1. Ethics Alarms gets to criticize “Let’s go, Brandon” as an uncivil, gutter taunt that should not be wielded against the President of the United States. CNN doesn’t. This appears to have become ethics estoppel day, with EA noting the absurdity of mainstream media journalists like Greg Sargent and and Rachel Maddow whining about Fox News providing aid to Republican candidates. The same principle should mute CNN hypocrites like John Berman and Briana Keilar tut-tutting over the coded “Fuck Joe Biden” chant. CNN was silent when Congresswoman and “Squad” member Rashida Tlaib called President Trump a “motherfucker,” didn’t find it newsworthy when Robert de Niro used similar language before celebrity audiences in multiple venues, and didn’t express worries about the state of political discourse when Kathy Griffin posed with a model of Trump’s severed head. Now, however, they are offended because”their” President is the target. Journalists aren’t supposed to consider one President as more “theirs” than another, and the same principles of respect and civility should apply to each POTUS equally.

2. Speaking of civility, during a Supreme Court argument yesterday, the issue was whether elected bodies can censure their members for incivility or other inappropriate rhetoric or expressive speech without violating the First Amendment.Are censures, which are formal reprimands and a kind of punishment, a form of free speech or a threat to it? The case was brought by David Wilson, a former elected trustee of the Houston Community College System. Wilson sued the system’s board, orchestrated robocalls and hired private investigators to look into whether another trustee had lied about where she lived. In 2018, Wilson’s fellow board members had enough of his criticism and censured him. “The board finds that Mr. Wilson’s conduct was not only inappropriate, but reprehensible, and such conduct warrants disciplinary action,” the resolution said. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit allowed the case to proceed, ruling last year that punishing an elected official for his speech might breach the Constitution.

Stay tuned.

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Additional Observations (Part I is here):

1. Is there any more useless and dishonest profession than professional political polling? 538 came closest to predicting the actual margin between Youngkin and McAuliffe going into yesterday, but only because it included Fox News’ outlier poll showing Youngkin 8 points ahead. Even then, the margin was 100% larger than 538’s average, 2% over .9%. Fox’s shocking call emerged after several conservative pundits complained that the network’s past polling always over-counted progressives….a coincience, I’m sure. I knew that Youngkin was going to win by the desperate way McAuliffe was campaigning in the last two weeks, with flagrant lies, shrill ads and an absurd obsession with Trump. Youngkin, meanwhile, looked and sounded like a candidate who was getting good news from the field. Internal polling is intelligence and tends to be more accurate, but the stuff the newspapers and TV shows publicize are shot through with bias and hidden agendas–Will this get more of “our” voters to the polls? Will this discourage the deplorables?

2. Hanlon’s Razor alert. Answering questions from reporters at the climate change summit, President Biden actually said that he saw nothing suggesting that “how I’m doing” would have any effect on how his party’s candidates fared at the polls. Was he lying, or have his IQ points dropped into single digits? Nah, those soaring gas prices, inflation, mask mandates, and supply chain interruptions overseen by a proud daddy who left his post, and all the Americans left to fend for themselves against the Taliban didn’t influence voters! Why wouldn’t they vote in more members of the same party responsible for it all?

3. The talking point that Critical Race Theory is a myth and isn’t taught in the public schools is such an audacious and insulting lie when the evidence to the contrary is everywhere. The “1619 Project” is taught in schools all over the country, and is rooted in critical race theory ideology. On the Virginia Department of Education website, “Critical Race Theory in Education” is highlighted as a “best practice” and the site’s definitions of “racism,” “white supremacy,” and “education equity” are derived from CRT. Outgoing Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s public education officials openly endorsed the anti-white, “Racist America” theory as an “important analytic tool” to “further spur developments in education.” Yet McAuliffe claimed in the last days of the campaign that CRT was just a “racist dog whistle” used to panic those bigoted Republican voters.

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Last night, a Republican no one ever heard of a year ago won the right to occupy the Governor’s Mansion in Virginia, which Joe Biden had won by 10 percentage points less than a year ago. A Democratic incumbent governor generally assumed to be a shoo-in for re-election in New Jersey until recently was trailing his Republican challenger in a race too close to call. Back to “Ol’ Virginy,” Republicans also took the Lt. Governor and Attorney General slots. Minneapolis’s referendum seeking to replace the police department with an Orwellian “Department of Public Safety” was soundly defeated.

Good. The Democrats were begging for a rebuke like this, and they got it. A better example of what George Will, back when I respected him, called “condign justice” could hardly be imagined. More ominous still for Joe Biden’s party, it is difficult to see how the carnage of last night doesn’t make an epic wipe-out in the 2022 mid-terms in 2022 a near certainty, except that Republicans are fully capable of lousing up a sure thing.

