I don’t know whether the letter above, reportedly being sent to Pennsylvania voters, is real or not. There have been so many false flag operations from both sides of the political divide in recent years that it is impossible to tell. But I do know which party is the most desperate, ruthless and without any apparent limits to the depths it will resort to in order to maintain the nation’s lurch toward proto-totalitarianism, censorship and one-party rule.
Now, as it senses Kamala Harris’s ludicrous and incompetent campaign is going to fall short, her party is pretty openly threatening violence if she receives the ballot box thrashing Democrats so richly deserve after four years of incompetence, a puppet President and a Soviet-style palace coup deposing him.
In an interview with Tucker Carlson (don’t get me started on him again), Axis journalist and pundit Mark Halperin asserted that tens of millions of Americans will be so freaked out at the election of Donald Trump to that they will suffer mass collective mental trauma. That, of course, means fury, panic and violence. I have no doubt that he his right. Progressives, Democrats, “the resistance” and the mainstream media have been escalating fear-mongering regarding Trump far, far beyond what it was in 2016, when a previously sane Boston lawyer told me tearfully that she feared for the life of her two-year-old child, so certain was she that the Mad Orange Mogul would lead us into nuclear war.
Tuning in for literally minutes this morning, I saw Fox News this morning run the video of the Cleveland Ind…sorry, Guardiansstunning the New York Yankees in the American League Championship Series with an extra innings walk-off home run after tying the game with another homer in the 9th, as the Yankees were one out away from victory. Bill Hemmer and Dana Perino then spent an unusually long time expressing their enthusiasm for baseball and the play-of while making it crystal clear that neither of them knew what the hell they were talking about.
They said—twice!—that Cleveland was one strike away from elimination before that 9th inning home run. Morons. A Yankee win would have given New York a daunting 3 games to 0 lead (though the Yankees lost after having exactly that lead over the 2004 Boston Red Sox in that seasons’ famous ALCS), but the ALCS is a best-of-seven series, not best-of-five.
It’s disrespectful of baseball fans and the sport itself to presume to report baseball news and report it so carelessly and ignorantly. Perino and Hemmer obviously didn’t care enough to do their homework and to acquire sufficient basic knowledge about the play-offs to talk about the play-offs. Their feigned excitement was as fake as their commentary was incompetent. They are supposed to be professionals. A reporter thinking the ALCS is only five games while reporting on baseball’s play-offs is like thinking the popular vote determines the winner while reporting on a Presidential election.
Is a network that is this sloppy and unprofessional covering baseball likely to be more reliable when it reports on other matters?
A usually astute and beneficent friend of long-standing posted that on Facebook recently.
I’d love to know what Marxist Ethics Corrupter wrote it, so I can hold him or her up to the derision, contempt and shunning such a sinister argument deserves. The obvious smoking gun in the statement is “what society needs to know.”
Who determines what society needs to know? Current public schools, administrators and teachers have concluded that society needs to know that the United States was based on slavery, that its Founders were villains, that U.S. is currently a racist nation that citizens “of color” cannot succeed in without special assistance, that sexual identify is fluid and that socialism is the only morally defensible form of government.
None of that belongs in a public school curriculum. Public school exists to teach skills and critical thinking: it should no more be teaching political cant than religion. The totalitarian who issued that poison above is advocating indoctrination, and worse, indoctrination by people who I don’t know, trust, or believe have the education, perspective or intelligence to decide what “society needs to know.”
This story surprises me not in the least, as former representative Liz Cheney has the approximate respect for ethics of a wolf spider.
While vice chairwoman of the House committee “investigating” the January 6 Capitol riot (the correct term would be “exploiting”), Cheney used an encrypted phone app to directly communicate with witness Cassidy Hutchinson (above, with Cheney), who later changed her testimony. Cheney did this without alerting or having the permission and participation of Cassidy’s lawyer, a direct and serious violation of both legal ethics rules (Cheney is a member of the D.C. Bar and licensed to practice there) and Congressional rules as well.
Hutchinson was represented by D.C. attorney Stefan Passantino at the time, who says that he did not authorize the contacts with Cheney and was not aware of them until recently.
