I really don’t have time this morning to do the analysis of yesterday’s latest SCOTUS decision that it deserves, or even to complete the deserved excoriation of the liars, hysterics and morons have made utter asses of themselves while making ignorant and gullible members of the public more ignorant still. I was grateful to see Prof. Turley’s essay this morning, which is exactly what I expected it to be.
But all anyone had to do was to read the damn opinion, which you can and should do here. It is a moderate opinion. It is a careful opinion, and it was an unavoidable one. It is also an opinion that would never have been necessary if the totalitarian Democrats hadn’t decided to weaponize the criminal justice system in a last ditch effort to stop Donald Trump from defeating their demented, puppet President.
Here are the distinguished individuals Harvard saw fit to award honorary degrees to at graduation this year. (I’m sure some of them, heck, maybe all, are very fine people) :
Gustavo Dudamel, music and artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, his home country, and music and artistic director-designate of the New York Philharmonic
Jennie Chin Hansen, immediate past chief executive of the American Geriatrics Society, and past president of AARP—a pioneer in care for the elderly.
Sylvester James Gates Jr., Clark Leadership Chair in Science and Distinguished University Professor and a University System of Maryland Regents Professor, a theoretical physicist who has worked on supersymmetry, supergravity, and superstring theory.
Joy Harjo, twenty-third Poet Laureate of the United States, 2019-2022, the author of 10 books of poetry (plus plays, children’s books, and two volumes of memoir), and a performing musician who played for many years with her band, Poetic Justice, and has produced seven albums.
Maria A. Ressa, co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 (with Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov) for her brave, independent news coverage of her native Philippines.
(Former Harvard president Lawrence Bacow also got an honorary degree, but ex-Harvard presidents always do if they manage not to get fired for plagiarism, so he doesn’t count.)
Interesting. Out of five honorees, not one was a white American, not even a white woman, or a white LGTBQ warrior. A Venezuelan male, a female Filipino, Harjo is Native American, Gates is black, and Hansen is Asian American.
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…
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.”
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.
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) June 30, 2024
If Joe Scarborough had a scrap of decency, an atom of responsibility, or a wisp of the capacity for shame, he would voluntarily end his “Morning Joe” show, retire to private life, and ideally wear a paper bag over his head ’til the end of his days. Of course, if MSNBC was a professional news operation and not a den of hacks, it wouldn’t allow Scarborough back on the air next week.
I nearly posted about Scarborough two days ago, before I saw this clip today. He was featured in the Times piece titled “One by One, Biden’s Closest Media Allies Defect After the Debate.” The main three close Biden “media allies” mentioned were Morning Joe, Van Jones and NYT columnist Thomas Friedman. I was going to write something along the lines of, “Scarborough, Jones and Friedman! Would it be possible to gather an array of less credible, more ethically-revolting weasels? Having allies like them mean nothing, and having allies like them abandon you means nothing. Has the fable of the Scorpion and the Frog ever been more applicable?” Here’s the last addition to Van Jones’ Ethics Alarms dossier: he’s a proven anti-white race-huckster and face-man who cleans up nice for cameras and usually keeps his inner racist at bay so he can keep his lucrative CNN gig. The last time Friedman made the blog was in 2019, when he wrote that President Trump was “protected by big media outlets”! He really wrote that.
Now here’s how the sad Times story begins, talking about Scarborough:
The <gasp!> apocalyptic news was the New York Times posting an editorial board statement telling Biden he has to go “for the good of the country.” Of course, the Times can’t be expected to accept a share of responsibility for saddling the U.S. with Biden by burying the credible account of a staffer who claimed he raped her, hiding the Hunter laptop story until the success of Joe’s basement campaign was cinched, and generally serving as an uncritical Democratic Party cheering section when it counts. The Times also let the completely discredited Lincoln Project take a typical shot at Trump in its op-ed pages. And a silly one: the Project’s mouthpiece said that Trump botched the debate because he didn’t “lay out a positive economic plan to appeal to middle-class voters feeling economic pressure” (Sure he did: get Joe Biden out of the White House! Works for me!) and reverse himself on abortion, saving “young girls” from having to “endure extremist politicians eager to criminalize what was a constitutional right for two generations.” No woman is in danger of ever being imprisoned in the U.S. for having an abortion. Dumb prosecutors will do dumb things, but that’s no reason to ignore the critical issue at the core of the abortion problem: the delicate human lives abortion enthusiasts want to ignore. In the debate, Trump focused on that. It wasn’t a mistake.
As for the Times board, it dutifully parroted the official DNC talking points about Trump’s lies and “lies,” as if Biden wasn’t spitting out whoppers himself when it was possible to figure out what he was saying. The Times also used the latest trope from the Axis: Republicans should consider replacing Trump. Sure, that makes sense. If Biden was a complete vegetable and still beating Trump in the polls, is there any chance that Democrats would replace him as their nominee? Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!
Except for one brief moment of frustration and madness, Ethics Alarms has been consistent in its derision of the concept of reparations for slavery. Illogical, legally unhinged, divisive, anti-democratic and most of all, impossible, this really bad idea, a favorite of get-rich-quick racial grievance hucksters and reality-resistant progressives, still hangs around like old unwashed socks, and no amount of argument or reasoning seems to be able to send them to the rag pile. Recently both California, where terrible leftist ideas go to thrive and ruin things, and New York, which really should be moved to the West Coast, have both at least pretended to endorse reparations for slavery. California’s ridiculous reparations task force has proposed giving $223,200 each to all descendants of slaves in California, on the theory that it will be a just remedy for housing discrimination against blacks between 1933 and 1977. The cost to California taxpayers would be about $559 billion, more than California’s entire annual budget (that the state already can’t afford), and that doesn’t include the massive cost of administrating the hand-outs and dealing with all the law suits it is bound to generate.
Brilliant. But that’s reparations for you! Logic, common sense and reality have nothing to do with it.
Now comes two wokey professors from—you guessed it, Harvard, to issue a scholarly paper published in “The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences,” titled “Normalizing Reparations: U.S. Precedent, Norms, and Models for Compensating Harms and Implications for Reparations to Black Americans.” The thesis of this thing is essentially that reparations for slavery should be paid because “Everybody Does It,” offering variations of the #1 rationalization on the list that don’t properly apply to slavery at all. (What? The descendants of slaves are not like fishermen facing depleted fish stocks?) The paper is being called a “study”: it is not a study, but rather an activist advocacy piece. (I would have bet that both scholars are black; nope, just one is, although I would not be surprised to learn that Linda J. Bilmes signed on just to help Cornell William Brooks avoid the obvious accusation of bias and conflict of interest. And, naturally, at Harvard taking on such a mission, certifiably bats though it is, can only enhance her popularity on campus.)
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?
