A House Oversight Committee meeting was pondering whether Attorney General Merrick Garland be held in contempt of Congress when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), responded to a question from Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) by saying, “I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading.” Stay classy, MTG! (In truth, MTG has never been classy). “That is absolutely unacceptable,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez interjected, proving that she’s not wrong all the time. “How dare you attack the physical appearance of another person?”
Greene then turned her wit, such as it is, on AOC, asking, “Are your feelings hurt?” “Oh, girl? Baby girl,” Ocasio-Cortez replied, trying hard to sink to the ridiculous Republican’s level, “Don’t even play.” Then Greene asked Ocasio-Cortez, “Why don’t you debate me?,” and AOC snapped back, “it’s pretty self-evident.”
I wonder what she was referring to? Jean Kerr once wrote that it was folly to argue with a six-year-old because you would inevitably start sounding like one.
“You don’t have enough intelligence,” shot back Greene, eschewing the more sophisticated, “I’m rubber and you’re glue” bon mot.
Substantially correct, but rhetorically sloppy and needless inflammatory….in other words, typical of Trump.
Martha Pollack announced earlier this month that she will step down as the president of Cornell, running neck-and neck-and -neck-and neck with the other Ivy League indoctrination camps in seeding anti-white hate and anti-Semitism. She championed the Democratic Party led race-focused DEI initiative at Cornell in the wake of a non-racial incident in which a bad cop hastened the demise of a life-time petty perp and addict overdosing and resisting arrest in Minnesota. This, in turn, led to targeting of Jewish and pro-Israel students, to such an extent that Jewish students felt unsafe and threatened on their own campus; one student was charged with seriously threatening a Jewish massacre. Pollack has been weak and enabling toward the pro-terrorists even for an Ivy League president, resulting in terrible publicity for the school and many millions in lost donations.If she was “doing what she thought was right,” she didn’t even have the guts to follow-through on her misguided agenda: perhaps seeing the proverbial writing on the wall, she’s quitting before she can be fired.
But in the grand tradition of weenies and cowards everywhere, now that she is immune from consequences, Pollack took one last, disgusting swipe at her victims, praising the Hamas-supporting demonstrators in an email released on May 14. As Cornell professor William Jacobsen correctly noted, the message amounted to gaslighting. “The entire statement was demeaning and insulting, except to the anti-Israel protesters,” he wrote. It praised the students who threatened the Jews on campus and expressed “gratitude” that the demonstrations weren’t worse. The missive to the campus read in part:
Ugh. The old “public officials are responsible for keeping their wives in line” canard, which for some reason is only applied to conservatives by the mainstream news media. Or we could file this under “Hail Mary attempts to get the Supreme Court’s conservative Justices to recuse themselves so SCOTUS won’t strike down the totalitarian Left’s conspiracy to “get” Donald Trump by any means necessary, and law, ethics and democracy be damned.”
A New York Timesheadline yesterday shouted,“At Justice Alito’s House, a ‘Stop the Steal’ Symbol on Display.” Wow, what symbol was that? It was an upside-down American flag, seen flying over (much reviled, almost as much as Clarence Thomas) Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s house for a few days in January 2021. Because the flag was up in the period between the January 6 riot at the Capitol Joe Biden’s inauguration, the Times infers that the flag meant that Alito thinks the 2020 election was stolen from former President Trump.
Of course the Times dredged up some unethical ethics experts to deceive their readers about the seriousness of this. “Judicial experts said in interviews that the flag was a clear violation of ethics rules, which seek to avoid even the appearance of bias, and could sow doubt about Justice Alito’s impartiality in cases related to the election and the Capitol riot,” writes the Times, ostentatiously avoiding mentioning the names of the experts who said, as I would have, “What? This is nothing!”
“It might be his spouse or someone else living in his home, but he shouldn’t have it in his yard as his message to the world,” said Professor Amanda Frost at the University of Virginia law school. This is “the equivalent of putting a ‘Stop the Steal’ sign in your yard, which is a problem if you’re deciding election-related cases,” she said.
Uh, no it’s not, but that analysis is the equivalent of the professor wearing an “I am a partisan hack!” sign on her forehead.
