U.S. Society

Into The “Bias Makes You Stupid” Hall of Fame Goes American University Professor Allan Lichtman

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I didn’t need a magic 8-Ball to predict that I would be writing this post on November 6. Back in July, I noted the absurdity and hubris of this epitome of a progressive-biased historian—but then aren’t they all?—pretending that he sees all amd knows all. Allan Lichtman’s claim to authority is that he has this formula, see, and it allows him to predict with astounding accuracy (9 out of 10 times! Oops, now it’s 9 out of 11 times…) who will win Presidential elections. I wrote in conclusion,

[Lichtman] went on Fox News Sunday to bloviate that if Democratic delegates rebel against President Joe Biden and choose another Democratic nominee, it will spell chaos for the party.  Lichtman, who is a progressive Democrat and once ran for the Senate as one, was relatively restrained on Fox News, but on MSNBC, he went full Trump Deranged, saying that if the Democrats don’t run Biden, it will mean Trump will win (his system says so!) and that will be the end of democracy!

Those are Lichtman’s warped priorities: he thinks it’s essential that his party wins even if it means electing an obviously deteriorating old man who won’t be able to do the job of President along with everything else that implies. A shadow government run by unelected apparatchiks, for example. He’s a Presidential historian: he knows about Woodrow Wilson, and still he thinks its in the best interest of the nation to vote for that. Lichtman is warning the MSNBC types—you know, morons—that all that matters is keeping The Party in control. Having a virtual basket case in the White House? That’s not a disaster to this guy, not like he says an open Democratic convention would be.

The professor’s shtick radiates poor civic values, sickening priorities, irresponsible advice and worst of all for a history professor, a rotten historical perspective. I have no interest in his prognostications and neither should anyone else. Lichtman should go away now, coming out of his hole in four years like Puxatawny Phil to fascinate the same kind of gullible suckers with his election predictions as are entranced by systems to win state lotteries.

Wonder of wonders, despite his prognostication of doom if Biden left the ticket, once Kamala Harris was installed as Joe’s replacement, Lichtman’s infallible “system” found that she was going to win the 2024 election. That was passing strange, since his system didn’t include categories for babbling empty-suits who alternate between taking two diametrically opposing positions simultaneously and running on “My opponent is Hitler” platforms.

One might justifiably think that, as as a historian, Lichtman would give the only precedent for a defeated single term President coming back four tears later and running for President again significant weight. Grover Cleveland won, after all. Nope. The professor was certain that his formula was correct. Not only was the professor wrong, he was spectacularly wrong. “Right now after a very long night I am taking some time off to assess why I was wrong and what the future holds for America,” Lichtman told USA TODAY this morning.

It’s obvious why he was wrong: bias made him stupid. Gee, who could have guessed that an incompetent candidate chosen without winning a single delegate or running in a single Presidential primary, with the lowest popularity numbers of any Vice-President and a strategy that depended on not letting voters know who she was or what she believed, wouldn’t defeat a previous President of the United States with a devoted, even fanatic, following?

Well, there’s me, and, oh, many thousands of other people with a passing knowledge of history and a modicum of common sense.

Here’s a tip Professor Lichtman: add “Terrible candidates running incompetent campaigns tend to lose” to the factors you consider next time. Trust me: it works.

NOW Can We Say Trump’s Claims That the 2020 Election Was Stolen From Him Aren’t “Baseless”?

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

This was raised in comments on the last post, but it should be highlighted.

There needs to be a bi-partisan investigation. If I try really hard and indulge my creative powers, I can think of innocent reasons for there being so many more votes cast in 2020, but they aren’t the reasons suggested by Occam’s Razor. Wouldn’t you think the 2024 election would have drawn more voters that in 2020, since the future of democracy was supposedly hanging in the balance?

Does the chart suggest that Republicans were cheating too, but just not as well as Democrats? If nothing else, the statistics support the need for secure, trustworthy election procedures, and we did not have them in 2020.

A Post 2024 Election Ethics Spectacular!

