This is serious. The last week or so has been disastrous for the Trump Administration, almost entirely because of its own foolishness, recklessness, and lack of competence. As I have noted more than once in this period, its missions are too important to be placed in jeopardy by hubris and stupidity, but that is what is happening. This is a phenomenon for which the President himself is entirely at fault. I have scant hope that he is capable of either recognizing the peril he is placing the nation in, or reforming. The President and his hand-picked loose cannons aren’t just shooting themselves in the metaphorical foot. The photo above is more accurate.
First, of course, we have the President’s own cruel, useless, gratuitous post insulting Rob Reiner after the director and his wife were murdered. Trump might as well have hit himself in the face with a cast-iron frying pan on national TV. It gave people who already hate him ammunition to say, “See?” It made moderates question his stability, self-control and character if they already didn’t, and it put his defenders in the position of defending the indefensible, thus diminishing their credibility and influence.
Right on cue, the Brown mass shooting was instantly the inspiration for the usual gang of anti-Second Amendment zealots, utopians,”Imagine” fans, fact-phobic progressives and nascent totalitarians (funny how they hang out together…huh!) to again scream for “common sense gun control.” Joe Biden did it, or whoever was standing near him barely moving their lips or pretending to drink a glass of water.
Last week, quirky, smart, logic-obsessed substacker Holly Mathnerd issued a typically thoughtful essay called “The Reality of Nationwide Gun Control…the math behind the policy.” Holly gifted me with a subscription to her blog a while back as a gesture of professional courtesy so I pass her analysis on to you. I have written essentially this exact post on Ethics Alarms before and long ago, however, and probably more than once. My reaction to Holly’s work is, “Yes, of course. Why do we keep having to explain this?” Her delivery is a lot less abrasive than mine, so if that helps, great.
Gun control is also on my list of policy objectives that I view as unethical because they are impossible, and arguing for them is 1) a waste of time, 2) misleads the slow of wit into thinking they aren’t impossible when they are, 3) constitute virtue-signaling and 4) would be terrible mistakes even if they weren’t impossible. Read Holly’s whole argument, but the short version is…
If “nationwide gun control” is going to mean anything more than a slogan, it has to be defined in operational terms. Not aspirations. Not values. Mechanics. Logistics. Physical Reality. What specific actions actual humans would have to take with their human bodies in the material world.
In a country with roughly 450 million privately held firearms already in circulation, nationwide gun control cannot mean preventing future purchases alone. Even a total ban on new sales would leave hundreds of millions of existing weapons untouched for decades. So the policy people are implicitly calling for is not regulation at the margin, but the systematic reduction of the existing stock of guns. That requires locating them.
There is no way to meaningfully restrict, reclaim, or eliminate privately owned firearms without first knowing who has them and where they are. Which means a comprehensive national registry: mandatory disclosure of ownership, backed by penalties for noncompliance, with mechanisms for verification. Anything less is symbolic. Once a registry exists, enforcement becomes unavoidable. Some people will comply. Many will not. Some will be confused, some distrustful, some quietly resistant.
That resistance is not an edge case; it is a certainty at this scale. At that point, enforcement ceases to be abstract. It becomes door-to-door. This is the moment where “nationwide gun control” stops sounding like a policy preference and starts sounding like a domestic enforcement regime. Warrants. Searches. Seizures. Follow-ups. Informants. Penalties for concealment. Escalation when compliance is refused.
There is no clean or frictionless version of this process, and no serious proposal pretends otherwise once you spell it out.
I’m rewriting a post from last Christmas that I liked, in part because the ethics news is ticking me off, in part because I am once again having a non-Christmas because I miss my late wife Grace too much to celebrate anything, and in part because the song means a lot to me. I foolishly posted the first version of this last year on Christmas day, guaranteeing that few would read it. I’ll try a bit earlier this time.
I co-wrote two Christmas revues for my late, lamented (by me, anyway) professional theater company in Arlington, Virginia, The American Century Theater. The most popular of the two (though not my personal favorite) was called “If Only In My Dreams,” a title taken from the lyrics of another wistful Christmas song, “I’ll Be Home For Christmas,” by lyricist Kim Gannon and composer Walter Kent. It was introduced by Bing Crosby in 1943—it’s amazing how many of our secular Christmas songs were first recorded by Bing. Well, maybe not so amazing: what was amazing was the range and warmth of his voice.
