Another week, another wave of hypocritical, “Yikes, Trump is President!” freakouts. In addition to the weekend’s “No Kings” children’s theater, Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley (Guess which party!) grabbed the Senate floor on Tuesday to “ring the alarm” on President Donald Trump’s “tightening authoritarian grip on the country.” Then he blabbed on for 23 hours, the second-longest speech in Senate history, and said absolutely nothing new, original, that didn’t ape old, old Axis talking points, or the wasn’t pure projection.

Let’s see: Merkley accused the Trump administration of undermining checks and balances, attacking free speech (funny, coming from a Democrat), attacking the press (they aren’t attacked enough), “politicizing the Justice Department,” (VERY funny coming from a Democrat) and using the military to suppress dissent, which only makes sense if you define defying federal law and attacking law enforcement officers as “dissent.” He made the familiar, apparently opinion research-tested claim that this President isn’t “normal” (having studied all of these guys rather extensively, I have no idea what a normal President is or would be. Every one is absolutely unique.)

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I’ve been getting snarky emails and proposed comments chiding me for frequently misspelling “Charlie,” as in Charlie Kirk, as “Charley.” “Why do you keep doing that?” asks one.

Why? I do it because…

1. I write the blog in my “spare time,” of which I have none, and try to cover as much of the ethics landscape as I can to advance the mission of this blog and my profession as an ethicist…

2. I am often rushed and pressed for time, as this pursuit takes me conservatively 3-4 hours every day for which I am not compensated, at least monetarily….

3. I’ve always made a lot of typos because I can’t type, though I do a better job proofing than I used to…

4. I grew up with an Uncle Charley, who not only spelled his name that way but who also objected to the “-ie” version, so “Charlie” has always looked wrong to me…

5. Names with multiple spellings bedevil me and always have. Don’t get me started on “Stephen/Steven,” “Sara/Sarah” or “Madeline/Madeleine/Madelyn/Madalyn/Madelynn/Madilyn” (if that’s your name and I spell it right, I assure you that it’s an accident).

I want to get these details right, but readers who nit-pick on the irrelevant “gotchas” are not being constructive, and as in the case of the #1 Ethics Alarms troll, often are simply assholes. When they try writing 2000-2500 words a day of original commentary for 15 years while trying to keep a challenging business running with a dead partner, no staff and an often troubled family healthy and happy, I’ll take their critiques of my typing more seriously.

Until then, my response is a vociferous “Bite me.”

I know I keep complaining about this, but I continue to be depressed and shocked at how many people I admire and respect are taking to social media to virtue-signal—as if sounding like an ignorant fool is ever virtuous—about participating in the weekend’s beyond moronic No Kings rallies. The ones who most disappoint me are the lawyers. If you boil down what little of substance there is in the bill of particulars offered by these lobotomized citizens, the residue at the bottom of the pan is “we think law enforcement is cruel.” Really? Gee, my definition of “cruel” is letting poor, desperate, ignorant people over the border in defiance of our laws while giving them the impression that it’s okay and there will never be any negative consequences as long as they keep their heads down, work for pathetic wages at menial jobs and don’t rape anyone (and heck, maybe even if they do.) These people were lied to when Joe Biden and the Democrats said, “Come on over! You’re welcome!” The Democrats really thought that with their weaponizing of the justice system against political opponents and undermining election integrity, there would never again be an administration that didn’t want the country flooded with illegals. They also thought, with some justification, that the gates had been flung open for so long that an illegal immigration crackdown and reckoning would be logistically and politically impossible. As for that miscalculation, I call on Nelson Muntz to say…

Assholes.

I did love the White House comment when asked about the demonstrations. “Who cares?” But I do care. I care that so many of my friends are leaking IQ points out their ears….

Meanwhile…

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I don’t understand this at all.

What’s going on here? Democrats just went through one of the worst public relations weeks (Imagine: this was one of the least of their embarrassments!) for their party imaginable. President Trump shined on the world stage. GOP candidates for governor in both Virginia and New Jersey were surging. So Republicans decide to say “Hold my beer!” and let their inner Nazis and racists frolic? What the hell?

The first incident is the most confounding. An image captured by Zoom in the background of a virtual meeting in the Congressional office of Rep. Dave Taylor (R-Ohio) showed the cubical wall below…

…with an altered American flag with a Nazi swastika in the stripes. Alongside the flag are pinned images of a pocket Constitution and a congressional calendar. Taylor, seemingly caught Heil-handed, naturally condemned the symbol as “vile” and said his office was investigating with the U.S. Capitol Police. “I am aware of an image that appears to depict a vile and deeply inappropriate symbol near an employee in my office,” he said in a statement. “The content of that image does not reflect the values or standards of this office, my staff or myself, and I condemn it in the strongest terms.”

Taylor called the flag “vandalism.” I call him an untrustworthy idiot if he isn’t a Nazi, and he needs to resign and then be stuffed into a barrel with fat Lithuanian midgets*, never to see the light of day again. This couldn’t happen if he didn’t have the management ability of the average dairy cow. Who has he hired to be on his staff? Were candidates screened so that anyone with an IQ over 70 was automatically disqualified? A. Someone puts that Nazi thing up. B. Nobody does anything about it. C. It’s visible to a third party during a Zoom call! This is res ipsa loquitur in throbbing neon lights. Taylor is responsible, there is no excuse for it, and however it happened, he should be jettisoned and back to Ohio, because it’s illegal to shoot him and too messy to have him tarred and feathered.

But wait…there’s more! The day before, Politico revealed these…

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A nice but naive (and Democrat) Facebook Friend posted the cover above, which Time says is slated for November, writing, “This is how you get to be an “enemy of the people” and musing that the motive behind Time publishing such an unflattering image was “puzzling.” Bless his heart! The motive isn’t puzzling at all, and it is why Time and the rest of the Axis propagandists are “enemies of the people.” Even after this President’s unequivocal triumph in getting Israel and Gaza to agree on something at least resembling a peace treaty, TIME had to find a way to slap at Trump in the process of reporting it.

The photo is ugly and makes Trump look ugly. It emphasizes age, and doesn’t even look like him. An equivalent photograph of Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama, capturing every sag, wattle and wrinkle, would be condemned as sexist. Deliberately using unflattering photos is one of the oldest and most juvenile of media bias techniques. Regular readers here may recall the Ethics Alarms mea culpa for using so many terrible photos of Hillary Clinton, who had a lot of them…

and my pledge to stop doing it, which I did (until just now). The only President who approached Trump in having his worst looks gleefully circulated by the press was Richard Nixon, and even he never was subjected to a cover shot like that.

Naturally, the President, who cannot control himself—not a good quality in a President—and apparently has never heard of the Streisand Effect had to complain about the cover on Truth Social, guaranteeing that the headlines will be about Trump’s vanity, making certain that 10 times more people see the thing, and letting the despicable TIME editors pat themselves on their backs for a cover that will, at least briefly, make the dying magazine relevant again.

The cover is mean-spirited, unfair, disrespectful, and indefensible, except to Trump-Haters who will react by saying that he deserves it.