The recent revelations in Ethics Villain Jake Tapper’s “Original Sin” exposé of how Joe Biden’s Presidency was a deceptive charade, with a POTUS how frequently and increasingly “had moments of incoherence, of a stark inability to communicate or recognize people or recall important facts.” I found myself wondering if the final installment of the long Ethics Alarms series “The Worst President Ever” needed an major update. After all, the last chapter, #7, declared Joe Biden the upset winner over Woodrow Wilson on January 12, 2025, before Donald Trump took office, before “Biden’s” series of last minute attempts to throw obstacles in the new President’s path, the prospective pardons, and the revelation that Biden was not only keeping his dementia secret (well, as secret as possible…) but was also deceiving the public regarding his physical health, having been diagnosed at some point—a year before he left office? Two years?—with prostate cancer.
U.S. Society
End of May Ethics Inventory, 5/31/25
Nice. A pro-Hamas, pro-Palestine student who was the chosen MIT Commencement speaker this week changed her approved speech to condemn Israel for “genocide,” the current code-word favored by anti-Semites to mean “Jews aren’t allowed to defend themselves.” All the Jewish families as well as the Israeli students walked out of the ceremony in protest. Megha M. Vemuri, the speaker and president of the Class of 2025, was banned by the school from attending the later undergraduate ceremony, an MIT spokesperson told Fox. “MIT supports free expression but stands by its decision, which was in response to the individual deliberately and repeatedly misleading Commencement organizers and leading a protest from the stage, disrupting an important Institute ceremony,” the university said in a statement.
MIT has no one to blame but itself. It has encouraged anti-Semitism on campus (like Harvard and other schools) and teaches its more suggestible students to embrace “intersectionality,” in which Palestinians are equated with “oppressed” minorities, and Jews with “racist whites.”
Meanwhile:
1. Loretta Swit died. She was a minor star who made her name and fame playing the character in “M*A*S*H” that Sally Kellerman had created in the hit Robert Altman movie in the long-running TV adaptation. (The TV show got Swit a lifetime sinecure guest starring on shows like “The Love Boat” and “Murder She Wrote” for the remainder of her career.). The character’s name was “Hot-Lips Houlihan, and because the New York Times cannot stop injecting leftist sentiments and propaganda into every corner of the paper, it wrote in Swit’s obituary,
This is garbage, and it makes me wonder if the writer saw the film. The character was nicknamed “Hot Lips” because a supposedly secret sexual adventure she enjoyed with her obnoxious lover (and ranking superior) Major Burns, had been inadvertently broadcast over the outpost public address system. Margaret Houlihan had been caught saying, “Kiss my hot lips!” and the name stuck. Since “Hot Lips” nicknamed herself, the moniker could hardly be called sexist, but political correctness still reigns at the Times. The movie “M*A*S*H” was about sexual hi-jinks among the doctors and nurses far more extreme than in the moralistic and sometimes oppressively liberal TV version. Writes Ed Driscoll on Instapundit regarding the 1967 hit, “The Times in 2025 looks back at the collective writing, directing and producing efforts of Richard Hooker, Ring Lardner Jr., Robert Altman and Larry Gelbart and concludes “That’s not funny.”
Let Us Call the George Floyd Freakout What It Was
…a cynical, dishonest, politically-motivated exploitation of an otherwise meaningless arrest gone wrong, fueled by a Machiavellian party, irresponsible journalism, and a biased justice system. The ethics train wreck was a disaster for race relations, law enforcement, and the nation as a whole.
I would typically say “Good job, everybody!” at this juncture, except I refuse to take any blame for this one. I saw Black Lives Matter for what it was from the beginning, and identified the phoniness of the George Floyd riots immediately. Too bad so few people read Ethics Alarms.
There should be accountability, but there won’t be.
Observations On Jake Tapper’s Epiphany and Related Matters…
1. Greenwald is right. This sudden “realization” by Tapper is massively dishonest and part of the ridiculous “We were duped!” narrative by the Axis media. I knew that the White House, Karine, and Tapper himself were all lying. For this Ethics Villain to now declare, “Eureka! I’ve got it! We can’t trust Democrats OR Republicans!” is a) pathetic, b) desperate, c) insulting.
2. Rep. Jasmine Crocket—oh please, please PLEASE nominate her to run for President, Democrats!—decided to try the now-familiar Axis device of accusing Trump and the Republicans of what her party is guilty of. She’s saying that Republicans are ignoring Trump’s cognitive decline. My Trump Deranged sister actually believes that, in part because the Left thinks not supporting socialism, open borders, anti-white discrimination in hiring, trans athletes clobbering women in sporting competitions and Politburo-style executive branch government is crazy.
3. In a similar example of pretzel Axis”logic,” now White House aides and others are arguing that the vegetable President cover-up was justified to try to stop Trump from “destroying democracy.” This is akin to the infamous Nixon-era line regarding the Vietnam war: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” How dumb does someone have to be to accept this rationalization?