“If Only In My Dreams” was constructed around the letters written by GIs overseas during World War II to their families or girlfriends as Christmas loomed. They were published in an issue of American Heritage, a wonderful magazine now, sadly, in the company of Life, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post, gone and nearly forgotten. I alternated those letters with narration and the popular Christmas songs of the period. The brilliant Jacqueline Manger directed the show, which was being written as she rehearsed it.
The most famous and important of these songs was, of course, “White Christmas.” Bing Crosby’s version is still the best selling single of all time, and deserves the title. When Irving Berlin handed the song over to the musician who transcribed his melodies (Irv could not read music and composed by ear, just like another brilliant and prolific tune-smith, Paul McCartney), he famously announced that he had written, not just the best song he had ever created, but the best song that anyone had ever written. Continue reading →
I know this guy (not the guy in the picture: that’s Ben Stiller as “Mr. Furious” in “Mystery Men”), an opinionated retired lawyer convinced of his own intellectual superiority. I was still surprised at the bias and incompetence of his recent substack post titled “Trump: Death by Yesbuts.” Yet because it is another manifestation of extreme Trump Derangement, my Trump Deranged Facebook friend, another retired lawyer whose intellect is to Mr. Hirsch’s as Elon Musk’s is to a sea sponge, actually linked to this thing approvingly on Facebook. It is to weep. Is stupidity contagious now? Do we need a vaccine?
The author signals his incompetence and ethical vacuum in his very first paragraph by mocking jurors in a hung jury who told him, “Of course there was a reasonable doubt, but he was guilty.” We are not even told which side the jurors voted for, a factor rather crucial to making sense out of his analogy. That statement by itself would be consistent in the mouths of any of the jurors in Reginald Rose’s “Twelve Angry Men” who finally acquit the almost certainly guilty accused because the prosecution didn’t sufficiently prove the case against him. It was very reasonable for any juror to conclude that the kid committed the murder but that nonetheless, he was not proven guilty in court. In fact, this was my conclusion after watching the whole O.J. Simpson trial.
The rest of the article quickly devolves into standard anti-Trump distortions, name-calling and bias, as well as the familiar narrative discussed in my previous post. Hirsch writes,
Back in 2017, [Trump] told the Conservative Police Action Conference that “Nobody loves the First Amendment more than me.” But, he added, “The fake news doesn’t tell the truth. It doesn’t represent the people. It never will represent the people. We’re going to do something about it.”
In other words, “Yes, but….” “Freedom of speech” is a great phrase but the speech better not say bad things about me!
False translation, but then bias makes you stupid. Fake news doesn’t serve the people. Fake news is a blight on democracy, and it is very important to do something about it. Trump was not talking about news “saying bad things,” he was talking about the deliberate manipulation of facts for partisan gain.
The complaint filed yesterday in the Southern District of Florida states:
‘In the BBC Panorama documentary titled “Trump: A Second Chance”… first broadcast on October 28,2024, the BBC intentionally and maliciously sought to fully mislead its viewers around the world by splicing together two entirely separate parts of President Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021…. The Panorama Documentary deliberately omitted another critical part of the Speech in such a manner as to intentionally misrepresent the meaning of what President Trump said. The Panorama Documentary falsely depicted President Trump telling supporters: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”…
President Trump never uttered this sequence of words. This fabricated depiction of President Trump during the Speech was false, deceptive, and defamatory given that President Trump’s actual and full remarks during the Speech were (a) “Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down. Anyone you want but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressman and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them” (Remarks made on January 6, 2021, 12:12p.m. Eastern Standard Time, 14:52 into the Speech), and then, much later, (b) “[B]ut I said ‘Something’s wrong here, Something’s really wrong, can’t have happened.’ And we fight, we fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” (Remarks made on January 6, 2021 at 1:07 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, 69:30 into the Speech).
“Moreover, the BBC purposefully omitted President Trump stating, less than one minute after urging supporters to cheer for their senators and congressmen, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard” (Remarks made on January 6, 2021, 12:13 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, 15:48 into the Speech).”
