Per conservative blogger Jim Treacher, the Biden Campaign sent this out to supporters today…
Wow.
Observations:
U.S. Society
Answering Prof. Volokh’s Questions…
On his blog, The Volokh Conspiracy (which I have loyally followed from its independent days, to the Washington Post, and now at Reason), Prof. Eugene Volokh offers a series of rhetorical questions in his post, “Sad Thoughts About American Politics.” Volokh, whom I have corresponded with occasionally over the years, is the Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. More importantly, he’s a rational, fair analyst with keen ethics alarms. The point of rhetorical questions is to elicit a response inherent in the question’s phrasing and context. Nonetheless, I thought I’d warm up my faculties first thing this morning by answering the questioned he poses. These are just the question, now. In the post, he had considerable context and commentary. But I assume you know the context, and you can read the commentary at the link. Here are the questions…
Breaking: The Democrats Are Screwed
I know this is Nelson’s second visit in less than a week, but it’s still the most appropriate reaction.
This news just came to me from the New York Times. I have a gift link for you here, to get you past the pay wall.
The quick version is that the party was counting on the Biden family to sit old Joe down this weekend, tell him they love him, and convince him to drop out of the Presidential race. Instead, sayeth the Times (which itself had issued a panicked call for Joe to leave)…
“…President Biden’s family is urging him to stay in the race and keep fighting despite last week’s disastrous debate performance, even as some members of his clan privately expressed exasperation at how he was prepared for the event by his staff, people close to the situation said on Sunday. Mr. Biden huddled with his wife, children and grandchildren at Camp David while he tried to figure out how to tamp down Democratic anxiety. While his relatives were acutely aware of how poorly he did against former President Donald J. Trump, they argued that he could still show the country that he remains capable of serving for another four years.”
Amusingly, Hunter is reported to be the most adamant that Biden stay in the White House until they carry him out. Of course! Joe is his meal-ticket. Without him, Biden’s black sheep son is just another junkie.
Again, I feel nothing but pity and embarrassment for our President (and contempt for his selfish, irresponsible family), but as for the chaos this development inflicts on the Democrats, good. They deserve every bit of it and more. The party’s self-made crisis is what George Will used to call “condign justice.”
Momentous Week Ethics Countdown…6/30/24: Only 3 Out Of 5 Are Debate-Related!
I wasn’t going to do one of these today because I really don’t have time, but this comment from Althouse today isn’t worth a whole post but can’t be allowed to pass. She wrote,
“By the way, is it “entirely possible that Biden could have a much stronger debate in September”? Not only is it entirely possible for Biden to have a much stronger debate in September, it’s entirely possible that if you calm yourself, clear your head of preconceptions, and cue up last Thursday’s debate and watch it again, you will perceive it as a much stronger debate than it seemed on first watch.”
Oh, Ann, Ann. What the hell is the matter with her? She’s still flogging her initial reaction that Biden was “bad” but not “that bad.” Sure it was “that bad.” Even if there had been just a single attack of confused gibberish like the one that prompted Trump’s killer line about Joe not even knowing what he meant, it would have made the debate a historic political disaster. What part of “All Biden had to do was show he wasn’t too addled and feeble to be trusted to lead the nation, and he couldn’t do it” escapes her? That quote makes me wonder if she’s losing it.
And there is no chance, absolutely none, that Biden is going to improve in three months. How would that happen? I had an older friend a few years ago who showed symptoms similar to Biden’s in a da- long meeting we had about his play that I was preparing to direct. It was one of the longest, most depressing three hours of my life. Less than three months later, he could barely speak and was completely disoriented.
That was dementia, but what is Ann’s excuse? Excessive hope? A massive blind spot? Denial? Contrarianism? Her not-so-secret Democrat taking over, like Pazuzu?
It’s unethical for opinion writers who people trust to offer recklessly absurd opinions.
Meanwhile, counting down…
Let’s Play “Guess the Ethicists’ Answers!”
This week’s highlighted question for Kwame Anthony Appiah, the NYU philosophy prof who serves as the New York Times’ Magazine’s first real ethicist to take on the role of “The Ethicist” in its long-running advice column, had me pausing to see if I could guess his response. I was wrong: maybe you can do better. Then try to guess mine.
Here’s the question:
“I worked part time for my granduncle’s business when I was 13 and 14. There were many times when we were alone, and he sexually abused me. I never raised it with my parents in those early years; I doubted I would be believed, and my granduncle was a ‘‘kind old man’’ who was very generous to my financially strained family.
In my late 20s, while in therapy, I began to realize the impact those experiences had on me. I told my husband and my parents what happened all those years ago. I received the essential support I needed from my father and my husband. But my relationship with my mother became fraught. When I shared the events with her, she told me that the same man sexually abused her when she was a teenager and that she never told anyone. At first, we were angry about the impact on both of us, but then I became angry at her for not protecting me. How could she have possibly allowed her teenage daughter to regularly be alone with this man? She said that because he was an old man when I worked for him, she didn’t think he would still do the same things. She also asked that I not share this information with my father, fearing that he would blame her for not protecting me.
