“I wonder which “national party” is expressing this anxiety to The Washington Post — which party relied on Twitter moderation to protect its interests in the run-up to the elections….”
—-“Fiercely neutral” but increasingly annoyed blogger Ann Althouse, commenting on the Washington Post’s report that “Devastating cuts to Twitter’s workforce on Friday, four days before the midterm elections, are fueling anxieties among political campaigns and election offices that have counted on the social network’s staff to help them combat violent threats and viral lies…”
Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! The Post’s spin is brazenly self-indicting: I wonder how many readers are so insulated and brain-washed that they don’t notice…or can’t.
Recently the official Democrat campaign desperation talking point that “democracy is on the ballot” has been repeated over and over again from President Biden down the line, and tweeted and retweeted as well. That’s a viral lie, or course: democracy is the ballot, and “democracy is on the ballot” is Democratic aspiring totalitarian code for the head-spinning assertion, “if you vote for any party other than ours, you’re destroying the Republic.”
Let me be clear: Tiffany Cross, recently fired as a show host by MSNBC, had and has no business being an on-air political pundit. She should never have been hired, and any legitimate journalism organization would have fired Cross years ago.
Let’s see: Cross has said that a “civil war” in the U.S. requires progressives to “pick up a weapon” in the fight for democracy. She called Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas “Justice Pubic Hair on My Coke Can,” referring to one of Anita Hill’s unsubstantiated accusations regarding Thomas creating a hostile work environment with sexually provocative jokes. She warned viewers about “White replacement” and called Republican members of Congress “White supremacists.” She openly rooted for Kyle Rittenhouse to be convicted, primarily because he is white, and said that those applauding his acquittal—since he wasn’t proven guilty—were disgusting. More recently, Cross sat by smiling as racist Ellie Mystal called Herschel Walker a “negro” because he’s a Republican.
It is hard to imagine what kind of deranged arguments, claims, accusations and theories Democrats and the news media will resort to over the next few days. The exhibition could be mordantly amusing, and it could be scary. I can say, however, that based on what I saw channel-surfing while suffering from insomnia at the Boar’s Head Inn and Resort in Charlottesville last night and this morning, no political party has ever sunk so low, or so vividly revealed to anyone capable of paying attention that it regards ethics as a disposable commodity. The main rationalization, after “It isn’t what it is,” of course (Crime? What crime? Inflation? What’s that?) is # 31. The Troublesome Luxury, or “Ethics is a luxury we can’t afford right now.”
Late start today; just got back home after a 2.5 hour drive from Charlottesville (where there a lot of fine people) after an early morning ethics CLE presentation for the Virginia Bar.
That hilarious screen shot from the same MSNBC session that gave historian Michael Beschloss a platform to claim that Republicans are planning on arresting and killing children is too rich to pas up. What a great sanctimonious, “I’ve been warning” you scowl from Rachel Maddow’s protege, Chris Hayes. I wonder if that deadline to save America is as reliable as Al Gore’s and Greta Thunberg’s deadlines to save the world? How did people this ludicrous get in a position of influence?
But I digress. The simple matter of questioning the eminently questionable Joe Biden won the 2020 election has been somehow blown into some kind of apocalyptic phobia by the Axis of Unethical Conduct, and “election denier” has become almost as ubiquitous and versatile smear as “racist.” Here’s CBS’s “criteria” for labeling someone currently running as an “election denier.”
Democrats questioned the legitimacy of Bush’s two elections and Trump’s, and in Trump’s case, many of them never conceded that Trump was elected at all (they don’t think the Electoral College is legitimate). But you can question the legitimacy of an election and still accept the fact that the candidate was elected, just as one can question the legitimacy of a baseball game decided by an umpire’s bad call (Game 3 of the 1975 World series comes to mind, for some reason), but accept the fact that the game is over and the luckier team won. Continue reading →
Is it racist to expect people who provide communications-related services in the US. to speak competent and understandable English? We have been harassed in recent weeks by one unsolicited phone call after another offering guidance on health insurance matters during the current enrollment period. A particularly incomprehensible barely English-speaking agent called my wife today, who had to keep asking her to repeat what the woman was trying to say. She finally said that she was “a socialist.” We presume she meant a “social worker.” Grace replied, tartly, that she might want to look up “socialist” before she told any other people that’s what she was. Then she said, “good-bye.”
