U.S. Society

The Totalitarian Left’s Reaction To Trump’s Interview With Elon Musk Should Tell Voters All They Need To Know About “What’s Going On Here”

/ Jack Marshall / 64 Comments

That’s the interview above. I haven’t had time to listen to it; it doesn’t matter what was said. It’s an unscripted, spontaneous conversation with one of the two major Presidential candidates. No one who understands elections and who believes in democracy should have any objection to it, fear it, or find its existence threatening in any way. And yet…here is the Harris-Walz campaign’s reaction:

Later, we got this:

Is there any way to excuse or justify such reactions? That is a rhetorical question: there is not. Continue reading →

Quickie From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: Why You Can’t Trust The Daily Mail…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

See that headline? See the bullet point right under it? I have a hard time believing that illegal immigrants will cost the Bay State 1.8 billion dollars over two years, but 1.8 trillion dollars is like something Joe Biden would say. It’s obviously impossible.

Yet that throbbing typo has been on the web site for two full days. Nobody noticed? Does nobody on the staff read their own website? No readers were sharp enough to pick up on such a flagrant error?

Amazing. My high school newspaper (The Arlington High School Chronicle) was more professional.

Do not trust the Daily Mail.

J.D. Vance Demonstrates the Ethical Remedy For Partisan Media Bias

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

J. D. Vance made the rounds of the Sunday morning TV shows, and neatly demonstrated why he will be an asset to the Republican ticket in the exchange above with CNN’s biased dim bulb Dana Bash.

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Weekend Ethics Update, 8/10/24: Paul Harvey and Other Alarms

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

That’s a famous segment from Paul Harvey’s radio show, unearthed by Citizens Free Press. It’s fascinating in retrospect and worthy of reflection no matter what your political orientation may be. I place it in the same category as “A Clockwork Orange” and “Network,” commentaries that seemed dystopian and extreme when they first appeared, but that when viewed now are disquietly familiar. The date makes Harvey’s commentary particularly interesting, for 1964 was the cusp of the Sixties, right before its tornado winds blew traditional values and American respect for its institutions into tiny pieces, never again to be assembled quite as securely again.

Harvey was a proud conservative, of course: many of his beliefs today are considered Cro-Magnon. He was not responsible for the video, which engages in several cheap shots; the gay couple from “Modern Family,” for example, don’t deserve their appearance here: it was a loving same sex marriage between two kind men who were loving parents (and the least strange characters in the show). Nevertheless, Harvey was prescient in many ways, unfortunately for all of us.

1. How do PolitFact’s partisan hacks look at themselves in the mirror? The most biased and dishonest of all the factchecking organizations—and that’s quite a distinction—was at it again this week as it joined the effort to pretend Kamala Harris isn’t what she is.

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Authentic Frontier Gibberish of the Month: IOC President Thomas Bach

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“We have said from the very beginning. If someone is presenting us scientifically a solid system how to identify men and women who were the first ones to do it? We do not like this uncertainty. We do not like it for the overall situation. We do not like it for nobody. So we would be more than pleased to look into it. But what is not possible … is someone saying ‘this is not a woman’ by looking at somebody or by falling prey to a defamation campaign.”

Well, that explains a lot, doesn’t it? This is the caliber of intellect and clarity of thought those leading the Olympic Games are able to display when explanations are in order. No wonder we get…oh, heck, why bother?

For some reason his statement reminded me of “Green Eggs and Ham.” “I do not like you, Sam-I-Am. I do not like green eggs and ham.” Personally, I don’t like, or trust, officials who can’t make more sense than this, and more grammatically, behind a microphone.

So Democrats Are Really Trying To Elect A President By Not Letting Voters Know Who She Is and What She Believes. Democracy! Some Observations…

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

I had already decided to open this Saturday’s Ethics Games with a post on this topic when I read this section in NYT left-wing columnist Nate Cohn’s (gleeful?) column this morning about a Times-Sienna poll that has Kamala Harris suddenly topping Trump in several “battleground states” where he has been leading Biden. Cohn wrote,

…One way to think about her position is that she has become something like a “generic” Democrat. This might sound like an insult, but it’s really not. In fact, nothing is more coveted. An unnamed generic candidate — whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican — almost always fares better in the polls than named candidates, who are inevitably burdened by all the imperfections voters learn about in the process of a campaign.

Isn’t that wonderful? Cohn clearly thinks so. He also explains that in earlier polls an “anyone but Trump” hypothetical generic candidate beat the former President by 10 points in these same states. Harris now leads Trump by five, meaning only half of the “anyone but Trump” voters have no clue who Kamala Harris is….but hey, that might just be enough! So the Democratic Party, in its fervor to save democracy, are going to try to keep it that way.

Can you guess why Abe is at the top of this post? I bet you can!