/ Jack Marshall / 74 Comments

Abe was the real winner last night. I have been evoking his famous quote about nobody being able to “fool all the people all of the time” for the entire campaign, and his faith in the public, American values, democracy, the Constitution and the Founders’ vision was beautifully and inspiringly validated last night. It was particularly satisfying that the People were, ultimately not fooled despite the nefarious effort of the Axis media, pollsters and corrupt “experts” to deceive them. Creeping totalitarianism was kicked in the metaphorical nuts last night. Good.

And now, a brief musical interlude…

I will await with anticipation the flowers, candy, hams and notes from all of the doomsayers, cynics and faithless out there (you know who you are) who rolled their eyes at my insistence several months ago that the ugly mess Democrats had made during the past four years, the cover-up (and not a very good one) of Biden’s senility, the gaslighting, hypocrisy and lies by the party and its media allies, and most of all, the Soviet-style elevation to attempted anointed leadership of a DEI radical leftist without any genuine qualifications for President would end in a national election rebuke.

Meanwhile, anyone who is not Trump-Deranged should feel almost as much satisfaction from Trump’s revenge on the Axis (“the resistance,” Democrats, and the their toadying mainstream media), which was not only a resounding Electoral College victory (And we see one of the great virtues of the much-maligned EC: showing a mandate for a winning candidate who has won a clear majority of the states and the varying values they represent when the popular vote is close. This was a Democratic Party theme after the very close 1960 election, the first close election since the 19th Century. (And watch how high his Electoral College soars after California,New York, Illinois, and the rest of the states that signed onto The National Popular Vote Compact go! Just kidding. “National Vote Compact? What elephant?”) Will Republicans and Trump supporters, having taken the Senate back with brio and the White House and very likely to keep control of the House as well, take moment to give the sneering, condescending, hateful, fearmongering Left the momentary but emphatic, “So there! You got what you deserve. To hell with bygones: you’ve been trying to undo our country, and your President called us garbage and enemies of democracy.” The Duke understood…

.If the Democrats and their media are capable of a course correction and a return to fairness and sanity, they will take last night’s result as decisive evidence that they have been perverted, and that they need to do some serious introspection, read some history books, get some ethics training, and reform. A panelist on Fox News last night opined that the loss would be good for the Democrats, because it would be a slap in the face (or a punch in the mouth) to shock them into returning to the party’s traditional values, and not to continue the march to the elitist, racialist, DEI-besotted “we know what’s best, Little People!” single party distortion of the republic that the Biden Administration embraced. The final insult was that they tried to foist off a phony, undemocratically-selected, babbling hack as a trustworthy leader, counting on her ability to avoid direct answers, to deny her previous positions, hinting at diametrically opposed positions depending on her audience…

…and to rely on teleprompters while the Left called the other party and its candidate fascists and an existential threat to democracy.

That is what the Left, and certainly the now totally disgraced news media, should do, because regaining the trust they have squandered is paramount for the future of the nation. I’m sure they won’t. Oprah’s galpal Gayle King whined to the CBS morning audience today, “What about checks and balances?” See, when the other party holds the White House, the Senate , the House with a conservative SCOTUS, it’s undemocratic! This comes from a supporter of the party that would have tried to pack the Supreme Court if it had the kind of majorities the GOP will have over the next two years. Funny, I didn’t hear the news media or any Republicans make that fatuous protest when Barack Obama had a similarly supportive Congress…

No, they won’t snap out of it—they are too far gone. Harris could have signalled a commitment to restoring the traditions of respect and official deference to newly elected Presidents by graciously conceding last night when it was obvious to anyone not in denial that the jig was up. Like Hilary in 2016, she didn’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t, but at least Hillary had good reason to be stunned, and she was ahead in the popular vote. Because Harris couldn’t show any class, courage or contrition, I don’t fault Trump for not mentioning her name last night. No Presidential candidate of a major party has ever been so disgracefully savaged during a campaign.