“[A] historian 50 years from now – if historians are allowed to write in this country and if they are still free publishing houses and a free press – which I’m not certain of – but if that is true, a historian will say what was at stake tonight and this week was the fact whether we will be a democracy in the future, whether our children will be arrested and conceivably killed.”
What happened to this guy? He really used to be a respectable Presidential historian; I’ve read, and enjoyed, some of his books, like “Eisenhower: A Centennial Life” (1990) and “The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960–1963” (1991). Then somewhere before 2016 he snapped like Larry Tribe, or bias made him stupid, or something. He was the “expert” who said Hillary lost to Trump because parties almost never hold the White House three terms in a row, which is non-historical offal more worthy of an uneducated dolt like Bette Midler. His statement from last night is even worse, and an abuse of his reputation and position. No one can trust the analysis of a historian who defaults to partisan hysteria. As Thomas More might say, “But Michael, it profits a man nothing to gain the whole world if he should lose his soul… but for MSNBC?”
Here’s proof on how far Beschloss has sunk: He essentially channeled Rob Reiner:
To that, Federalist editor Molly Hemingway replied, “This type of rhetoric seems more like an IQ test than political persuasion. Like, how stupid does a grown adult have to be to find this type of argument compelling?” Well, as stupid as an acclaimed Presidential scholar, I guess… [Pointer: Chris Marschner]Continue reading →
I’m not even sure the partisan campaign speech President Joe Biden delivered last night from Union Station [text here] in Washington, DC even rises to the level of grasping at straws. It was certainly desperate and pathetic in its desperation and hypocrisy: Ethics Alarms has been predicting that as the reality of public lashback against the spectacularly failed Democratic Party rule since 2020 (and in many places, before) became undeniable, the lies, tantrums and other excesses of those accountable would escalate. I’m sure even worse is on the horizon, but the most charitable thing one could say about Biden’s speech last night is that it wasn’t a terrible as his earlier one calling Republicans fascists. Nonetheless, in my preliminary research, no President has ever given two such divisive and intellectually indefensible speeches in their entire time in office, and Joe Biden gave them within 60 days of each other.
The speech comes as the various polls are finally showing what anyone paying attention knew was the case long before: Democrats are losing support even from their base, and face an epic shellacking. The slashing conservative blogger Ace of Spades, I think, has this scam figured out. He writes that the polling organizations, most of them allied with with progressive universities and biased news organizations, deliberately slanted their polling groups towards Democrats in order to please their clients. (Another analyst adds that such fake news gives Democrats sufficient hope to peddle in fundraising appeals, knowing well that the real numbers would be far more discouraging.) Now, however, because their future credibility depends on not looking like idiots when the votes are tallied, the pollsters are finally playing it straight.
Still, even as all around Biden are losing their heads and blaming it on him, I cannot fathom the epic gall required for this President of all Presidents to base a last ditch appeal for his party on the argument that “we the people must decide whether we’re going to sustain a republic where reality is accepted, the law is obeyed, and your vote is truly sacred.”
We haven’t had Sheriff Bart and the Waco Kid as guests here for a while, and this story seems like an appropriate one for their illumination. I know I keep saying that The Great Stupid has reached Peak Stupid only to find something worse, but I don’t know how one gets dumber than this. The tale out of Lake County, Ohio is even more ridiculous than Biden’s speech last night.
For some reason known only to the rogue neurons involved, the Lake County mounted police decided that it would be a grand Halloween gesture to costume their horses as “ghost horses.” Never mind that nobody knows what a ghost horse looks like. My only clue is the various versions of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” in which the ghostly Headless Horseman rides a black steed with red glowing eyes. Then there were the ghost horses in Disney’s “Darby O’Gill and the Little People,” which were just horses you could see through. It would never occur to me, if I were asked to imagine a ghost horse, that one would look like a normal horse under a sheet with little eye holes cut in it. Nonetheless, that’s what those whimsical cops came up with, as you can see:
Now, since the ghostly steeds made their appearance on Halloween, I admit that was a big clue to the cognitively engaged regarding what the cops were going for. Nonetheless, many residents, we are credibly informed, were alarmed because they thought these were Ku Klux Klan horses.
“That was poor execution for a ghost,” said one offended resident. “You go back and look at pictures of the Ku Klux Klan, it’s like the exact replica of what the horses looked like.”