The D.C. Bar Rule of Professional Conduct 4.2 states that “a lawyer shall not communicate or cause another to communicate about the subject of the representation with a person known to be represented by another lawyer in the matter, unless the lawyer has the prior consent of the lawyer representing such other person or is authorized by law or a court order to do so.” Indeed every bar’s rules state this, as do the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct. It is one of the oldest and most strictly-observed legal ethics principles there is, pre-dating the first official set of legal ethics rules issued by the American Bar Association in 1908.
[I just added what follows to the previous post, but I want to highlight it. Like Brett Baier, I was slow on the trigger to come up with the proper response to Harris’s dishonest rant about Trump’s alleged reference to “the enemy within,” which occurs toward the end of the interview.]
Harris had some gall going on about Trump’s “enemy within” quote, which she and others, including the New York Times, mischaracterized. Here’s the Times [I think all Harris did is read the Times piece and adopted its spin.]…
[For some reason I can’t unembed the previous version of the video that worked this morning…]
I’m still waiting for a transcript, but if you were lucky enough to miss last night’s Kamala Harris Hail Mary interview with Bret Baier on Fox News, that’s the whole thing above. Harris arrived 10 minutes late for the interview and her staff cut it off early, so instead of the promised 30 minute interview with someone more prone to asking genuine questions than, say, The View’s panel of progressive dolts, Harris struggled through less than that. She is literally trying to run out the clock, perhaps a sound strategy when you’re ahead, but a cowardly when you are behind.
Observations:
Yesterday I opined that Harris has virtually nothing to support her argument for being President other than the irrefutable fact that she isn’t Donald Trump and that women should be able to kill their unborn children at will—and the President has almost no power to assist with the latter. Based on last night’s interview, I was literally correct. I expected Harris to be a little better prepared to issue some substance in the interview; now that I saw it, I don’t know what I was thinking. There literally is no substance to Harris or her candidacy, at least nothing she’s willing or able to express publicly. She really thinks she will get away with this, and that not being that Hitler/dictator/liar/super-villain/monster Trump is enough to win. Fascinating.
Harris did everything she could to avoid answering questions. constantly shifting to “But Trump…” I assume this was the agreed-upon strategy because she and her party think the American public is stupid and can’t recognize desperate deflection and fakery when it is right in front of their eyes. Maybe they are stupid. We shall see.
When Baier asked the obvious question about why Harris kept talking about “change” and “turning the page” when she, her party, and the man whose policies she endorsed without exception or reservations on “The View” have been in the metaphorical driver’s seat since 2021, Harris answered,
“Well, first of all, turning the page from the last decade in which we have been burdened with the kind of rhetoric coming from Donald Trump that has been designed and implemented to divide our country…”
Later she elaborated, sort of, saying “Let me be very clear—My presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency. Like every new President that comes into office I will bring my life experiences, my professional experiences, and fresh and new ideas.”
Then..
Baier: “[M]ore than 70 percent of people tell the country is on the wrong track. They say the country is on the wrong track. If it’s on the wrong track, that track follows three and a half years of you being Vice President and president Biden being President. That is what they’re saying, 79% of them. Why are they saying that? If you are turning the page, you’ve been in office for three and a half years.”
Harris: “And Donald Trump has been running for office since …
Baier: “But you’ve been the person holding the office!”
Harris: “Come on, come on!”
Baier: “Madam Vice President.”
Harris: “You and I both know what I’m talking about. You and I both know what I’m talking about.”
Baier: “I actually don’t. What are you talking about?”
Harris: “What I’m talking about is that over the last decade, people have become …”
Baier: “But you have the lever of power!”
Harris: “But, listen, over the last decade, it is clear to me and certainly the Republicans who are on stage with me. The former chief of staff to the President, Donald Trump, former defense secretaries, national security adviser and his Vice President, one that he is unfit to serve that he is unstable, that he is dangerous, and that people are exhausted with someone who professes to be a leader who spends full time demeaning and nd engaging in personal grievances and it being about him and…”
Baier: “Madam Vice President.”
Harris: “… instead of the American people. People are tired of that.”