Knowing that the truth might destroy their marriage, I have remained silent about my mother’s experience and have kept it a secret at her request. I encouraged my mother to attend counseling to address the issue, but she has never done so. Nor has she told my dad. I’ve lost a lot of respect for her over this; her decision seems a selfish one.
I am now in my 50s, my parents are in their 80s and the secret is still buried. My dad continues to ask why I don’t spend more time with my mother; it clearly bothers him. I wonder if it is time to share the secret with him. Is unburdening myself of this secret worth causing disruption and sadness at this late stage of my dad’s life and my parents’ 60-year marriage?“
OK, thinking music time!
Time’s up! Do you have your answers? What did The Ethicist say, and what was my (instant) response?
Ethics Dunces: 1) Anyone Who Says Biden Didn’t Lose the Debate 2) Anyone Who Will Still Vote For Biden After Watching the Debate.
I know that headline will get some heads-a-blowing. So be it. It’s true.
A CNN quickie poll of debate watchers conducted by SSRS found that the majority of registered voters who watched the debate believed that Biden lost in in a 67% to 33% split. 69% of Democratic debate watchers actually said that Biden won the debate.
There is no accounting for opinions or taste, but saying that Biden won last night’s debate cannot be defended except as dishonesty, denial, or insanity. If that performance won, how could Biden have lost? By simply lying supine on the stage, farting and drooling? With these people —69% of Democrats!—maybe they would have even called that winning. Fine, they could say that they won’t change their minds about the candidates just because Biden lost the debate, since they have been brainwashed into thinking Trump is Satan. They could say that Biden lost the debate but still has their trust that he can handle the job for four years, as absurd a position as that is. However, they cannot say that Biden won the debate unless they completely redefine “won” as “made a complete fool of himself and embarrassed his party, his supporters and his country.”
That 69% figure as well as 33% of the total group polled need to be immediately installed in the Bias Makes You Stupid Hall of Fame.
Wait, Does Trump Read Ethics Alarms?
He essentially used almost the exact same “kill line” on Biden that I recommended:
“I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence; I don’t think he knows what he said either.”
Of course, it’s a pretty obvious one, but at least he or someone on his team is alert.
And no, I am not watching this nadir in our democracy’s history. Someone who had read my post called me up to tell me about it.
Looking around the web and social media, it appears that the Axis will have a tough time spinning this. From S.E. Cupp, one of CNN’s token conservatives who hates Trump:
“Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Anti-Semitism…”
“Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias” is a tag here, representing the sarcastic like EA uses periodically to mock the stubborn gaslighters who insist against overwhelming evidence that we have a benign, honest, objective journalistic establishment when we do not, much to the nation’s despond. Sometimes the metaphorical smoking guns are more choking than others. (One of the reasons I will not be watching tonight’s “debate” is because I fully expect the smoke to be especially thick.)
Confronting My Biases, Episode 11: People Who Knock On My Door
Unlike a lot of the biases in this series, I know this bias is irrational, neighborly and unfair. However, I just can’t shake it. My first instinct, always, when I hear a knock on the door (I disconnected the door bell long ago when it kept going off on its own) is some mixture of anger, annoyance, and dread.
The bias became full blown when a large female Alzheimer patient startled Grace and I awake one morning shortly after we were married by banging on our front door while roaring angry gibberish. It turned out she had wandered off from a facility and thought she lived here. Four police officers had a hard time corralling her. Long before that, though, my mother had poisoned me against the whole concept of surprise visitors: she distrusted them. Then there was that mentally ill guy with an old Weimeraner on a leash who would knock on our door in Arlington, Mass. still thinking he was an air raid warden and that it was World War II. I remember that he had clear blue eyes, dead eyes, like a zombie. This was before I had ever encountered Jehovah’s Witnesses, kids selling magazines to pay for a trip to Disney World, and Comcast salesmen.
And before I had watched so many home-invasion movies.
Why I Won’t Be Watching the Biden-Trump Debate
The short answer is that I don’t feel like cleaning up all the brains, blood and bone after multiple head-explosions. The long answer follows.
The fact that a Presidential election (Is it “the most important Presidential election” ever? This has been claimed about almost every election I can remember, and I remember all of them since I was 10 years old. The Chicken Little Principle applies. Maybe it is, but the whole concept has been abused) is really and truly going forward with these two epically bad candidates as the public’s only serious alternatives represents a catastrophic failure of our system on many levels. This is not a good sign. We could not reach such a dire point if both parties, the public, our institutions, culture and values had not fallen apart in chunks. For me, watching the debate would feel like watching a bloody car crash involving close friends and relatives, except in their car seats instead, without seat belts, will be the United States of America.
Ethics Alarms 