While all this was going on, those objective, professional, unbiased analysts on MSNBC, CNN and just about everywhere else but the jubilant Fox News were freaking out; presumably the pundits and reporters in the Post and the Times will be emulating them. They were all complicit in the Democratic wipe-out, refusing to report just how bad the Biden Presidency has been for the first ten months (with the occasional exception, like the Afghanistan debacle), continuing to bash Donald Trump as if he was still tweeting, and generally insulting any American who wasn’t ready to do their his or her impression of Winston Smith.

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Two hours ago, Colleen Long of the AP issued the scoop that she had solved the puzzle of where “Let’s Go Brandon!” came from. It is October 30. On October 4, Ethics Alarms informed its readers,

“After NASCAR driver Brandon Brown won at the Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama over the weekend, NBC Sports reporter Kelli Stavast tried to interview him while fans were loudly chanting, “Fuck Joe Biden!” in the background. Like the loyal state media hack she is, Kelli did her best to obscure reality from the TV audience, saying to the racer, “As you can hear the chants from the crowd, ‘Let’s go Brandon!’” Nice try.”

Today, the Associate Press piece asks, “But how did Republicans settle on the Brandon phrase as a G-rated substitute for its more vulgar three-word cousin?” It’s a mystery! But readers can trust crack investigative reporters like Long to get to the bottom of it: “It started at an Oct. 2 NASCAR race at the Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama. Brandon Brown…” she writes, and then tells the same story anyone could read here 26 days ago. American Thinker reported it the day before I did, but that’s a conservative site, so anything it reports doesn’t count, and the mainstream media does its readers a favor by using their own wits and industry.

It takes a little longer to get to the truth, but it’s worth it!

Well, I feel like scum and I am scum. Today is my younger sister’s birthday, and I whiffed, even though we had talked earlier this week about me taking her out to dinner. I never forget her birthday—everyone else’s, but never hers, because it’s the day before Halloween. Not only did I disappoint her, but she’s in a house with no TV or internet after a big storm here. Now she doesn’t want to do anything. It was just a terrible, disrupting week on too many fronts to count, and I lost track of times, dates, and space. I’m working all weekend, and worked late into the night the last two days, but that’s no excuse. I can’t believe I did it. Both my son and wife refuse to celebrate their birthdays for philosophical reasons, and I haven’t wanted to think about mine since my father dropped dead on the date in 2009. But my sister really needed some attention this year, and I failed her.

1. What describes this situation? “Live by the sword, die by the sword”? “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones”? “Assholes gotta asshole”? Ashlee Marie Preston, the transgender activist who was among the leaders of the protests against Dave Chappelle for his routines on “The Closer” about trans people, and who helped trigger the protest at Netflix, was subjected to a deep Twitter dive, and guess what? She has tweeted nasty things about Asians and Hispanics. Like, for example, “Asian hoes act like they wont get karate chopped in they muthafuckin throat. What is this hoe staring at? Mind ya beeswax #Bitch”. Now, I could not possibly care less about the opinions of any activist about anything who expresses themselves like that, but apparently some people are calling Preston a hypocrite. No, she appears to be pretty typical: an trans African American who is offended when anyone jokes about her own “tribes” but who feels perfectly justified in denigrating groups she doesn’t belong to. It’s exactly like Democrats, progressives and their media allies in the Axis of Unethical Conduct having the gall to complain about the “Let’s go Brandon!” gag after denigrating President Trump without restraint for four years.

2. The contrived offense that refuses to die. Ugh, THIS again. The Atlanta Braves are in the World Series, so now the nation has to watch Atlanta fans go through their idiotic ritual of miming a tomahawk chop while they sing a fake, generic Indian war chant. Now, it’s no more idiotic than “the Wave,” or chanting “Yankees suck!,” but political correctness activists have been calling such silliness “racist” for as long as they have been trying to eliminate Native American-inspired team names, mascots, and logos. See, there are two objectives: move up the power hierarchy by making others do what they want even in an area they don’t care about, and make sure American culture has no references to Native Americans at all. I’m not sure why Native Americans would want that, but these activists seem to think so.

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I’ve never done this before and may never do it again; nor am I lacking candidates for Comment of the Day among the recent posts here. However, this comment by Althouse reader “This Person” was so gloriously to the point that I couldn’t resist.

Ann is accepting comments again after a brief interruption following her ill-considered tantrum over people paying more attention to commenters than her, or something. The Comment of the Day is, as regular readers here will immediately see, about the Ethics Alarms Rationalization #64, “Yoo’s Rationalization,” or “It isn’t what it is.” This has become the operating principle of the Democratic Party as it has forsworn accountability among its leaders and embraced the Big Lie tactic as enthusiastically and destructively as…anybody in history.

What clinched the COTD prize for This Person was his perceptive focus on Barack Obama as the most forceful instigator of this now routine party reflex. (Do note that #64 is named after the Republican lawyer who argued that waterboarding wasn’t technically torture. Both parties have used Yoo’s Rationalization, but only Democrats (so far) have become addicted to it.)

Here is This Person’s Comment of the Day on this Althouse post.

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