Yesterday, I got up early and drove to my polling station, parked along the side of the road because I knew I wouldn’t find a space on the parking lot of the local Lions Club and got into a line that stretched to the end of said parking lot. The line began to extend onto the side of the road. It was 5:50 AM. It was a beautiful sight.
I was in the door at 6:24 AM. I had my ballot by 6:30 AM. I had filled it out by 6:35 AM. I stuck it in the scanner and got my sticker at 6:40 AM.
When I got home, I took my sticker, wrote “Garbage” on it and wore it proudly all day. I also posted on Facebook Abraham Lincoln’s famous statement from his first Inaugural Address (when the country was in far worse straits than it is now): “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
I kept up with the news all day long. The voting machines in Pennsylvania that didn’t work (that one of the most technologically-advanced countries in the world cannot run an election without these kinds of antics happening is absurd). The Voting Guides handed out in Rhode Island that were allegedly real ballots with the Republicans whited out. The bizarre happenings in Milwaukee where the ballots had to be recounted. The bomb threats in Georgia. Mr. Golden and our son went to vote later in the day and didn’t get stickers because they were out. In fact, the polling station ran out of ballots around 1:30 PM yesterday and had to get more.
In Harris’s (late) concession speech to her supporters, she told them to “fight” and “keep fighting.” Trump said that on Januray 6, and when the crowd went off and started a riot, he was accused of telling his follower to literally fight. He was accused of leading an insurrection: MSNBC repeated that canard all night.
Naturally, it never occurred to Harris that her choice of words was gross hypocrisy, and exposed the double standards Trump has been subjected to since 2016.
Thanks, Kamala. You’re an idiot, but that was helpful.
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 iskeeping 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.
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.
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…
1. As I write this, the New York Times‘ model is predicting that Trump will win the popular vote and pegs his chances of winning the election at 90%. It’s a shame that I don’t trust anything the Times says.
2. The best column of the day came from David Harsanyi, a conservative pundit who is not a Trump fan. Best paragraph:
“The unhinged, hysterical meltdown of the Left over former President Donald Trump’s candidacy is unparalleled in modern history. Women who walk around cosplaying The Handmaid’s Tale are living in the wealthiest and freest place women have ever known. They will continue to do so, even if Trump finds his way back into the White House for four years. The very notion that “democracy” hinges on the unfettered availability of third-trimester abortions is a kind of corrosive delusion only partisanship can whip up in otherwise rational people. Then again, we already know if Trump wins, every innocuous tax cut will be treated like the Reichstag fire.”
Bingo.
3. The super fancy computer maps are distracting and no improvement over the old fashioned tote boards of the past; in fact, they are much worse. Over at Fox News, poor Bill Hemmer is constantly saying, “Sorry, sorry…there we go…oops, wrong screen…”
4. MSNBC’s propagandists are furious and in a foul mood, as well as lying their fool heads off, as usual. Joy Reid announced that black men were not supporting Trump any more than in 2020—that’s untrue. Lawrence O’Donnell went on a rant about how the Republicans get “to play by different rules than Democrats,” which qualifies as gaslighting. They were joined by smirking Rachel Maddow in gratuitous Trump-bashing: if you can’t beat him, smear him.
I hope I can stay awake to watch the meltdown if and when Trump is declared the winner.
5. It’s ugly and stupid over on Facebook, as I have had to wrestle my fingers to the floor to stop myself from picking off the ridiculous, poorly reasoned, ignorant claims and rationalizations from people who once were rational even as you and I until their brains were eaten by Trump Derangement.
6. Ann Seltzer, whose polling stunned everyone by showing Harris winning Iowa, a GOP stronghold, needs to go into another field. Trump is winning the state by 14 pts. How incompetent. How embarrassing.
7. Fox News keeps saying that if Trump wins, it will be the greatest comeback in American political history. This is just wrong. Richard Nixon will always have that distinction. He lost the Presidential election in 1960, then lost in an upset when he ran for governor of California in 1962. Everyone assumed he had signed his political obituary when he gave a bitter, self-pitying concession speech and appeared to announce that he was quitting politics. In 1964, he wasn’t a factor in the Presidential race at all, and was just practicing law in New York. Four years later, Nixon was President.