This elegant Comment of the Day by CEES VAN BARNEVELDT is short by COTD standards, but I had to honor it. Yes, the comment echoes a theme that has been covered on Ethics Alarms many times, because I am an artist myself as well as a critic and connoisseur of art, and because I feel passionately that art of all kinds has an independent life from that of the artist. It is a Cognitive Dissonance Scale challenge, to be sure, when an artist’s horrible words, views, conduct or character are underwater on one’s personal CD scale and that artist’s creative output is high in positive territory. But one has to try, and try hard, to separate the two. So much of my favorite music was written by flawed, cold, even sick people. So much of the literature I love, and that has formed a great deal of my perspective on life, was authored by terrible human beings, except for that spark of brilliance. I believe with all my heart in Thomas Jefferson’s vision of America, democracy and liberty, but find his personal conduct and hypocrisy nauseating. And don’t get me started on the performing arts: to take the most prominent example, I have spent a large chunk of my life celebrating, admiring, interpreting and promoting the talentsand artistic output of Danny Kaye, who was, as I discovered late in the process, a misanthropic sociopath. That did not change however, the joy he brought to millions, his delightful performances in “The Court Jester,” “Hans Christian Anderson” or “White Christmas,” or the glory of Danny’s dazzling renditions of “Tchaikovsky” or “Anatole of Paris.”
There is no excuse for this and those tempted to defend it should staple their lips shut and super-glue their fingers together.
Quick points that should be obvious:
Trump has a political death wish exemplified by his determination to make his most irrational foes look like they have a good point about his character.
The man literally doesn’t know how a President of the United States should act, or if he does, doesn’t care, which is worse.
His administration’s many missions are too important for him to jeopardize them with petty, ugly, breaches of decency and dignity like this, just to satisfy a personal grudge against a man who just had his throat cut by his son.
Major Tipton is an appropriate host to this post, because, like the main character in the movie the Major memorably closes with that word, Rob Reiner was a good man turned in-side out ethically and rationally by powerful influences he was unable to resist. In Part I of this series inspired by the great director’s terrible death along with his wife at the hands of their son, I explained why I felt that Reiner’s decent into extreme and often humiliating Leftist cant should not diminish our regard for him as an artist, and why his political activism is best seen as a cautionary tale about how bias, implanted by one’s culture, can make one stupid unless eternal vigilance and self-examination are regularly applied.
To illustrate the extent of Rob Reiner’s deterioration inflicted on him by the Hollywood progressive culture, I am re-posting two essays from the Ethics Alarms archives, one from 2022, and the final post involving Reiner before the sad ones today.
Great movies. Classic movies. Movies that will have people laughing, crying and thinking for decades, and maybe centuries. That’s his legacy.
Reiner, a brilliant director and entertaining comic character actor died horribly with his wife last night, apparently murdered by their troubled son. Rob Reiner is the second Hollywood great whose end this year will always cast a shadow over his brilliant career, Gene Hackman being the other. It is so unfair when this happens, and it happens too often. I can’t watch Natalie Wood in a movie, not even “Miracle on 34th Street, ” without wondering if her husband Robert Wagner (I try not think about him at all) drowned her; I can’t watch Phillip Seymour Hoffman, one of the best actors in my lifetime, in any of his performances without my mind flashing back to his death from binging on heroin after seemingly conquering that addiction. Maybe it’s just me: I hope so.
I also hope conservative pundits and bloggers display more compassion, humanity and common sense than progressives and Democrats did when activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated. Reiner was an artist first and foremost, but he used his celebrity and resources to play at being a progressive activist and was really, really, really bad at it. Everyone will be doing him a great favor if they just ignore that embarrassing part of his life. Remember him for “THis is Spinal Tap,” “Stand by Me,” “When Harry Met Sally,” “The Princess Bride,” “A Few Good Men,” or one of his other films. Don’t let his Leftist craziness diminish your respect for his artistry. I regard his addiction to extreme progressive cant the equivalent of Hoffman’s addiction to heroin, or Spencer Tracy’s alcoholism.
Scumbag @BennieGThompson says the horrific attack on our two great National Guard heroes in D.C. was just an "unfortunate accident."@Sec_Noem: "You think that was an unfortunate accident!? It was a terrorist attack. He shot our National Guardsmen in the head." pic.twitter.com/O4hEDvYDuT
Wow. The depth of uselessness of our members of Congress apparently knows no bounds. Who the hell is “Benny Thompson” and what cabal of morons elected someone like that to the House of Representatives? Normally I would have looked for a freestanding video of that moment, but in this case the X poster’s ad hominem attack is fair and just.
This self-indicting fool has been in Congress since 1993 representaing Mississippi’s 2nd congressional district. Wikipedia says he was an “educator” after getting degrees from two “historically black” institutions, meaning, in most cases, that the degree means even less than most college degrees. Then, after undoubtedly making hundreds of young minds dumber teaching the kind of critical thinking that leads a man to call cold-blooded murder an accident, Bennie went into politics.
Ethics Alarms 