Before turning the stage over to all of you (on Fridays “all” is hyperbole), I have to let you gawk at this, smoking gun evidence 1) of why I stopped getting the Post delivered to my front lawn; 2) that bias makes you stupid, and by “you” I mean especially Trump-Deranged Washington Post pundits; and 3) that the mainstream media thinks Americans are morons. Note the giggly, lowest common denominator tone of this piece of junk.
This is a gift article from me, meaning you don’t have to pay for it like I do. Its title is “How in the world is Trump’s trial not hurting him?” How in the world can even Washington Post Trump-hating columnists ask such a stupid question?
Well, you can muse on that mystery if you choose. I have a Serbian/Canadian podcast on conflicts of interest to do, and no, I’m not joking.
Only in the age of social media, mandatory conformity, and militant political correctness would a conservative Catholic commencement address at a tiny conservative Catholic Benedictine College, in Atchison, Kansas about 50 miles northwest of Kansas City, turn into a national controversy. Oops, I don’t want to bias the ethics quiz: forget the way I phrased that.
Harrison Butker of the Kansas City Chiefs, the place-kickers for the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs, was invited to give the Commencement speech for the 2024 graduating class, seemingly an odd choice, but then maybe not. Butker had been outspoken the Cathodic Church in recent years, and I strongly suspect that he delivered exactly what the leadership of Benedictine College was seeking at the ceremony last weekend.
To gauge the reactions on social media and elsewhere, however (it sure sounded like his speech was well-received by the students) you would think his address was from the fiery depths of Hell, as if he had supported Hamas terrorism or anti-Semitism or something. He was roundly attacked on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter/”X.” About 125,000 people have signed a petition on Change.org calling for the Chiefs to fire the kicker; typical progressives: if you don’t espouse their views and support their agendas, then you don’t deserve to make a living. The reliably despicable NFL felt it had to oppose the player’s statements, as if anyone thought he was speaking for the league rather than for himself. “Harrison Butker gave a speech in his personal capacity,” Jonathan Beane, the NFL’s senior vice president and chief diversity and inclusion officer, said in a written statement. “His views are not those of the NFL as an organization. The NFL is steadfast in our commitment to inclusion, which only makes our league stronger.” Naturally, the most corrupt and hypocritical league in sports felt it had to pander to the woke, and do so by uttering the magic word, “inclusion,” thereby falsely suggesting that Butker advocated exclusion. Best of all, Kansas City used its official social media account to reveal Butker’s residence, doxxing him. Nice. The city is sorry though. That will do him a lot of good when someone burns his house down.
I could quote the sections that has the Angry Left on the warpath—can I say that?—but instead I’m going to publish the whole speech. Then I’ll ask the Ethics Quiz question, and give my answer, abut which I feel strongly. Here is the speech:
At his weekly news conference two days ago, talking about New York City’s shortage of lifeguards for its public pools as the simmer months approach, New York City Mayor Eric Adams said,
“How do we have a large body of people that are in our city and country that are excellent swimmers and at the same time we need lifeguards? The only obstacle is that we won’t give them the right to work to become a lifeguard.”
He really said this. He did! I wouldn’t lie to you about something like that. That’s what the mayor of New York City said, and he wasn’t joking.
After the predictable response (well, Adams apparently is incapable of predicting it, but almost everyone with their cerebrum installed properly would be), the mayor’s attempt at “walking back” his idiocy only raised more doubts about his intellectual fitness (or rather, eliminated them). Adams suggested that illegal immigrants (he called them “migrants,” which doesn’t change what they are) could fill other key jobs in the city, in nursing and food service , for example. “Why people want to just hang onto swimming when I listed that we need to allow people to work,” he said. “Let people work.”
Yup, let’s allow people to break our laws and defy our immigration procedures, and be rewarded for it. Good plan! Why should any American respect our laws when elected leaders like Adams take that position? Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn) asked: “Do other Democrats like Joe Biden think breaking the law is qualification for employment in our country?” Why yes, Marsha, they do.
Somebody explain to the mayor that attaching any skill or characteristic to an entire group is at the core of stereotyping and bigotry. May I assume that Adams, as a black man, has great rhythm and can play a mean banjo?
Q: Since apparently wading or swimming across the Rio Grande is regarded as a career credential, why don’t our DEI obsessed Ivy League colleges extend swimming scholarships to these talented and buoyant “visitors”?
A: Because “not drowning” doesn’t make someone an “excellent swimmer.”
