Comment of the Day: “Ethics Dunce And Unethical Quote of the Week: Emmy Winner Hannah Einbinder, Plus Another ‘Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias’ Moment by the Times…”

I used to follow up every Oscar telecast by chiding the Academy of Motion Picture Sciences for their omissions in the annual “In Memoriam” segment, which were often egregious. (How do you snub the likes of Harry Morgan and Stella Stevens?) I never did the same with the Emmys because I never watch the Emmys, but it has occurred to me that increasingly that awards show is more indicative of the state of American culture than the Oscars. Movies are going the way of live theater (Gee, thanks Wuhan virus!), and given the incompetence and political arrogance of Hollywood, it’s not the tragedy I once would have thought it was.

I found a special treat in the comment by AM Golden about this weekend’s Emmy Awards broadcast, as I saw an Emmys version of my annual Oscar posts! Here’s that Comment of the Day on the post “Comment of the Day: Ethics Dunce And Unethical Quote of the Week: Emmy Winner Hannah Einbinder, Plus Another ‘Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias’ Moment by the Times…”. I’ll have a few comments at the end…

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Does anyone care about these awards anymore? Does anyone know any of the actors nominated?

As is my tradition, I skipped the ceremony and watched the In Memoriam this morning. I do this to grumpily catalog how many deaths were overlooked.

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An Ethics Alarms Hat Trick!Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga) Earns Ethics Dunce, Unethical Quote of the Month, and Incompetent Elected Official of the Month!

In addition to her many, many flaws, Taylor Greene, strong contender for the Worst Member of Congress in the Worst Congressional Class Ever, doesn’t understand the basic political rule expressed first by Napoleon: ‘”Never interfere with an enemy while he’s in the process of destroying himself.”

What an embarrassment. What an idiot! All around her the Axis is showing just how untrustworthy its members are by trying lie its way out of the uncomfortable reality exposed by Charley Kirk’s assassination while a disgusting number Democrats and progressives are cheering his death on social media. And what does she do? She issues a statement just as offensive and irresponsible so they can try to shift the conversation to “intolerance on the Right.”

Brilliant.

Here is what the Georgia Congresswoman (Be proud, Georgia Republicans!) wrote on “X” (in addition to the hat trick, she also won “Unethical Tweet of the Month” in tough competition):

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The Washington Post Fires Columnist Karen Attiah…Just As Ethics Alarms Recommended In 2023

On January 18, 2023, the racist black female Washington Post columnist made as ass of herself by insisting that the newly unveiled sculpture (in Boston) celebrating the marriage of Martin Luther King and Coretta “perfectly represents how White America loves to butcher MLK.” Karen Attiah didn’t bother to check on the race of the sculptor (who was black) or the commission that approved the design (mostly black). I wrote in part,

How can someone be an incompetent racist? Like this. Al Sharpton is a skilled racist. Joy Reid is a skilled racist. Michelle Obama is a skilled racist. Charles Blow is a skilled racist. Appiah is a ridiculously careless and dumb racist. How could someone publish a diatribe like she did without checking to see whether the artist was white?
 
She could because she is such a racist that it never occurred to her that something she objected to wasn’t the fault of whites. This is the apex of racism, its most ugly form. To the KKK, everything wrong with their nation was the fault of blacks, Catholics and immigrants. To Hitler, all of Germany’s ills were attributable to Jews. To people like Attiah—and don’t kid yourself, there are a lot of them—whites are the enemy, evil and a human pathogen on society.
 
That’s bad enough that it should disqualify her from a position of authority and influence at the Washington Post. But she also has exposed herself as frighteningly lacking basic reporting skills and journalistic integrity. She is doubly untrustworthy. No apology, no excuse-making can erase this debacle.
 
I am eager to see if the Post has the courage and professionalism, as well as respect for its readers, to do what has to be done. My guess?No.