Baier: “If that’s the case why is half the country supporting him? Why is he beating you in a lot of swing states? Why, if he’s as bad as you say that half of this country is now supporting this person who could be the 47th president of the United States? Why is that happening?”
Harris: “This is an election for president of the United States. It’s not supposed to be easy.”
Baier: “I know, but if it’s as…”
Harris: “It’s not supposed to be a cake walk for anyone.”
Baier: “So are they misguided, the 50%? Are they stupid?”
Harris: “Oh, god, I would never say that about the American people. And, in fact, when you listen to Donald Trump, if you watch any of his rallies, he is the one who tends to demean and belittle and diminish the American people. He is the one who talks about an enemy within — within — an enemy within — talking about the American people, suggesting he would turn the American military on the American people.”
Here’s another glaring example of how all Harris could do was deflect to Trump rather than discuss her own positions:
Baier: “So, are you still in support of using taxpayer dollars to help prison inmates to detained illegal aliens on inmates to transgender?
Harris: “I will follow a law and it’s a law that Donald Trump actually followed. You’re probably familiar with — now it’s a public report that under Donald Trump’s administration, these surgeries were available to on a medical necessity basis to people in the federal prison system and I think, frankly, that ad from the Trump campaign is a little bit of, like, throwing, you know, stones when you’re living in a glass house.”
Baier: “The Trump aides say he never advocated for that prison policy and no gender transition surgeries happened during his…”
Harris: Well, you know what? You gotta take responsible for what happened in your administration.
Baier: “He had no surgeries happened in his presidency.”
Harris: “It’s in black and white.”
Baier: “So, would you still advocate for using taxpayer dollars for gender reassignment surgeries?”
Harris: “I will follow the law, just as I…”
Baier: “But you have a say in…”
Harris: “I think Donald Trump would say he did.”
Baier: “You would have a say as president.”
Harris: “Like I said, I think he spent $20 million on those ads trying to create a sense of fear in the voters because he actually has no plan in this election that is about focusing on the needs of the American people whereas a $20 million on that ad on an issue that, as it relates to the biggest issue that effect the American people, it’s really quite remote and, again, his policy was no different. Look at where we are though.”
Oh.
This was Harris’s “But Trump!” deflection when Baier asked when it was that she began to figure out that President Biden was losing marbles at a rapid rate, and why she kept insisting he was as sharp as ever:
“Joe Biden I have watched from the Oval Office to the Situation Room, and he has the judgment and the experience to do exactly what he has done in making very important decisions on behalf of the American people. Brett, Joe Biden’s not on the ballot, and Donald Trump is … I think the American people have a concern about Donald Trump.”
I would like to read or hear the reasoning by a Democrat zombie that Harris was effective in this interview. I ban commenters on Ethics Alarms who argue like she did.
Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias (or coordination of the news media through Axis High Command)! The memo went out that the official spin to be put on this debacle is that Harris showed she was strong and combative. The official word-of-the- day was “feisty” which—I’m sure it was a coincidence—shows up again and again. Baier, naturally, is being criticized for being “rude” by trying to get Harris to answer his questions. “Kamala Harris Arrived for a Fox Interview. She Got a Debate,” whined the Times, as if the mainstream media hacks haven’t treated every interview with Trump or Vance as an adversarial encounter.
Over at Alhouse’s place, the supposedly “fiercely” objective blogger’s reaction to the interview was “I’ve been waiting for Harris to do a tough, challenging interview, and it was painful to watch the deflection and evasion. The main defense seemed to be to make Bret Baier look bad because he interrupted. Terrible.” In the almost 200 comments to her post so far, only “Inga,” the Democrat troll that Althouse tolerates for some reason, was anything but disgusted with Harris’s performance. Inga wrote in part, “Harris did an excellent job. Much much much better than Trump if he were to have been interviewed by Rachel Maddow or someone on MSNBC or CNN, that’s why he is chickenshit to face a tough interviewer.”
How deluded or dishonest must someone be to call Harris’s performance “an excellent job”?
Baier is getting criticized by Trump supporters because he didn’t ask other questions, such as grilling Harris about the FBI report just released that showed a much higher murder rate in the U.S. under Biden than had been reported before. If Harris had submitted to an hour-ling interview as she should have, Baier would have been able to ask more questions.