The signature significance test: Would any public figure who isn’t an idiot say this in a public forum, even once, without intending to be funny?
See? An Ethics Alarms Comment of the Day does not have to be the length of an honors thesis to qualify for the honor.
This one, courtesy of A.M. Golden, resonated with me the second I read it. The post commented upon was about my discussion last night with a very dear friend—one of those relationships in which it doesn’t matter how long you are apart, it picks up, unchanged, from exactly where it was whether it’s after five minutes or 20 years—who was noticeably wary about expressing a clear opinion on the Hamas-Israel War Ethics Train Wreck in our conversation. Here’s the Comment of the Day, on the post, “A Careful Conversation With An Old Friend,” and I’ll elaborate after you read it….
***
We’ve had more than one careful conversation with a family member here and there myself.
Isn’t it a shame that your Jewish friend felt he had to test the waters before expressing his opinion, though?
I received a surprise phone call today from a freind I have not seen for many years, and not seen frequently for more than a decade since he retired with his wife to Boca Raton. There are not too many people that I’ve known in my life who are as essentially good to the bone as—well, I’ll call him “Micah.” He’s a talented artist in many mediums, intuitive, sensitive, kind and wise. We decided to meet for a beer.
We didn’t lack for things to talk about—there was my wife’s sudden death, of course, but we also know so many of the same people and have many similar interests. I don’t think in all the years we have known each other, political topics have ever come up. But we got on the topic of our kids and our friends’ kids, my son’s decision to eschew college, and from that onto the recent disaster at Harvard, as Micah mentioned in passing that my having a degree from there “didn’t hurt.” My brief but detailed exposition in response regarding Harvard’s ethics rot led to his off-hand comment, “The stuff around the war in Gaza is really upsetting.”
My old fiend was being careful: that could mean anything. He didn’t want to draw me into an expression of opinion that might lead to a rift, and in over 40 years, we’ve never had a rift of any kind. Then he said, still being careful, “I can certainly understand why Netenyahu feels he must do what he is doing.
Micah is Jewish, though that aspect of his life almost never comes up. He added, “I know a lot of innocent people are being killed.” Then he dropped a clue: “….although they might not be as innocent as people think.”
Ah! My cue! I replied immediately, “If you want your family, your children and yourself to avoid the consequences of being in a war, you shouldn’t elect terrorists to run your government. And if you want to make certain that the terrorists next door don’t kill your children, your only choice is to do whatever is necessary to get rid of them permanently.”
Micah turned to me with a look I could only describe as relief. “Thank-you,” he said.
There was only a brief coda to the exchange, after which we went back to pleasant subjects (well, other than the death of my wife). I said, “President Biden’s attempt to take both sides at once is indefensible.” Always trying to see the other person’s point of view as is his wont, Micah replied, “Unfortunately it’s an election year, and whatever position Biden takes will have negative consequences.”
I said immediately, “When that’s the case, it should be relatively easy to do the right thing.” He looked at me with relief again. “That’s how I feel about it too.”
Then we talked about theater, baseball, sealing wax, and whether pigs have wings….
[WordPress’s crack AI bot tells me to tag this “Bible study.”]
I waited a few days before writing about this because I had to stop giggling to type.
I you watch Aaron Sorkin’s excellent if a bit too fawning movie, “The Trial of the Chicago Seven,” you will see that the anti-war campus protesters of the Sixties had, if nothing else, integrity and guts. Maybe they had inherited some from their parents, of “The Greatest Generation.” Today’s student protests in favor of Hamas, terrorism and Jew-killing (I know, I know: “Think of the children!”), in contrast, are marked by hypocrisy, ignorance and weenie-ism.
Princeton has certainly moved to the front of the line in the latter. After the protesting students announced a hunger strike in support of allegedly starving Gazans (Pro tip: if you don’t want to suffer from the predictable consequences of war, don’t elect terrorists as your government). Then they complained that they—the students, now, not the Gazans—were hungry. One female protester shouted into a megaphone, “This is absolutely unfair. My peers and I, we are starving. We are physically exhausted. I am quite literally shaking right now as you can see.” What, is the nearby McDonald’s closed?
Then the protesters persuaded some of the professors whose indoctrination made them the misguided weenies they are to make themselves look foolish by signing a letter of protest in the students’ support. It’s long and infuriating, but here are the best parts…
Ethics Alarms 