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Ethics Dunce And Unethical Quote of the Week: Emmy Winner Hannah Einbinder, Plus Another “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias” Moment by the Times…

“Hacks” star Hannah Einbinder, accepting her Emmy for outstanding supporting actress in a comedy series last night, ended her litany of thank-yous by shouting, “Go Birds, fuck ICE and free Palestine!”
I have long believed that using a televised acceptance speech or a presenting slot to make a political statement should earn a permanent ban from future awards ceremonies as well exclusion from any future nominations and awards. It is unethical conduct, self-indulgent and abusing a captive audience that did not come to be preached at, especially since so many actors are ignorant, biased and have the political sophistication of sixth graders.

Okay, her exhortation to her favorite football team is excusable if still inappropriate, but “fuck ICE” is both uncivil and unprofessional (the “fuck” part) as well as anti-American and moronic (the ICE part). “Free Palestine” is even worse. There is no Palestine; the Palestinians are fully responsible for their own fate, and people who don’t read history should not shoot off their mouths in public and definitely not on national TV since, like this actress, they don’t know what they are talking about.

Oh: despite her saying “fuck,” attacking law enforcement and rooting for the destruction of Israel, the New York Times didn’t mention her speech in its “Best and Worst Moments From the 2025 Emmy Awards.”

Panderers, cowards and ethics corrupters.

Ethics Alarms Reluctantly and Sadly Reports That The Trump Derangement Virus Has Eaten Curmie’s Brain…

I really feel badly about this, and I find it terrifying, frankly. I know Curmie. I like him; I think of him as a friend, even though he metaphorically kicked me in the teeth by abandoning his column here and fleeing the blog without so much as an explanatory email or a “by your leave” after years of my promoting him and his blog on Ethics Alarms.

But cowabunga! Curmie posted that junk above on his Facebook page three days ago, and it is beyond stupid and beneath contempt. This very intelligent, analytical, learned, sensitive and rational man has embraced one of the most desperate alternate reality spin narratives of the Axis as it tries to somehow avoid the wave of recognition across the nation and the world of what American progressives have become.

First, he is appealing to the authority of the Democratic Socialist Party. Second, the post he is pointing to is deceitful: yes, Granny did say that, but it is a non-sequitur. It is like arguing that FDR was really a Republican because Teddy was. The fact that the “alleged assassin” has a MAGA family proves nothing about his motives or political orientation at all. And Curmie knows this, because Curmie is smart, or was.

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Boy, And I Thought The Last Times Op-Ed I Criticized Here Was Bad! Peter Baker Says, “Hold My Beer”!

If you can read the crap the Times’ Peter Baker threw at us in “In an Era of Deep Polarization, Unity Is Not Trump’s Mission” without getting the dry heaves and being tempted to destroy you computer screen with a hammer, you have a piece missing. Its subhead: “President Trump does not subscribe to the traditional notion of being president for all Americans.” KABOOM. Head exploded, brains on walls and ceiling. How date Baker write that? How dare the Times print it? This is simultaneous smoking gun evidence of Trump Derangement, incurable bias, and denial of reality. The gift link is here. Have a bucket nearby. Here’s the gift link. I don’t think the opportunity to read such malign, intellectually dishonest junk is truly a “gift.”

To state the obvious, Baker has the utter gall to make his fatuous assertion following a sort-of President who did this…

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We Don’t Have To Debate This, Do We? Brian Kilmede Is an Ethics-Challenged Idiot and Fox News Must Fire Him Immediately.

Why hasn’t he been fired already? Why wasn’t he pulled off the air with a giant hook before he could complete what would laughingly be called his “thought”?

“Fox & Friends” co-anchor Brian Kilmeade, who has long been an embarrassment on Fox News’ routinely embarrassing news happy talk moring show “Fox and Friends,” said during a discussion with fellow (almost equally annoying) anchors Lawrence Jones and Ainsley Earhardt last week that homeless people (like the maniac who killed the young woman on the train in Charlotte) should be given “involuntary lethal injection(s).” Homeless problem solved!