4. This…
Scott Pelley has long been the most openly biased and partisan of the “60 Minutes” team (well, he and Leslie Stahl), and his speech is an instant “It isn’t what it is” classic. His arrogance and fury reveals a destructive, untrustworthy profession beginning to realize that the jig is truly up: they have betrayed their nation and its ideals, and nearly everyone knows it, or as President Trump so wisely observed, our journalists are indeed “enemies of the people.” It is rumored that Pelley is likely to be dumped at CBS: Good.
5. Why does the media keep using “alleged” and “allegedly” to modify descriptions of events that occurred right in front of us? CBS “allegedly” edited the Harris interview so she would seem like less of an idiot to voters? We know they did: the transcript proves it. The White House, Democrats and journalists “allegedly” lied about Biden’s cognitive crash? It is “alleged” that others were making Presidential decisions during Biden’s wreck of a Presidency?
Miss Vito?
Ethics Quiz: Harvard’s International Students
I know I’m revealing my own reaction, contrary to EA quiz protocol, but this story calls for Major Tipton:
Accompanying the hand-wringing and progressive head explosions over the Trump Administration’s various demands on Harvard University and its threatened sanctions (including blocking Harvard’s ability to enroll—and get money from—international students), was the stunning information that 6,800 international students attended Harvard College in the 2024-25 school year, which is about 27% of the student body! This, according to university enrollment data. That figure is an increase from 19.7 percent in 2010-11.
Wait: almost 30% of the slots at the U.S’s most prestigious and (supposedly) best college, with resulting diplomas that are virtual golden tickets to success, riches and happiness (or so the legend goes) don’t go to Americans?
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day this Memorial Day is…
How the Hell is this fair, civically responsible, prudent, reasonable or justifiable?
Still More Evidence of the Biden Dementia Cover-up
Jon Stewart’s podcast “The Weekly Show” podcast featured former Obama speechwriter and current “Pod Save America” co-host Jon Lovett, who used the show to admit what should cause the Democratic Party and its supporters to apologize, throw themselves on the mercy of voters and engage in a sweeping ethics reform since, you know, the party betrayed America. (It won’t, though, so it’s futile even to hope for that appropriate response.)
During a discussion of Biden’s fitness for office, Lovett spat out too many inarticulate “Unethical Quotes of the Week” to clean up, collect and enumerate, but the meaning was damning anyway. He recalled how Biden appeared in April 2024: “He was rambling, and he was hard to follow, and he repeated a story.”
“And, you know, I— I think people inside maybe weren’t being honest with themselves about what they were seeing,” he said. This is the “group think” excuse that the party’s consultants apparently worked out in a bunker somewhere and circulated around the Axis. I’m guessing it beat out the “Dr. Jill hypnotized everyone with her laser eyes” narrative. Lovett continued, “But I know if, like, from my own point of view, part of what was a challenge was because Joe Biden seemed so hellbent on staying in, right? I never wanted to be dishonest about what I felt we were seeing.”
He didn’t want to be dishonest; he just was, poor guy. The Democrats simply cannot be allowed to escape accountability for this.
At the now infamous George Clooney fundraiser, Lovett says, it was clear to all that Biden had no business being President. “I remember feeling, ‘I wanna talk about this as a huge liability, I wanna talk about this as something Joe Biden can overcome.’ But I’m not gonna go so far as to say, ‘I think Joe Biden must drop out—He is too old to be president.’” Lovett explained. “If Joe Biden is the candidate, I want him to fucking win because I care about the country.”
He cares so much about the country that he’s willing to re-elect a disabled President who can’t do the job. That’s not “caring about the country.” That’s caring about keeping power in defiance of the Constitution and democracy.
I suppose I’m obsessing about this lately, but everybody should be obsessing about it. Democrats did this for four years, the news media let them do it, and there have to be consequences.
Memorial Day Weekend Open Forum
Thanks to my still resonating Verizon services disaster last weekend, this is the second Open Forum in a week. I deem it important to at least try to get back to normal, however, and so here we are.
As a bit of inspiration, I present the tale of a most unethical public servant, former L.A. Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Brian K. Williams, shown above. Democrats have become this crazy: on Oct. 3, 2024, while he was in an online meeting involving his official duties, Williams picked up an incoming call on his city-issued phone, excused himself, and called the L.A. Police Department’s Chief of Staff. Williams reported he had just received a call from an unknown man who was threatening to bomb L.A. City Hall. Ten minutes later, Williams texted Mayor Karen Bass and other city officials, writing,
“Bomb threat: I received phone call on my city cell at 10:48 am this morning. The male caller stated that ‘he was tired of the city support of Israel, and he has decided to place a bomb in City Hall. It might be in the rotunda.’ I immediately contacted the chief of staff of LAPD, they are going to send a number of officers over to do a search of the building and to determine if anyone else received a threat.”