I resolved to discuss this early yesterday, when the same Kamala surrogate—I had never seen him before, but he was a youngish black man and appropriately glib—was making the rounds of the news networks (even Fox News) arguing that Harris never has to agree to be interviewed and answer questions without a script or a teleprompter, and there isn’t anything wrong with that. After all, he argued while several talking heads expressed exasperation (notably Harris Faulkner on Fox and S.E. Cupp on CNN), the public doesn’t need spontaneous answers to learn what they need to know. Kamala Harris doesn’t do as well off script (Ya think?), so why should she agree to present herself in less than the best light?

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You Think I’m Too Tough On Ethics Alarms Commenters? Ann Althouse Says, “Hold My Beer!” I Say, “Bite Me!”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Sorry, this is petty, I know, but I can’t let this pass.

Here’s Althouse today: Presenting “We’re Having the Wrong Argument Over the Olympic Boxers/Questions about unfair advantage won’t just go away.” by Helen Lewis in The Atlantic for discussion, the retired law professor/blogress writes, “Please read the whole thing before commenting and restrict comments to the issue framed in the article, which I am not going to attempt to summarize. If you don’t know what 5ARD is, please don’t comment.”

Then it turned out that the article was behind a paywall, and you have to give The Atlantic a credit card to get your free trial subscription. “Oh, that’s a problem! Sorry,” says Althouse.

This garners (Ann hates the word “garner”) Althouse the second “Bite Me!” award of 2024. Ethics Alarms introduced the “Bite Me!” in 2023. It’s a distinction reserved for either an individual whose “response to being bullied, pressured and threatened into submissiveness is to say, “Do your worst. I believe in what I am doing, and I don’t grovel to mobs,” or as used several times in the course of 2023, the author of unethical conduct that demands the response, “Bite me!”

Ann falls in the second category.

Friday Open Forum on “Un-elected President Day”

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Propitiously enough, August 9 is the anniversary of our first un-elected President of the United States taking office at high noon in 1974. Gerald Ford was never on a Presidential ticket, having been appointed as Vice President upon the resignation of Richard Nixon’s vile VP, Spiro T. Agnew. At least Ford’s ascension came courtesy of a Constitutional amendment: it’s not like he bypassed a democratic nominating process or anything, but who would try something like that?

Let’s see what you can come up with to discuss today….

Another Day, Another Fact-Free Anti-Trump Smear From The Axis

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

One can safely add Yahoo! and the Los Angeles Times to the massive list of media organs that are ethically estopped from calling Donald Trump a habitual liar, since they habitually lie about him.

The most recent example comes from the Times uncritically and deceptively reporting on a series of hyper-partisan, hysterical rants by LGTBQ+ Democrats in San Francisco (well, its San Francisco). Yahoo! then circulated the propaganda under its own banner online. Like the good little Axis of Unethical Conduct members they are, the LA Times and Yahoo! dutifully reported pure Trump Derangement fiction as news, and it was biased, dishonest, unethical journalism from the headline to the finish.

Which, ironically, is not news either. This is how the news media has been operating where Trump is involved for ten years. This is how it plans on winning the Presidency for the Democrats again.

The headline is “‘Our lives are on the line’: Why many LGBTQ+ people hope for a Harris win.” Not one LGBTQ+ American’s “life is on the line” in this election by any stretch of the imagination. Trump does not oppose gay rights or same sex marriage. He has made it clear that he believes in treating such citizens as anyone else should be treated. Believing, as most conservatives, Republicans and people who haven’t been brainwashed or bullied do, that LGBTQ+ lifestyle propaganda does not belong in public school classes does not endanger LGBTQ+ rights or lives.

But the Times (and then Yahoo!) lied, because that’s what progressive journalism does now. It begins,

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Biden Withdrawal Ethics Train Wreck Update: No, Trump’s Condemnation Was Not “Noble”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Conservative pundit Stephen Green wrote today that Donald Trump’s statement saying “….Out Loud What Everybody in Washington Is Afraid To” was a noble act. Green went quite a bit further, too, concluding,

“I don’t care who you are — Republican, Democrat, MAGA, progressive, NeverTrump, traditional conservative, or even a filthy communist — if, at this moment, you can recognize this simple truth about what Trump said today. It was noble.  Biden was more than Trump’s political rival. He’s a man who has spent the last five years smearing Trump (and millions of Trump voters) as a racist, a phobic, a hater, a would-be dictator, an authoritarian, and worse. But now that Biden is as low as any president has been since Richard Nixon was forced out of office 50 years ago this week, Trump spoke the truth about what Biden’s own party did to him. If someone can’t recognize the nobility in that, then I still don’t care what they are because they’re a filthy commie at heart.”

Steve got just a teeny bit carried away. And I guess I’m a filthy commie, because I see nothing noble in Trump’s condemnation of Biden’s being pushed out. Oh, don’t get me wrong, there is plenty to condemn in the entire scenario. But Joe’s forced exit, when it finally happened, isn’t one of them. And while I’m ready to accept the possibility that Donald Trump may possess, somewhere, deep down and well hidden, the capacity for nobility, today’s self-serving statement wasn’t evidence of that.

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