Well, now, that’s not exactly accurate. It is true that the Klansmen sometimes had their horses in white sheets… Continue reading →
I don’t understand this story at all. It represents a complete loss of perspective, human, societal and ethical. I do not know how we got to this place, but we need to get out of it, and the faster the better.
On Halloween, a man was seen in Madison, Wisconsin walking down state street dressed as Adolf Hitler. We are told that horrified onlookers called the police. Oh, fine. In a college town, more than one person, who would normally be the village idiot, thinks it is illegal to dress as a historical character. The police department felt it had to issue a statement explaining that wearing the costume did not “rise to the level of a prosecutable crime” and that the faux Nazi leader “engaged in protected freedoms of speech and expression.” The statement, however, also said that the act of such costuming justified “fear and disgust” and was “troubling.”
Well, after Ethics Breach #1 in the episode, the ignorant fools calling the police, this was Ethics Breach #2. It is not the police department’s job or function to critique Halloween costumes, especially in Halloween. “Fear’??? This was too scary a costume for Halloween? Or does “fear” mean that the alarmists legitimately felt that they would be harmed by…what, looking at the guy? Were they afraid he would invade Poland? As an ethicist, I’m disgusted that the Madison police would validate hysterical feelings of disgust. The guy was wearing a costume on Halloween! It is not the police department’s business to announce how anyone else should feel about it. Continue reading →
Oh, gee, I guess by using the old folk song “If I had a hammer”to suggest that the Democrats are wildly and absurdly exploiting a lunatic’s one-off hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband as a life-preserver while a metaphoric drowning in a red sea next week looms,I have joined a “brutal mob.”
That’s the sentiment of The Atlantic, which bloviates, “Laughing over a hammer attack on an old man, the GOP has completed its transition from a political party to a brutal mob.”Meanwhile, according to the New York Times, mockery of the Democrats’ obsession with the attack as if it has any larger significance at all (the party hacks surely aren’t interested in the crime-ridden cesspool their policies have created in San Francisco, where mentally ill vagrants like Pelosi’s attacker roam and play like the deer and the antelope), means I am simpatico with Republicans “who conclude that, like Mr. Trump, they will pay no political price for attacks on their opponents, however meanspirited, inflammatory or false.”
Wow. That accusation takes a lot of chutzpah after six years of daily “meanspirited, inflammatory or false” attacks on Donald Trump, his wife, his children, his staff and his supporters, culminating in a “democratic norm” shattering prime-time TV speech by a Democratic President labeling Trump’s supporters as clear and present dangers to democracy,
“Inflammatory attack? What inflammatory attack?”
They can all bite me. I’m not accepting any part of such criticism from Democrats and their mainstream media mouthpieces for calling their framing of the weird Pelosi episode exactly what it is: cynical, dishonest, and frantic.That was the point, a fair and valid one, of my use of the song. (“Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” was runner-up), The Left’s silly game is to force everyone to express horror and condemnation over this episode, while thousands of attacks on Americans take place every day. They think such compelled groveling will symbolize acceptance of their ludicrous theory that harsh (but deserved) criticism of Pelosi’s wife caused the attack, so such criticism itself must cease. I see that my friend U.S. Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger felt he had to issue a statement toeing that line. Well, Tom works for Pelosi, I don’t, and I also don’t tolerate double standards and narratives that require me to hammer my own brain into submission.I’m on to this desperation ruse—not that it’s hard to figure out—and I refuse to treat it with respect when ridicule is what it warrants.
1. When in doubt, lie, I guess. I don’t get to vote in the newly drawn 7th Congressional District in Virginia, but if I were voting in the close race between incumbent Democratic U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger and her Republican challenger Yesli Vega, the most recent Spanberger attack ad would settle the issue. A spokesperson for Spanberger who says he is a veteran cop says he is disgusted that Vega has “defended criminals,” meaning the January 6 rioters, and goes on to say that 140 officers were injured in the riot—he gets a point or two for not saying “insurrection”—and “five died.” That statement is an outright lie, and one that has been debunked over and over again. No officers died during the riot. Five died in the days and months after the riot, but none of the deaths were connected with injuries sustained on January 6. This is a particularly egregious Big Lie, one that has been advanced in part by President Biden among others. The Democratic Party’s super-PAC, House Majority Pac, is responsible for the ad.
Ethics Alarms 