But there was no threat. The call Williams had received, an investigation revealed, was from Williams himself, who had used the Google Voice application on his personal phone to place a call to his work phone. The threatened bomb threat was his own.
The Department of Justice announced that Williams, 61, has been charged with the felony of reporting a false bomb threat, and has pleaded guilty. The crime carries a statutory maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison.
Nice.
Your turn!
Integrity Test For Climate Change Hysterics
Well waddya know! The U.S. is on the verge of setting records for all-time low temperatures in May. That’s funny. I thought humanity was doomed because the world is burning up.
Of course, I don’t think one unseasonally cold month has any more significance than one unseasonably cold day, but that’s not how the climate change cabal has been playing their game. No, every time the temperature seems especially high anywhere in the USA, the activists, most of whom know as much about climate science as I know about fixing a carburetor, start screaming, pointing, and crying out, “See? SEE?” They do the same thing with seasonal wildfires, hurricanes, floods and, at least on The View, earthquakes and eclipses. They get away with it too, because the unscrupulous politicians they elect and the dim-bulb progressive pundits and reporters who work for those politicians always endorse and rationalize the climate change hysterics’ propaganda, even after every prediction, every projection, every deadline to save humanity proves to be hooey.
Unethical Commencement Speaker of the Decade: Minnesota Governor “Knucklehead” Tim Walz
Does anyone still need convincing that Gov. Walz is among the most irresponsible, civically ignorant, repellent and dishonest elected officials in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave? Apparently so: the University of Minnesota Law School invited him to give the main address as its commencement ceremony. Even if Walz were not a clueless demagogue, constitutional dunce and enemy of free speech (he thinks “hate speech” should be punished), he’s an absurd choice to give a speech to law school grads. Not only isn’t he lawyer, he lacks the rudiments of critical thinking essential to the law. He doesn’t know what lawyer do, or what their standards of conduct are.
Walz didn’t disappoint: he continued on the path of unhinged demogoguery that has characterized his pronouncements since he dragged Kamala Harris and the Democrats down to defeat. (Yes, I know there were dozens of factors that resulted in the Totalitarian Party’s well-earned loss in November, but when I absolutely knew the Harris ticket was doomed was when Walz bumbled his way through the debate with J.D. Vance.)
Here are the lowlights of the unethical speech he inflicted on the recent graduates. There are more gaffes and lies than acceptable sections, which is, I guess, impressive it its own, warped, knickleheaded way. My comments are in bold, his blather is in italics:
Incidentally, Twitter/X Also Sucks, And Can Bite Me.
For reasons yet to be explained, my second attempt to maintain an account on “X” was foiled yesterday when I was suddenly blocked from my own home page, “EthicsAlarmist.” I have spent over an hour trying to wade through the laborious process of getting back on, all because the phone number I initially used to set up the account is no longer in use. There is apparently no way to fix this. They keep wanting to send me a code using that number, and when I give them my current cell phone number and try to use the code they send me, the site responds that the phone number I am using is not associated with the account. Like so, so many others, X has a terrible service website.
I just received this in the email they also say is not associated with the account:
Hello,
The phone number you provided does not match the phone number on the account.
If you have a different phone number that might be associated with the account, you can request a password reset via SMS text message using this link: https://x.com/account/begin_password_reset.
If you’re still not able to update your password, we may be able to assist you. Please respond to this email with the following:
- Are you still logged in to https://mobile.x.com?
- What is the @username you are trying to access?
- Is the account linked to an app like X for Android or iOS, postDeck, Vine, Instagram, etc?
Thanks,
X Support
I’ve gone through all of that, twice. It’s an endless loop. Then I received this:
Hello,
We’re writing to let you know that we’re unable to verify you as the account owner. We know this is disappointing to hear, but we can’t assist you further with accessing your account. If you know which email address or phone number is associated with the account, and you no longer have access to that email or connected phone number, please contact your service provider for assistance.
For privacy reasons, we can’t provide any information about this account’s registered email address or phone number. We understand it’s frustrating to get locked out of an account, but we have these policies to protect accounts and private data. We appreciate your understanding.
You’re more than welcome to create a new account to get back onto X.
Please do not respond to this email as replies to this account are not monitored.
Thanks, X Support
My response: “You are welcome to bite me.” I do not understand, and I particularly don’t understand how a Big Tech company can be this incompetent.
Eventually I suppose I will have to open a third account (I abandoned #1 while Twitter was kicking out conservatives and Trump) just to have access to tweets and videos from other sources, but I won’t be investing any time in seeking followers or exposure for Ethics Alarms content.
A platform that behaves like this can’t be trusted—and I even paid for a “blue check.” And after my Verizon experience, Musk’s baby picked the wrong time to mess with me. I’m sure there is some secret to getting my account back, but X has wasted too much of my time already, and I will not forgive or forget.
To Hell with it.
Ethics Alarms 