What Trump said (in his interview with Tucker Carlson) about the odious Elizabeth Cheney:

“Look, she’s a deranged person. The reason she doesn’t like me is that she wanted to stay in Iraq, she wants to — tough, tough person, you know, people get killed all over, she’s real tough, right? … But the reason she couldn’t stand me is that she always wanted to go to war with people. I don’t want to go to war. She wanted to go — she wanted to stay in Syria. I took them out. She wanted to stay in Iraq. I took them out. I mean, if it were up to her, we’d be in 50 different countries. No. 1, it’s very dangerous, No. 2, a lot of people get killed, and No. 3, it’s very, very expensive. … She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face. You know they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, ‘Oh, gee, well, let’s send, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.’ But she’s a stupid person. And I used to have — I’d have meetings with a lot of people, and she always wanted to go to war with people.“

How the Axis news media reported it:

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I have some tweaks to make for this, but in general it’s spot on.

1. It is a stupid quote on its face, of course. Trump served as President for four years and the results were mostly positive despite deliberate and unethical efforts by the Axis of Unethical Conduct to undermine him. The Presidency is a unique job; by definition anyone who had been President (and not suffered a major cognitive decline subsequently, but that’s just a wild hypothetical) is more qualified than anyone who hasn’t been President.

2. What the anonymous (how courageous!) exec means is “if Trump wins despite eight years of 90% of the news media doing everything it it power to poison the public against him while covering up the vile conduct of Democrats” American journalism has no credibility any more and not enough power to manipulate our politics and public policy as its practitioners long to do.

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I think it’s time for a new ethicist to write “The Ethicist” column…

Kwame Anthony Appiah has been shaky all year, but he seems to be bottoming out. A disturbed inquirer who works in the I.T. department of a town government asked what he should do about his boss, who “frequently discusses bizarre ideas” including conspiracy theories about lizard people infiltrating the federal government and the Rothschilds as “vampiric blood drinkers.”

“It is not outside the realm of possibility that this alternate reality could compromise the director’s decision-making, potentially jeopardizing the security of our town’s sensitive information,” he writes, but although the concerned worker has gone “up the ladder” as we say in the ethics biz, none of the manager’s superiors think there is a problem.

“I am left in a difficult position, fearing not only for the security of our town’s data but also for my own job stability under a manager detached from reality. Is it ethical for someone in such a crucial role to openly espouse these beliefs at work?” he asks “The Ethicist.”

The last question is a legitimate one, so, naturally, Prof. Appiah virtually ignores it, only saying that because the Rothschild fantasy is a famous anti-Jewish libel, it “raises a workplace issue.” However, it is a workplace issue whether the manager is inflicting his opinions on the staff about the virtues of abortion or a plague of lizard people. The ethical policy is easy: co-workers should never proselytize others in the work place about anything and that goes triple for supervisors. Instead, “The Ethicist” turns in this direction:

“It also raises a judgment issue. Maybe their appetite for this stuff will have no effect on their professionalism, but why take the risk? People who harbor suspicions about vast conspiracies are, as we’ve learned, prone to being manipulated. The World Economic Forum’s Global Risk report for 2022 reported that 95 percent of cybersecurity failings were traceable to human error. People appear to be the weakest link in cybersecurity, and so a secure system depends on keeping track not just of hardware and software but of the people who interact with them as well. Given that you’ve tried getting senior management to do something about this, you’re entitled to act as a whistle-blower here and get the word out. I hope that you do.”

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