ADDED…
Harris had some gall going on about Trump’s “enemy within” quote, which she and others, including the New York Times, mischaracterized. Here’s the Times [I think all Harris did is read the Times piece and adopted its spin.]
With three weeks left before Election Day, former President Donald J. Trump is pushing to the forefront of his campaign a menacing political threat: that he would use the power of the presidency to crush those who disagree with him.
In a Fox News interview on Sunday, Mr. Trump framed Democrats as a pernicious “enemy from within” that would cause chaos on Election Day that he speculated the National Guard might need to handle.
A day later, he closed his remarks to a crowd at what was billed as a town hall in Pennsylvania with a stark message about his political opponents.
“They are so bad and frankly, they’re evil,” Mr. Trump said. “They’re evil. What they’ve done, they’ve weaponized, they’ve weaponized our elections. They’ve done things that nobody thought was even possible.”
How the Times gets from those comments to “use the power of the presidency to crush those who disagree with him” I don’t know. Do you? He predicted Democrats rioting, and that is exactly what others (including me) have predicted. The National Guard quells riots. If the National Guard is called out on Election Day, it will be the Biden Administration that does it.
Harris said that Trump called “the public” the “enemy within,” which makes no sense and isn’t what he said. He called her party “the enemy within.” That’s what it is, as I have documented here for months and years. Trump is, as usual, sloppy with explaining himself, but if there is anyone who has no standing to criticize him for characterizing her party as “the enemy within,” it is a member of this…
…administration. As for “They’ve done things that nobody thought was even possible,” that is true. Beginning with executing an investigation of the President based on false information from the Democratic Presidential campaign, Harris’s party has executed two impeachments that did not conform to Constitutional and established norms, corrupted a Presidential election by loosening ballot security standards, held a partisan star chamber inquiry over a single riot at the Capitol to establish the falsehood that Trump attempted an “insurrection,” and used partisan prosecutors to pursue multiple legal cases against their most formidable political opponent. Then they appointed a Presidential candidate with no participation by the voting public whatsoever, Soviet-style.
Trump’s statement was essentially correct. The Democrats have become a pernicious enemy of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the political process.
My otherwise intelligent and perceptive family member who has been in Stage Five Trump derangement for months has been arguing lately that Trump is senile, is on the same trajectory to dementia as Biden was when he was elected, and is mentally unstable, even more so than while he was President when one of the Axis “Get Trump!” coup schemes was to invoke the 25th Amendment regarding Presidential disability. This seemed so obviously contrived and desperate for someone like her (intelligent, ethical, independent B.T., as in “Before Trump”) that I wondered where it was coming from.
Last weekend, reading various propaganda outlets and listening for five minutes at a time to CNN and MSNBC, I realized that the Harris campaign’s “OMIGOD OUR PHONY CANDIDATE STRATEGY ISN’T WORKING!!! ARRGHHH!!” freakout had entered a new phase. Suddenly there were essays, articles and pundit rants about how Trump was mentally unstable and his “condition” had taken a turn for the worse. This was, like so many other simultaneous eruptions of almost identical rhetoric and arguments from Axis High Command in the past, pretty obviously a coordinated strategy decision. It was also a yet another example of Democrats employing blatant projection: this is the party that deliberately foisted a senile Presidential candidate on the nation, engaged in an almost four year cover-up using a complicit news media, and was finally exposed when Biden’s episodes of “Ready for the Home” became too frequent and alarming to deny.
Oh, I know there are some just as bad; indeed, the pro-abortion ads being run in Maryland against Republican Larry Hogan in the U.S. Senate race are at this despicable level. The Kaine spot, however, reminds me of Mary McCarthy epic take-down playwright Lillian Hellman: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.”
Let’s see…
The Supreme Court didn’t “rob” any women of anything. It sent the issue of abortion regulation to the states, where it always belonged.
The issue isn’t a “right to choose.” The issue is how far anyone’s right to kill another human being can or should be acknowledged. There is no right to “choose” to kill those who inconvenience us. Using deceptive phrases that deliberately disguise the rights, parties and stakeholders in a political dispute is deceit, a lie.
