Donald Trump was on thin ice making fun of Chris Christy’s weight, but he just proved that he had better eschew impugning Joe Biden’s age-related cognitive decline as well.
Addressing the Pray Vote Stand summit in Washington, Trump said, “We have a man who is totally corrupt and the worst president in the history of our country, who is cognitively impaired, in no condition to lead, and is now in charge of dealing with Russia and possible nuclear war. Just think of it. We would be in World War II very quickly if we’re going to be relying on this man, and far more devastating than any war.”
Oopsie! Trump presumably meant (I hope!) World War III, not the conflict that ended in 1945. That was a Bidenesque gaffe, and the equivalent of a pundit making a grammatical error while writing about how current high school grads can’t write. And that wasn’t all. Later in the same speech, Trump started confusing Biden with Barack Obama.
No, of course not. In fact, it’s mandatory, necessary, and appropriate. Everyone knew, or should have know, that the progressive, woke, Democratic grandstanders who undermined U.S. sovereignty and the rule of law by announcing that their cities would not cooperate in the enforcement of immigration laws were irresponsible fool, indeed (sorry) destructive assholes all along. (Anyone who voted for such officials are also irresponsible assholes, just to get the accountability aligned,) Now, however, we know that they know they are assholes, and have to behave in a manner that exposes to all what assholes they are. This is great.
The utter hypocrisy of mayors and governors declaring their love for illegal immigrants as long as most of them arrived and stayed in cities along the Southern borders was exposed when governors of states overrun by what the news media calls “migrants” to hide their problematic and illegal features have sent busloads and plane-loads of the them to cities like New York City, Chicago and Washington, D.C. Suddenly, the “sanctuaries,” which were so compassionate and welcoming as long as there were few negative consequences of their facile lip-service were not so understanding.
Several news media sources have now reported that the Associated Press was informed about Susanna Gibson and her husband selling sexual perversions-on-demand via videos on the public porn site Chaturbate. A candidate for a state legislature seeking compensation for letting an audience see her urinate, perhaps on said husband (just to pick one possible videoed activity) is obviously both newsworthy and of legitimate interest to voters (despite the absurd line of defense now taken by Gibson, her defenders and her party), but the AP’s editors deliberately refused to report on it. Instead, the AP alerted Gibson that the secret of the videos was out, so she could take them down, which she did. This was on September 5.
The outlet then waited until September 12, after the scandal had been reported by others, including the Washington Post, to report it as news. Nice.
This story, which exploded my head, got very little commentary on Ethics Alarms last week, which surprised me. Maybe I wasn’t sufficiently clear: sex workers, prostitutes and whack jobs have run for state legislatures from time immemorial, but they are usually considered fringe campaigns and publicity stunts (you know, like Donald Trump’s campaign in 2015) and considered barely worth discussing by reporters. But the Democratic Party in Virginia is actively defending Gibson, really and truly saying that Gibson’s conduct online is just fine because no law was broken. This stance magnifies the possibility that the entire party has 1) lost its collective mind and 2) now has the comprehension of ethics, civics, society and public service of the average muskrat.
Now Gibson, who, if you haven’t read the post, has engaged in graphic sex acts with her husband in videos for the porn site Chaturbate even as she in running to be a Virginia lawmaker, is being enthusiastically defended by her party, despite the fact that the fun couple was offering to take requests for their porn performances in exchange for money. “Y’all can watch me pee if you tip me and some tokens,” Gibson can be heard saying in one graphic videos. “Again, I’m raising money for a good cause.”
I thought the fact that Gibson and her party were actually claiming that Republicans and the media were engaging in illegal “revenge porn” and somehow doing something wrong by alerting the public that a candidate was misrepresenting her character, activities and kinks in her campaign material was sufficient to ping ethics alarms, but maybe not. So let’s drill down more deeply into the muck:
…like Unethical Quote of the Month, Ethics Dunce, “It Isn’t What It Is” Master, “Biggest Hypocrite of 2023” frontrunner…oh, lots of Ethics Alarms awards. Plus, she outed herself as a rhetoric-challenged idiot who has no business teaching children, much less presuming to lead those who do. But I’m getting ahead of myself…
Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) President Stacy Davis Gates has been an vociferous opponents of parents who advocate for the ability to eschew public schools (which, as we know, are terrible educationally and politically) for other options via school vouchers. Here are some of her publicized comments:
“School choice was actually the choice of racists. It was created to avoid integrating schools with Black children. Now it’s the civil rights struggle of our generation?”
“I’m also a mother. My children go to Chicago Public Schools. These are things that help to legitimize my space within the coalition.”
“‘Segregation Academies’ …Call them private schools supported by taxpayer funds-vouchers-so your norther cousins understand better.
“I can’t advocate on behalf of public education without it taking root in my own household.