I’ve run out of time, but I’ll be back. The riots haven’t started yet; Trump winning the popular vote might stifle them, but I doubt it. We should all celebrate Abe’s victory, but heed the warning of Samuel L. Jackson…

Still More Election Day Ethics Musings…

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

I’m posting that picture because it made me laugh out loud when I first saw it yesterday, has made be laugh several times just thinking about it, and still makes me laugh. I’m considering blowing it up and having it framed. I’m depressed and exhausted, I’m alone in a big house missing my wife, I have a million boring, annoying things to do and no plausible reason not to do them, and whoever took this photo (and I don’t care if it’s fa; it worked) is an ethics hero in my book.

Meanwhile:

1. Confronting my biases, 2024 election edition: I’m really going to have to work at not losing respect for a lot of friends and relatives who have written and said some of the dumbest, most ignorant things over the pat several months. I think I really will treat them asif they have been suffering from some obtrusive malady, like Tourettes, making them scream out obscenities, or uncontrollable flatulence. Of course, this will depend on whether they can calm the hell down…

2. At the risk of summoning “A Friend” from Spam Hell, kind of like inadvertently using a Ouija board to loose and evil spirit on the world, I must note lawyer-blogger John Hinderaker’s excellent takedown of the email the New York Times sent its subscribers, including me (though I don’t know how much longer I can stand it). The thing really is astounding in its hypocrisy and lack of self awareness, and I salute John for saving me the time to defenestrate it. What struck me was how every single item in the Times propaganda piece was identical to the arguments of my Trump Deranged relative who doesn’t read the times. Who is spreading these talking points? From whence specifically do they emanate? The one that particularly interested me was the last item: “[Trump] also vows to avoid the pattern of his first term by appointing loyal aides who will carry out his wishes.”

How dare he! Hinderaker writes, “We certainly hope so! That is what a president is supposed to do, and what Kamala Harris surely would do, with the help of whoever it is that has been running the Biden administration and now would run hers.”

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The Most Deranged Anti-Trump Lie of All, And Other Election Day Morning Ethics Musings…

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

I realized, as I woke up with a bang this morning earlier than I wanted to, that I am far more emotionally, intellectually and patriotically, never mind ethically, invested in the Presidential election result in 2024 than in any previous election.

The reasons, I hope, have been made reasonably clear here, not just over the course of the campaign, but over the past eight years, ever since the 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck chugged out of the metaphorical station. I also am, alternately, furious and amused by the ridiculous reality that the candidate I feel so strongly has to win today for the good of the nation is probably the worst Presidential candidate one of the two major parties has ever offered to the American public on Election Day, at least since the Civil War, with the exception of Woodrow Wilson, Trump himself and Hillary in 2016, and Joe Biden in 2020. I also am more anxious about what the Post 2024 Election Ethics Train Wreck will bring.

I am certain that if Trump wins, the Left will riot, and as the rioting will occur during a dead-in-the-water Democratic Administration, it will not be controlled and may even be encouraged. Make no mistake, this will be 100% the fault of the Axis of Unethical Conduct and the Harris campaign. They have used fear and hate as primary weapons against Donald Trump when they weren’t trying to impeach him or lock him up, and raised the intensity of this unethical—I could say “evil”—strategy to previously unimaginable levels when they realized that they had nothing positive—well, unless you consider aborting more babies positive—to justify another Democratic Presidency.

The party and its unethical news media useful idiots deserve to be punished, though I am not sure how. Both may have damaged themselves sufficiently to qualify as condign justice, but I doubt it. They have divided, wounded, scarred and imperiled the United States of America. There has to be accountability; there have to be consequences.

The first penalty needs to be a defeat today.

Other related ethics observations:

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“The Untrustworthy 20,” the Worst of the Worst On the Ballots in 2024, Part 2: Naming Names

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Ugh.

I was afraid of this: when I went over the various files to make the final cut, I had to leave out so many genuine miscreants whose presence as elected officials is a blight on America the Beautiful. Because I want to have the list evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, I couldn’t even find space for all the members of “The Squad.” Or Maxine Waters.

