this episode, while thousands of attacks on Americans take place every day. They think such compelled groveling will symbolize acceptance of their ludicrous theory that harsh (but deserved) criticism of Pelosi’s wife caused the attack, so such criticism itself must cease. I see that my friend U.S. Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger felt he had to issue a statement toeing that line. Well, Tom works for Pelosi, I don’t, and I also don’t tolerate double standards and narratives that require me to hammer my own brain into submission.I’m on to this desperation ruse—not that it’s hard to figure out—and I refuse to treat it with respect when ridicule is what it warrants.
1. When in doubt, lie, I guess. I don’t get to vote in the newly drawn 7th Congressional District in Virginia, but if I were voting in the close race between incumbent Democratic U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger and her Republican challenger Yesli Vega, the most recent Spanberger attack ad would settle the issue. A spokesperson for Spanberger who says he is a veteran cop says he is disgusted that Vega has “defended criminals,” meaning the January 6 rioters, and goes on to say that 140 officers were injured in the riot—he gets a point or two for not saying “insurrection”—and “five died.” That statement is an outright lie, and one that has been debunked over and over again. No officers died during the riot. Five died in the days and months after the riot, but none of the deaths were connected with injuries sustained on January 6. This is a particularly egregious Big Lie, one that has been advanced in part by President Biden among others. The Democratic Party’s super-PAC, House Majority Pac, is responsible for the ad.
I know Geena has already appeared here recently, but Americans really should be afraid of this story out of Fairfax, Virginia, and be especially afraid as they consider how long such sinister brain-washing of our young has been going on. The incident has a lot more relevance to the elections next week than an isolated attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, which has none. If we had a responsible journalistic establishment in the country any more, there would be an uproar over such strategies aimed at public school students. As it is, only Fox News has bothered to cover the story at all, and not very well at that.
Fifth graders were assigned the task of critiquing an anti-gun, anti-Second Amendment, anti-NRA essay as part of a persuasive writing fifth-grade unit from the teachers’ aide, “Units of Study in Opinion, Information, and Narrative Writing.” The screed is a fake child’s essay, obviously written by an adult. The clear purpose of the exercise is not to develop critical thinking skills but rather to embed anti-gun beliefs in children too young to evaluate and resist them. Here is the essay:
The ultimate take-away from the madness surrounding the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband is this: if Democrats and their media allies are devoting this much spin and energy into making it into an “October surprise,” they have reached peak desperation. To repeat myself from yesterday, who otherwise inclined to vote for a Republican would change his or her vote based on the “The evil, fascist Republicans who want to destroy democracy caused the violent attack by a whack-job on Nancy Pelosi’s husband with their hateful rhetoric and must be stopped by any means necessary” narrative? I can’t believe there is anyone in that category. I can easily believe, however, that some independent on the metaphorical fence might be prompted to conclude, “Wow, these people have lost their friggin’ minds. I don’t want to have anything to do with them.” Or, as King Arthur would say,
I have no idea if the various scandalous theories about the Paul Pelosi beating have any truth in them, but I will say this: the Democrats and members of the media that immediately leaped to the Gabby Giffords replay that Republican rhetoric seeded the attack richly deserve to be humiliated, which they will be if the incident turns out to be a gay hook-up gone wrong. The Axis immediately defaulted to exploiting the incident before they had the facts—if they are settled, I haven’t seen them— and now there at least appears to be some chance that the whole thing was misrepresented. The key takeaways ethically are 1) leaping to use the attack as a political weapon was indefensible and 2) if we had ethical journalists, reporters from major outlets would be digging to find the facts. Right now, it is only the fringes of the conservative media and blogosphere that even appears curious. Why did Paul Pelosi refer to his attacker as “a friend”? Why wasn’t there evidence of a break-in? Is there security footage, and what does it show? Glenn Greenwald tweeted, “Many journalists see the glaring questions and evidentiary holes in the Paul Pelosi narrative. But they also know how important that narrative is to Dems right before the mid-terms. So why stick their heads up, provoke a liberal Twitter mob, and be branded? That’s the climate.”
Well, it’s an unethical climate.
1. How hard should we be on Eric Burton? The Texas native and the founding member of The Black Pumas took the field at Minute Maid Park to start off Game #1 of the World Series with his rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and botched the lyrics. This has happened to many more prominent singers before, most famously Robert Goulet, in a performance he was mocked for until the end of his career. Having botched lyrics I know cold in a public performance myself (more than once, in fact), I am inclined to be kind and forgiving, but his rendition was also pitchy, and just didn’t sound very good. To my ear, it seemed that he was more interested in showing off his voice and riffs than actually doing the song justice, and that song deserves respect.
Wow. The news media and Democrats are really going all in in trying to use a sick maniac’s attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband as a campaign issue. Again, desperate, and as usual, stupid. The theory is that this can be a tipping point, except that it will take more than the usual mainstream media selective obfuscation of facts to make it even fly as high or as far as the Spruce Goose. Pelosi’s attacker was and is a long-time wacko. There is as much in his rants and beliefs to link him to either side of the political spectrum. The Left has had an absurd amount of success blowing up single incidents into generalizations (See: Trayvon Martin; George Floyd; the Capitol riot) but this is lame. Naturally we’re getting the “prove you don’t approve by condemning it!” tactic aimed at Republicans, a trick that somehow never is dusted off and employed when Republican, conservatives or their family members are attacked. I’m not surprised that Trump hasn’t issued some pro forma expression of sympathy or condemnation. He should, of course, but Nancy Pelosi has treated him with more disrespect than any House Speaker ever treated a President, and graciousness is not in his vocabulary. I just hope he avoids saying, “Good!”
The current narrative that Republicans have used hateful rhetoric against Democrats while Democrats have not equaled or surpassed them in pure viciousness is so transparently a lie that even Democrats can’t believe it. The President called Republicans fascists and a clear and present danger to democracy just a month ago! Never mind, though: they have nothing better now. Any voter who is going to hear and read this garbage and think, “Gee, I better vote for Democrats because a mentally-ill Canadian attacked the husband of the Speaker of the House with a hammer” is so incompetent that his or her votes could probably be bought by a promise of Twizzlers. Friends of the party and its media propagandists would be kind to whisper, “Just stop. You’re embarrassing yourselves.”
1. What should one make of this? Trans comedian Jordan Gray, on the UK comedy show“Friday Night Live,” ripped off his clothing, and, naked, began to play his keyboard with his erect penis while singing his song “Better Than You.” It’s lyrics included, “I’m a perfect woman, my tits will never shrink. I’m guaranteed to squirt, and I do anal by default … I am the lizard king, and I can do anything that any other woman can’t … I used to be a man, now I’m better than you.” We are told that the audience was delighted, but the misogynist lyrics have feminists up in arms.
Two words: Freak show. That’s all: this is in the same category as Joseph Pujol, better known by his stage name Le Pétomane, who entertained vaudeville audiences by farting out melodies. If trans individual wanted to be regarded as better than circus acts, freaks of nature and exhibitionists, they need to avoid behaving like this. It seriously undercuts their claims of being normal, respectable members of society. [Pointer: Mrs. Q]
In a related category is this jaw-dropping video, which was released on Disney Plus last year but is only being widely discussed now:
Ethics Alarms 