Jones began the assault on due process, civil rights and decency by saying about the homeless, “A lot of them don’t want to take the programs. A lot of them don’t want to get the help that is necessary. You can’t give them a choice. Either you take the resources that we’re gonna give you, or you decide that you’re going to be locked up in jail. That’s the way it has to be now.” Kilmeade added. “Or, involuntary lethal injection — or something. Just kill them!”

Nice.

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‘Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!’ The NYT on the Kirk Assassination…

Not for the first time, the New York Times, like the Axis media it rules over as the “news source of record,” has reminded me of the “dishonest waiter. 

In “Denial,” the film about the lawsuit by British Holocaust denier and fake historian David Irving against American Deborah Lipstadt, the late, great Tom Wilkinson as Lipstadt’s barrister Richard Rampton, in the process of excoriating Irving to the court where the case is being tried, evokes the analogy of “the dishonest waiter” in a memorable speech:

“My lord, during this trial, we have heard from Professor Evans and others of at least 25 major falsifications of history. Well, says Mr. Irving, ‘all historians make mistakes.’ But there is a difference between negligence, which is random in its effect, and a deliberateness, which is far more one-sided. All Mr. Irving’s little fictions, all his tweaks of the evidence all tend in the same direction: the exculpation of Adolf Hitler. He is, to use an analogy, like the waiter who always gives the wrong change. If he is honest, we may expect sometimes his mistakes to favor the customers, sometimes himself. But Mr. Irving is the dishonest waiter. All his mistakes work in his favor. How far, if at all, Mr. Irving’s Antisemitism is the cause of his Hitler apology, or vice versa, is unimportant. Whether they are taken together or individually, it is clear that they have led him to prostitute his reputation as a serious historian in favor of a bogus rehabilitation of Adolf Hitler and the dissemination of virulent Antisemitic propaganda.”

Bingo. New York Times, meet David Irving! Of course in this case the victim of bias and bad faith is not the history of the Holocaust, but the life and reputation of Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist and organizer who was assassinated by a radicalized leftist who had been told by the Axis that Kirk was. Just as Stephen King pronounced Kirk a monster who believed in killing gays, the Times pronounced him an anti-Semite by attributing ananti-Semitic statement he was criticizing to him. But you see, King is just an old knee-jerk progressive celebrity (like Whoopie Goldberg, Robert DeNiro or Bruce Springstein) whom nobody should pay attention to when he opines outside of his area of expertise. The New York Times’ job is to inform the public, correctly. Yeah, I know, I know, anyone can make a mistake (Rationalizations 19 and 20) but oddly, the Times never makes such mistakes that unjustly impugn and denigrate Democrats and fellow progressives.

Then the Times added to its ethics-transgression dossier regarding Kirk by publishing this garbage op-ed: “I Was Supposed to Debate Charlie Kirk. Here’s What I Would Have Said.” The editor who green-lighted this thing should be stuffed into a barrel with fat Lithuanian midgets, to quote Woody Allen in “What’s Up, Tiger Lilly?” A socialist demagogue I blissfully had never heard of before, Hasan Piker, gave us one side of a debate that never occurred, omitting Kirk’s, or anyone’s with half a cerebrum really, rebuttals of his consistently dubious assertions, some of which included,

  • “[Kirk fell] victim to what clearly seems to be a rising tide of political violence.” Deceit: It is a rising tide of political violence against conservatives and Republicans coming from the Left’s campaign of demonization. Left that detail out, I guess. Kirk would have corrected him.
  • The United States has both very loose gun laws and more violent gun deaths per capita than any other developed nation in the world. And while shootings occur most anywhere, campuses can be especially deadly. As news broke that Mr. Kirk was shot at Utah Valley University, there was a near-simultaneous tragedy at a high school in small-town Colorado, where a 16-year-old shot two fellow students. There have been 47 school shootings this year.”

Ah yes, another anti-gun hack exploiting a murder that could not possibly have been prevented by more gun laws (except ones banning and confiscating all guns)! And calling the execution of Kirk while speaking at a college a “school shooting” is statistical manipulation designed to deceive—which is why the “school shooting” figures are wildly inflated. There is no connection or relevance between the assassination and the Colorado episode or any mass shooting.