Back when I was doing the “Dirty Dozen,” the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, aka CREW, was a helpful resource because the group used to maintain its own list of corrupt officials. Oh, the list was heavily weighted toward Republicans, naturally, because while CREW claimed to be non-partisan, it clearly wasn’t. Eventually its ideological bias became undeniable, and now about half of its “investigations” involve Donald Trump.

Since the list is long, I won’t belabor the reasons for each honoree. In most cases, I shouldn’t have to. And, as in the past, most of these unethical candidates will win.

1. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky). He’s 82, making the fact that he’s running at all unethical. Then there is his destructive and wildly unethical—but legal!—refusal to allow Barack Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, even come to a vote.

2. Nancy Pelosi (D-S.F.). Like McConnell, Pelosi is an ethics dunce just for running (she’s 84). Her Ethics Alarms dossier is thick and damning, and her despicable open disrespect for President Trump during his final State of the Union address was a low point in American political history. She is a lifetime Ethics Villain.

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Unethical Closing Campaign Pitch of the Week: Kamala Harris

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

1. Wow. Harris has the epic gall to say that her opposition offers a “country of chaos, fear and hate” after her party has run a campaign stretching back years claiming that Donald Trump and his supporters threaten our continued existence as a free country, that his secret goal is to lock up his political opponents, ban abortion, and install himself as a dictator. The President she has served under claiming she is in entirely in sync with his views and policies just called half the nation “garbage”—I may be a bit too sensitive, but I think that’s hateful. For a the past 60 days, Harris’s campaign’s main message is that Donald Trump is Adolf Hitler. Scary! The Democrats have not only made this country one of fear and hate, they have done so deliberately to maintain their power.

2. Chaos? Has there been an administration since the Civil War that wallowed in more chaos than the Biden-Harris term mercifully concuding? Two bloody wars, a disastrous abandonment of Afghanistan, chaos at the border, chaos on campuses, soaring crime in the cities, two assassination attempts on the Republican Presidential candidate, and worst of all, the unsettling and dangerous spectacle of a mentally disabled POTUS , manipulated by an unaccountable group of faceless bureaucrats attempting to hide his condition from the public and, when that became impossible, his party engineering a Soviet-style ouster, bypassing the established process of choosing a nominee.

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“The Untrustworthy 20,” the Worst of the Worst On the Ballots in 2024, Part I: Introduction

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

When I was writing the predecessor to Ethics Alarms, The ethics Scoreboard, I would issue “The Dirty Dozen,” a compendium of the most unethical candidates for elected office every two years. For the first election cycle in Ethics Alarms’ history, I posted on “The Untrustworthy Twenty” and thereafter, I don’t remember why, discontinued the tradition. Sloth? Hopelessness? I just forgot?

After  George Santos (above) slimed his way into Congress in 2022 after lying about virtually everything, however, I resolved to  resuscitate the project as depressing as it might be. In that old post (2010) I began,

“Trust is the connective tissue that holds societies together: it can be strengthened by demonstrations of ethical values like integrity, loyalty, honesty, civility, responsibility, competence, and courage, and weakened by proof of unethical traits like fecklessness, dishonesty, lack of independent judgment, selfishness, lack of diligence, greed and cowardice. For decades, the American public’s trust in its elected representatives and governmental institutions—and other critical institutions like the news media and the legal system—has been in steep decline. This is not because of some inexplicable public fad or the poisoning of public perceptions by an unholy alliance of the pop culture and Fox news. The decline in trust has occurred because a significant proportion of America’s elected leaders have not been trustworthy, and the reason this has been true is that American voters have thus far refused to make proof of ethical values their main priority in electing them. Because politicians know this, they feel empowered to engage in corruption, self-enrichment and deception in the confidence that partisan supporters will vote for them anyway, as long as they mouth the same policy positions and deliver their quota of pork, earmarks, and government contracts. This, of course, does not benefit of  country in the long run, but weakens it. It also creates an increasingly arrogant and power-obsessed political class to which ethical values are like Halloween costumes, donned at regular intervals to disguise who they really are. The core principles of the democratic process do not matter to many of these people, and they don’t see why they should matter.”

