I was going to make a mean comment about St. Valentine being beheaded on this date in 270, but thought better of it. I associate the holiday with nothing but stress and trauma personally, but my mother took it very seriously. Val was beheaded, the story goes, for secretly performing marriages in Rome after the Emperor Claudius II banned the ceremony to keep citizens from using marriage as an excuse no to serve in his army.

The real ethics event of note, which I meant to note yesterday, was the Allied fire-bombing of Dresden in 1945. The “Florence of the Elbe” was reduced to ash and rubble, while about 25,000 Germans died horribly. Yet the attack accomplished little strategically; the Germans were close to surrender, and Dresden contributed little to the war effort. It was the European theater equivalent of dropping the second atom bomb on Nagasaki. The Dresden fire-bombing has been described a war crime as well as an act of pure vengeance, pay-back for the German bombing of Coventry in England. In that 1940 raid, 568 people were killed and another 863 badly injured, but the city was considered a cultural jewel, like Dresden. I have not researched the decision to bomb Dresden in any detail, but it always seemed strange to me that Eisenhower went to such lengths not to destroy priceless artistic treasures toward the end of the war, yet approved this.

1. Self-promotion Dept. In case there are any New Jersey lawyers reading who would like three hours of ethics credits as painlessly as possible, I’m doing a Zoom legal ethics seminar for the New Jersey bar on the 25th of this month with long-time partner Mike Messer. I write the songs, and he performs them. This is the all-Beatles program I have long wanted to do; each song covers one or more tough legal ethics issues, and they are all among my favorites: “I Saw Her Standing There,” “A Day in the Life,” “Come Together,” “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” “Here, There, and Everywhere,” “Let It Be,” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.”

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I wrote the introduction to this now three part post more than a month ago. It ended with this:

[T]he ascendant progressive movement has taken Yoo’s Rationalization to new heights (or depths) in ways that George Orwell would marvel at. Abortion is about “choice,” not the forfeited lives of the unborn. Defunding the police and not enforcing laws promotes “justice.” Discrimination on the basis of race and gender advances equality.

Most frightening of all, however, is the current effort to make the public believe that opposing single party dictated infringements of personal liberty and the Constitution is a “threat to democracy.”

That will be the focus of the second half of this post.

I confess that the post at hand, that “second half,” presumes what many in the thrall of LeftThink today deny: that the narrative about Republicans and Donald Trump especially creating an existential threat to democracy if they gain power is pure, unsupported, unsupportable Big Lie propaganda, part of a dangerous and divisive last ditch strategy to use fear to somehow avoid the electoral thrashing Democrats have earned perhaps more  spectacularly than any party in U.S. history that had succeeded in gaining control of both the White House and Congress.

After all, it isn’t Republicans who are holding an unprecedented, prosecution-style, single party investigation aimed at justifying criminal charges against the previous President and elected officials who support him. It is not the Republicans who have gone to unprecedented lengths to chill dissent, as the Biden Administration has with it the threats of legal action by the Justice Department against parents who are too vigorous in their objections to public school indoctrination. Nor are Republicans the party now devoted to loosening, seriously and permanently, security measures that promote public trust in elections and to make ballot manipulation that is difficult to catch more easier to attempt.

Republicans haven’t advocated packing the Supreme Court to ensure a permanent advantage, or repeatedly advanced policies that violate Equal Protection and the Civil Rights laws for the objective of favoring certain groups over others. Republicans haven’t co-oped the management of Big Tech, social media and 98% of the news media to ensure that their opposition’s message is squelched and reported negatively while their agenda is spared criticism as well as public reporting of inconvenient facts.

How can the Left, even acknowledging their huge advantage in controlling information, hope to persuade the public that up is down, and that it is the GOP that threatens democracy while the reality is that the opposite is true? Continue reading →