8.[Added, 1:17 am] I can’t let this pass. Juan Williams just got on Fox News and attributed Trump’s increasingly likely victory (the Times now has the likelihood at 95%) to racism and sexism. Over at MSNBC, the horrible Joy Reid actually said that Harris had run a “perfect” campaign, which is so absurd she should have been yanked off the set with a hook. This tells me that the programmed narrative if Harris loses is that it was only bigotry that defeated her, and not the fact that she was a weak and unappealing candidate who ran a terrible campaign.
I haven’t had time to finish my post honoring my friend, boss, advisor and mentor Tom Donohue, the long-time president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce whose funeral service I attended last week. I did, however, have an opportunity to follow his example today. Tom would have approved.
One of Tom’s life rules was “If you can help someone, young or old, in their career, do it.” He explained his dedication to this practice by saying, simply, “It’s the right thing to do. If you do it for others, they will do it for someone else when they are in a position to help. It makes society better. It maks life better.” And indeed, when I was in a protracted job search after leaving the Chamber, Tom made calls for me, and set up some networking meetings. (One was with Mitch McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, who treated me like poop on her shoe. But that’s another story…)
Today, in a busy, troubled day, I reluctantly listened to a sales pitch from a Verizon representative who knocked on my door offering special high-speed internet deals. He was a young African American man, in his twenties, and I was impressed with his poise and demeanor. I spend an hour talking with him—yes, I signed up to finally dump Comcast—and we learned a lot about each other. He told me he was starting up his own business while working for Verizon, and confessed to being a little frightened of the risk and the looming challenges of management. I shared some favorite stories about the national culture of risk taking and my own experiences with success and failure.
After our meeting I kept thinking about the kid, and for some reason Tom’s words came back to me while I was walking Spuds. Upon returning home, I called the young man; he had left his contact information. I told him that he had given me a good deal, and I wanted to offer him a deal in return: as an ethicist, I was available to him for advice and guidance at any point in his business adventures or in life. He just had to call.
He was exuberantly thankful, and I said, “Now make sure you call me before you make a mistake, if you can. But I’ll be helpful after one too. I’m serious about this.”
Who knows if he’ll really seek my advice? But at least he knows he has the resource.
In 2020, as discussed here, The NeverTrump Lincoln Project joined the anti-Trump Democrats in targeting law firms hired by the Trump campaign to challenge alleged irregularities in the election. Election law specialists Porter, Wright, Morris & Arthur and its lawyers were threatened with professional ruin and financial disaster, as they were told that daring to support the President of the United States constitutes a “dangerous attack on our democracy.” The firm, showing a dearth of legal ethics and integrity, withdrew, whining that the assault on its reputation created a conflict of interest, was disrupting the firm, and had prompted at least one lawyer’s resignation. Other firms dropped the campaign as a client, and the reason was fear—of losing clients, of being shunned in the legal community, of losing money. Mostly the latter.
How times had changed. When Bush Department of Defense Deputy Secretary Cully Stimson, a lawyer, gave a radio interview in which he condemned attorneys from large law firms who were representing Guantanamo Bay detainees pro bono and suggested that corporations avoid employing those firms because they were aiding the nation’s enemies, the legal profession reacted with indignation and horror. Karen J. Mathis, then the president of the American Bar Association, said, “Lawyers represent people in criminal cases to fulfill a core American value: the treatment of all people equally before the law. To impugn those who are doing this critical work — and doing it on a volunteer basis — is deeply offensive to members of the legal profession, and we hope to all Americans.” Prof. Stephen Gillers, the media’s favorite legal ethicist thanks to his penchant for being hard on conservatives and lenient on liberals, wrote, “This is prejudicial to the administration of justice. It’s possible that lawyers willing to undertake what has been long viewed as an admirable chore will decline to do so for fear of antagonizing important clients.” Christopher Moore, a lawyer at the New York firm Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton continued the profession’s defense of core lawyer ethics, telling the New York Times, “We believe in the concept of justice and that every person is entitled to counsel.”
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.”
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.
Ethics Alarms 