Isn’t itreassuring to know that things haven’t changed in 14 years? In fact, they have: they are much worse. I could easily compile an unethical 50, or 100. The two most untrustworthy major party candidates for President of the United States ever to face off in a Presidential election are on the ballot tomorrow, to succeed a a strong competitor for Worst President Ever who has made such a mess of the office and our traditional Presidential election process that the political system may never recover. In that 2010 post, I wrote,

“Public trust cannot keep declining indefinitely, you know. Eventually, a government that cannot be trusted will collapse. Just as addressing America’s fiscal crisis will take hard measures and sacrifice, addressing its equally dangerous crisis in trust requires sacrifice too. It will require voters to establish the principle that being “effective,” experienced or having the “right” policy positions will not be enough to justify electing or re-electing individuals who are demonstrably trustworthy. Voters must establish  untrustworthiness as absolutely disqualifying a candidate for election to public office. Any ethical, honest candidate with integrity must be seen as per se preferable to a corrupt, dishonest or unethical candidate, regardless of past achievements or policy views.”

I still believe that, despite being forced to vote for an untrustworthy candidate in this election because a cruel or sadistic god has chosen to make him the only available option to combat an organized and relentless effort to unmake the United States as it was envisioned by its Founders.

In that post, I offered a list of factors that do not justify determining that a candidate is necessarily untrustworthy: Continue reading →

So, Desperate and Trying For Any Edge That Doesn’t Require Actually Articulating A Clear Policy Position, Harris Cheats And NBC Helps Her…

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Nice.

This one is easy. Ethics Alarms has been stating (and showing) repeatedly that the Democrats cheat—to save democracy, of course, so it’s okay—and on Saturday the Harris campaign cheated flagrantly and openly. To do it, they needed help from the Democrat-biased media (again) and even though it knew this meant breaking the law, NBC went ahead and did it anyway.

Harris was a surprise guest on “Saturday Night Live, doing a sketch with Harris imitator Maya Rudolph, who later gushed about how she was a fan. This was a clear violation of the FCC’s Equal Time rule: broadcasters must offer candidates seeking the same political office comparable time and placement, Section 315 of the Communications Act states. That prohibits a licensed broadcaster from using the public airwaves to exert its influence for one candidate over another.

I thought it was a breach of the law the second I heard that Harris was going to appear, and FCC commissioner Brendon Carr protested almost immediately after the show aired. SNL and NBC had to offer the other candidates—not just Trump but Jill Stein and others—the same opportunity they gave to Harris. They didn’t.

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Just So There Is Accountability and We Don’t Forget, Here’s a List of The Lying Media Propagandists Who Claimed Trump Said He Wanted Liz Cheney Shot…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The Federalist was kind enough to supply what it says is complete list (it’s not, but never mind). The details are here, the unethical hacks are below.

When I point this kind of thing out to my usually intelligent, Trump-Deranged relative, the responses are:

  • “You keep saying the news media is biased and untrustworthy. Not ALL the reporters claimed that Trump said that!”
  • “Besides, that’s probably what he meant anyway.”
  • “So what? You know Trump has said that he wants to punish Liz Cheney!”
  • “Fox News exaggerates what Democrats say all the time!”
  • “Why are you always defending Trump?”

Here’s the list:

Jonah Goldberg

CNN anchor Kasie Hunt

CNN’s Eric Bradner

CNN’s Jim Acosta

Politico’s Andrew Howard

Politico bureau chief Jonathan Lemire

CNN’s Kate Sullivan

The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake

Reuters reporter Andy Sullivan

Reuters reporter Susan Heavey

National Review’s Jim Geraghty

Politico Senior Political Columnist Jonathan Martin

Rolling Stone reporter Nikki McCann Ramirez

I know the Federalist missed a few and maybe more than a few, like those mentioned in the Ethics Alarms post yesterday such as Joe Scarborough (The Federalist may not consider MSNBC worth counting, and that’s defensible). As far as I know, Goldberg is the only one who apologized, and a weaselly apology it was.

I’m sure the rest will say that they were just trying to save democracy, and how can you fault them for that?

BOY these people deserve to lose…