…and more. You know what I’m going to write next, don’t you? Surely you’ve seen this kind of set-up before. Yes, Gates recently placed her own teenage son in a Catholic high school located in Chicago’s South Side. This was so outstanding an example of hypocrisy by a politically involved public figure that even a CNN Democratic flack talking head was moved to challenge her on it.
Yes, it’s Bluto’s (John Belushi) now iconic gaffe in “Animal House” come true: “Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?” Those are German planes on the cover of Michael J. Clark’s history book for young readers about the sneak attack that brought the U.S. into World War II.
Just think about all of the careless, irresponsible boobs, including the author and the cover artist, who had to breach the ethical values of competence, diligence and respect for that book to be published and put on the market. How many must it have been? Then you can add to that List of Shame our pathetic, ruinous education system, which has produced such a nation of dolts that not even a humble secretary or passing clerk had the knowledge to point out, when they saw the book as it made its way through production, “Uh, aren’t those German planes?” Anyone who did, thus preventing this epic embarrassment, might have received a promotion or a bonus. Or at least someone would have bought him or her a nice lunch.
And this is one more example where cultural literacy rot matters. If you can’t learn your American history, at least know your classic films.
I did not see this coming at all. Obviously, neither did Oprah Winfrey.
On August 31, Winfrey and Dwayne Johnson united on their Instagram and TikTok accounts to promote their People’s Fund of Maui, which they had co-launched with a combined $10 million donation. The fund would support the victims of the Maui wildfires, and O joined with The Rock to call on the public for more contributions. The following accompanied their joint video, shot in Hawaii, naturally:
I want to thank everyone who pitched in to make the emergency Open Forum earlier this week as lively and interesting as it was. Now don’t rest on your laurels, though: as usual, there’s a lot out there in the ethics trees and underbrush to chew on…
What ever happened to the Doublemint Twins? I worry that they ended up like this…
“I think Donald Trump MUST die in prison…because either we’re going to protect the Democratic Republic or we’re going to allow people, in this case Trump to chip away at our democracy and chip away at what we believe in these institutions.”
That was Dean Obeidallah, long an extreme deranged leftist featured on the air and on the web by MSNBC (because extreme deranged leftists are the only alleged journalists and pundits that MSNBC deems worthy of a public platform), confirming again the totalitarian impulses of Democrats and the progressives of 2023. In an interview with Mediaite’s most left-biased reporter, Obeidallah ranted in part,
Trump MUST die in prison because I don’t care if he was 45 years old, you should get life in prison if you attempt a coup, and there should be no chance of parole. I don’t care who it is….That’s why I’m so passionate about, like with every fiber of my being, that Donald Trump has to live out his natural days, his last days of natural life in a prison cell…….And people accuse me like, oh, you say things that get people riled up like, nope, I or get what you said. I get organically riled up about this because I believe in this system. And, and if you don’t believe in it, so be it. But if you believe in it, I don’t think there’s any conclusion could bring that. Donald Trump has to end up in a prison cell and live his last days out in that prison cell.
In those three dots, Obeidallah claimed that the riot at the Capitol was an “attempted coup,” which is legal, factual and linguistical nonsense, and that’s what he thinks Donald Trump should be locked up for without a chance of parole. I’ve instructed my family that if I ever say anything that stupid in private they should bash in my head with a brick, and Obeidallah is paid by MSNBC for to give that level of ignorant, hysterical, inflammatory and irresponsible commentary over the air. I guess I owe Tucker Carlson a mea culpa: I thought he was too much of a demagogue to be allowed on TV. Continue reading →
I don’t know what you call this, but whatever it is, “ethics dunce” just isn’t enough.
That’s Susanna Gibson above with her husband (I don’t know where those annoying stars came from) performing on a porn website while she was already running as a candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates. The 40-year-old Democrat, along with her lawyer husband, have been appearing in flagrante delicto on an X-rated website, and offering to perform sundry sex acts in front of the camera, including those involving violence and bodily excretions, in exchange for money—not that there’s anything wrong with that.
But after the conservative Washington Free Beacon was tipped off to this rare proclivity on the part of a political candidate and wrote about it, Gibson announced that she was shocked—shocked!—that anyone would feel that a candidate for the legislature soliciting money for sex acts was something the public had a right to know about. She found a lawyer willing to try to use Maryland’s “revenge porn” law to punish such people. Daniel P. Watkins of the Meier Watkins Phillips Pusch firm, argues that “it’s illegal and it’s disgusting to disseminate this kind of material”and says that he is “working closely with the F.B.I. and local prosecutors to bring the wrongdoers to justice.”
Sure, Danny, good luck with that! It’s a ridiculous idea for a law suit, but ya never know, so it slips under the wire as “ethical,” though any lawyer bringing such a suit should have to wear a bag on his head.
Ethics Alarms 