Abortion is legal in every Southern state. That it is not is an outright, indefensible lie.
More deceit: “If Republicans take control in Washington and pass a national abortion ban” is like saying, “If Republicans take control in Washington and legalize slavery.” A national abortion ban is not going to happen, can’t happen, and would almost certainly be ruled unconstitutional if by some miracle it did. Legal scholar and ethicist William Hodes made that case powerfully in his article published on the Federalist Society website, pointing out that any such federal legislation would be unconstitutional, as it would exceed the scope of congressional power.
Of course women would have “options.” Finding solutions to the result of their own actions, or the actions of others, that doesn’t involve killing nascent lives is an excellent, ethical option.
“The Republicans won’t stop there” because they’re evil!EVIL!This is shameless demonizing and fear-mongering. They’ll legalize cannibalism! They’ll make everyone wear their underwear on the outside! How can the women in that video look at themselves in the mirror?
Contraception is protected under the Constitution. IVF involves complex biological and ethical issues, but there is no indication that there would be sufficient support in the Republican Party to ban the procedure. Yet this ad states as fact that the GOP would do it.
That’s pretty impressive hysteria and dishonesty for a 30 second ad. And this was the guy Hillary Clinton picked to be her Vice-President.
I don’t see how anyone who has any standards for honesty in our elected officials can vote for some who puts out deliberate falsehood like these and “approves” them. I know, I know, it’s “the ends justifies the means,” the unethical fallacy that has swallowed the whole Democratic Party.
Anything to be able to kill unborn human beings at will.
The basic story is here. Christopher Rufo, the same conservative writer and gadfly who exposed ex-Harvard President Claudine Gay’s serial plagiarism leading to her resignation, determined that “several passages” in Vice President Kamala Harris’ first book (2009’s “Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer” with co-author Joan O’C Hamilton) were taken from Wikipedia and other sources without proper attribution.
“European explorers ushered in a wave of devastation, violence, stealing land, and widespread disease.”
—Kamala Harris in 2021, pandering to the “America is a blight on the Earth and the world would have been better without it” bloc in the Democratic Party in a Columbus Day address.
Boy, what an idiot.
But to be fair to Kamala, I’m sure she would now say that she loves Columbus, and grew up in a middle class neighborhood.
What the European explorers ushered in was discovery, freedom from religious oppression, innovation, progress, and let’s just to cut to the chase, civilization. Had there been no United States, Harris and her relatives would probably be grease spots or serving as Nazi slaves today. But never mind, why should a basic comprehension of history, science and anthropology get it the way of a candidate for President of the United States vilifying the nation she aspires to lead? When does her campaign start handing out the “Make America Primitive Again” caps?
“At the end of 1492 most men in Western Europe felt exceedingly gloomy about the future. Christian civilization appeared to be shrinking in area and dividing into hostile units as its spherecontracted. For over a century there had been no important advance in natural science and registration in the universities dwindled as the instruction they offered became increasingly jejune and lifeless. Institutions were decaying, well-meaning people were growing cynical or desperate, and many intelligent men, for want of something betterto do, were endeavoring to escape the present through studying the pagan past. . . .Yet, even as the chroniclers of Nuremberg were correcting their proofs from Koberger’s press, a Spanish caravel named Nina scudded before a winter gale into Lisbon with news of a discovery that was to give old Europe another chance. In a few years we find the mental picture completely changed. Strong monarchs are stamping out privy conspiracy and rebellion; the Church, purged and chastened bythe Protestant Reformation, puts her house in order; new ideas flare up throughout Italy, France, Germany and the northern nations; faith in God revives and the human spirit is renewed. The change is complete and startling: A new envisagement of the world has begun, and men are no longer sighing after the imaginary golden age that lay in the distant past, but speculating as to the golden age that might possibly lie in the oncoming future.
“Christopher Columbus belonged to an age that was past, yet he became the sign and symbol of this new age of hope, glory and accomplishment. His medieval faith impelled him to a modern solution: Expansion.”
Morison’s book is superb, and I recommend it highly as an antidote to the simplistic anti-occidental prejudice of today…”
Ethics Alarms 