  • The author tries to blame Kirk’s death on the usual anti-American, anti-capitalism boogiemen: “rising rents and homelessness, the destruction caused by climate change, titanic levels of inequality, and too many others to name here. Our capitalist way of life — always accumulating, never evening out — leaves more and more people to deal with these problems on their own.”

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Comment of the Day: Glenn Logan

The assassination of Charlie Kirk and the aftermath of spin and consequences has brought out the best of veteran commenter Glenn Logan, who just had a distinguished COTD two days ago. Here is another, this one on the post, “Ethics Dunce: Stephen King.”

Among Glenn’s points was the topic of an EA post that his supersedes. Glenn writes,

“Getting someone fired for dancing on the grave of a person unlawfully killed in front of his family while speaking to a group of college students is not “cancel culture.” It is justified societal opprobrium for awful, unethical behavior that casts significant doubt on their possession of important qualities of caring, fairness, respect and humanity that are absolutely required for a society to function even at a basic level.”

Bingo.

Above you see an (incomplete) spreadsheet of individuals who have openly celebrated or justified Kirk’s assassination. I doubt that it is compete (and surprised that it is so short), but never mind: the issue is which of them deserve to be fired.

  • There are 19 teachers who are, to use Glenn’s term, ghouls on the list. All of them should be fired. Teachers have to convey values as well critical thinking to their students. Believing in political violence disqualified them for either job.
  • 23 on the list have jobs that I would hold are irrelevant to expressed opinions, even ones as repulsive as cheering o a murderer. If cognitive dissonance causes others to avoid them or boycott their services, that the risk one takes no matter what opinion is broadcast to the world. The 23 includes several nurses, a veterinarian, a data analyst, two librarians, some physicians, two restaurant workers, a barber, a “processor,” an “assistant,”an author, a flight attendant, a few therapists, a business owner, a trans activist, a BLM organizer, IT support staff, a “patient support” staffer, a “wealth manager,” a retail manager and a real estate agent. These should probably not be fired.

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Ethics Dunce: Stephen King

Stephen King is a talented writer and master of his genre. He is also a typical knee-jerk New England Democrat whose political and social commentary has exactly as much value as Cliff’s at Cheers after four or five beers. He really stepped into the metaphorical “it” with the tweet above, for which he was roundly pummeled on social media and had to grovel an apology after Ted Cruz launched a particularly harsh attack, called the author a “horrible, evil, twisted liar” in his response.

King’s slur was in reference to comments Kirk made on his podcast in 2024, in which Kirk criticized children’s YouTube star Ms. Rachel for citing God’s wish for Christians to “love thy neighbor” in Leviticus, and added that the exhortation should include gay people. Kirk pointed out that citing scripture as authority had obvious drawbacks, noting, “By the way, Ms. Rachel, you might want to crack open that Bible of yours. In a lesser reference, part of the same part of scripture, in Leviticus 18, is that ‘thou shall lay with another man shall be stoned to death.’ Just saying.”

He did not, obviously, advocate stoning gays to death.

Caught, King tried to lie his way out of his own unmasking. “The horrible, evil, twisted liar apologizes. This is what I get for reading something on Twitter [without] fact-checking. Won’t happen again,” King wrote after deleting the tweet. “I apologize for saying Charlie Kirk advocated stoning gays. What he actually demonstrated was how some people cherry-pick Biblical passages,” the 77-year-old author wrote.

But King already knew what Kirk meant, and has issued the lie anyway. How do we know that? We know because he mocked Kirk’s “just saying,” which means King knew what Kirk had said, and misrepresented it anyway as part of the Left’s desperate efforts to spin away the significance of Kerk’s assassination.

Boy, are they terrified of a tipping point! Good. They should be. Watching fish struggle when hooked is repulsive: it’s why I never could stand fishing. Watching the Axis thrash around now? Wonderful.

King and the rest, are showing the nation who they are.