In case I haven’t been sufficiently clear, the same ethical principle that I spent four years insisting on during Donald Trump’s administration is equally important during the Biden Administration. Every President, and hence the Office itself, deserves and needs a modicum of respect and deference, or our system doesn’t function. In turn, every President has a duty to work to keep the office respectable by his demeanor, words, appearance and conduct.
Virulent partisanship makes the first requirement unattainable in sufficient degree, and the unavoidable pay-back that any Democratic successor would receive from those who—legitimately—resented the absolute refusal of the “resistance,” Democrats and the media to give Trump the shred of a chance before burying him in ridicule and hate has pushed abuse of the office below levels from which it is unlikely to be able to recover.
I thought the American Presidency was on life support after the destructive parade of LBJ and the hate directed at him over Vietnam, Nixon and Watergate, Ford, whom pop culture treated as an unprecedented boob, and Jimmy Carter, whose disastrous idea of the Presidency was to pretend not to be a leader. Then, as has so often been the case, the exact right type of President for what ailed the nation and the position showed up. Ronald Reagan played POTUS beautifully, and restored the office, substantially though not completely, to its previous iconic status. I’ll never forget that hard-line Democrat and the chief lobbyist for the American Trial Lawyers Association while I was there, who hated Reagan’s policies, telling me, “If his policies weren’t bad enough, he also knows exactly how to be an American leader, damn him.”
Ronald Reagan left the Presidency in far better shape than he found it.
- Pop Ethics Quiz: Is this an appropriate activity by the American Bar Association? The “Racial Equity Habit Building Challenge ” has been curated by the ABA Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Council. The ABA’s introduction to its syllabus states:
“The Challenge invites participants to complete a syllabus of 21 short assignments (typically taking 15-30 minutes), over 21 consecutive days, that include readings, videos or podcasts. It has been intentionally crafted to focus on the Black American experience. The assignments seek to expose participants to perspectives on elements of Black history, identity and culture, and to the Black community’s experience of racism in America. Even this focus on Black Americans cannot possibly highlight all of the diversity of experiences and opinions within the Black community itself, much less substitute for learnings about any other community of color. This syllabus is but an introduction to what we hope will be a rewarding journey that extends far beyond the limits of this project.”
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Ethics Alarms is about ethics, not politics, but politics, especially in recent years, has increasingly been about the defining and flagging of unethical conduct. Typically elections have been an area in which both parties revel in accusing each other of dishonest and unethical conduct that they also engage in when it suits their needs; we recently saw, for example, the report on Democrats using “dark money” in the 2020 election cycle after condemning Republicans for their lack of transparency regarding campaign contributions, and either party climbing up on a metaphorical high horse over gerrymandering is laughable.
The accusations over the 2020 Presidential election are materially different, in part because 95% of the news media has taken a side the constitutes aggressive partisan activism: the claim that suspicions about the fairness and legitimacy of the vote count—in the absence of many safeguards that previous elections had made standard practice—were “disproven” and “groundless.” The use of ballot drop boxes, for example, raise the immediate specter of voter fraud, and one that is difficult to dispel. Did the actual voter drop off the ballot? Did that voter mark the ballot with his or her name on it? How secure is the box against tampering? The existence of such dubious devices in any close election guarantees public distrust, and should. Yet the news media is pushing the left’s false narrative that laws that ban drop-off boxes are “voter suppression.”
Here is Null Pointer on the matter, in the Comment of the Day on the post, “On ‘Decertification,’ Everybody’s Wrong (Or Lying)…”
One tip before you read: what is being described regarding elections is the condition Ethics Alarms dubs “Bizarro World Ethics.”
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Let’s just look a some truths about the 2020 election and see if we cannot deduce what might be going on.
Truth #1: The Democrats got up to shenanigans in the 2020 election, and if the exact nature of those shenanigans were laid out to the people, the people would probably nearly unanimously agree the shenanigans amounted to cheating. The people would not unanimously ADMIT it was cheating, but they would know. The Democrats do not want the people on the left to know that they engaged in behavior that essentially amounts to cheating.
Truth #2: The election is not going to be undone. It was never going to be undone. Everyone who isn’t a complete moron knows it cannot be undone. Everyone who knows it cannot be undone is not going to admit that they know it cannot be undone, however, because a lot of people hate the Democrats and like to piss the Democrats off. Polling is useless.
Truth #3: The Democrats cheat. The Democrats have always cheated, at least at the regional level. Everyone on the right knows the Democrats cheat. Everyone on the left thinks a majority of people agree with them about everything, rendering cheating unnecessary. The people on the left would be shocked to find out that a huge percentage of the population does not agree with them.
Truth #4: The Republicans let the Democrats cheat. The Republicans have always let the Democrats cheat because political calculations produced an equation that said it was more politically expedient to let the Democrats cheat than to call them on it. The Democrats have escalated their cheating over time because they can. The Democrats accuse everyone else of cheating to keep the political calculations in their favor by confusing their base. Continue reading →