Unraveling The Left’s Lawfare Assault On Democracy, (Cont.)

The “lawfare” the Democrats employed against Donald Trump in 2023 and 2024 was a substantial, audacious and damaging breach of all previous political principles, a transparent effort to hold power by using the legal system to eliminate the party’s most powerful adversary. I believe the damage to our system is permanent, much as Democrats eliminated impeachment as an important restraint on the Presidency by using it in such a flagrantly partisan manner in two illicit impeachments. Now there is no longer a taboo against a party using partisan prosecutors to find ways to bobble major political figures using the Soviet “show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime” method. Even though the Democrats failed, in part due to bad cases, in part to incompetent prosecutors, and most of all because of the astounding determination and resilience of their target, Donald Trump, this strategy will become standard operating procedure, and our system will be nastier, uglier, and less functional for it.

Gee, thanks Democrats!

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Open Forum: Normalcy Is Just Around the Corner, I Swear

(The first and perhaps the last time I will echo Warren G. Harding…)

I know, I know…for another week, I have failed to get more than two posts (on average) up per day, and even those posts have been shorter and less substantive than usual. A confluence of the many obstacles this persistent infected hematoma in my leg has imposed on my activities and an usually heavy workload in other areas have created the problem, but the leg is getting better….for example, the tips of my toes are no longer purple, and, sitting at my desk just aches rather than causing stabbing pain. Here’s an example of how loused up I am: I haven’t watched an entire Red Sox game in August, something hadn’t happened since I was 10.

Meanwhile, speaking of Boston, when did the city of my birth morph into the Confederacy? Boston Mayor Michelle Wu has been making defiant statements and Bluesky posts (signature significance, by the way) about the city in her charge being “safer” because it refuses to cooperate in enforcing Federal law. Todd Lyons, acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, vowed to “flood the zone” with federal immigration enforcement in response.

Good. I don’t understand how the sanctuary states and cities can be allowed to get away with this return to the “nullification” movement in the South that was a catalyst to the Civil War. I don’t understand the logic of Wu and other Democratic mayors and governors arguing that impeding the enforcement of laws enhances safety. I don’t understand why the Democrats have lashed themselves to the pro-illegal immigration anchor: how can this possibly help the party regain trust and respectability?

As a footnote, Wu amuses me when she boasts about Boston being the “safest major American city.” All of America’s major cities are unacceptably crime-ridden; all of them are governed by radically progressive and woke Democratic mayors. Saying that one of them is the “safest” is like raving about the best episode of “Three’s Company.”

Well, enough from me. This is your space: use it wisely and well.

Oh! One more thing: today I was offered a contribution from a new commenter that read, “Daha enerjik ve canlı bir masaj deneyimi isteyenler için İzmir masöz kızlar iyi bir tercihtir.” Sadly, I did not deem this worthy of admission to the ranks of privileged commenters.

If I Were Not An Ethicist…

I had an occasion to drive downtown to D.C. this morning. You would think, based on what the Axis media is telling us, that the city looks like occupied territory, with armed soldiers menacing pedestrians. In truth, I saw one group of about seven Guardsmen by the Lincoln Memorial, and they were not armed. (I tooted at them and they waved at me.)

But I digress. Once again, I parked on a street, Connecticut Avenue, and once again used a parking station where you punch in how long you are planning on parking, scan a credit card, and get a receipt that you are supposed to place on your dashboard. And once again, the system didn’t work: I paid, but got no receipt.

So I wrote down the time and the amount I paid on a piece of paper with my name and phone number, explaining that the system had malfunctioned, and put that so it was visible through the windshield

I returned to a ticketless car. I have now used this method three times in D.C., all successfully. This also means that the modern parking system has failed for me more often than not; in fact four times out of six attempts. (Once I just took a chance and didn’t post anything.)

Now, if I were not an ethicist, I would be sorely tempted to use my note method without paying the parking fee at all. I can think of many rationalizations for doing so. The D.C. government is incompetent. That parking system stinks. The city deserves to lose money; it also wastes my time as the system forces me to write out long explanations for a situation that isn’t my fault.

But I am an ethicist, so I won’t do that. I won’t…

On Trump’s Smithsonian Mission

The latest freakout by the Trump Deranged and the Axis media is over President Trump’s assault on the woke and often anti-U.S. propaganda that has seeped into the Smithsonian museums over the past decades while conservatives, Republicans and patriots were metaphorically asleep at the switch.

That the Smithsonian had become dominated by curators, scholars and ideologues who genuinely don’t like their nation very much and who wanted to use the museum exhibits to promote an “America is racist, sexist and a blight on civilization” narrative is, I believe, beyond reasonable debate: smoking guns include the original signage for the Enola Gay (portraying the bombing of Hiroshima as a war crime) and the deliberate omission of Clarence Thomas in the National Museum of African American History & Culture.

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Today’s Trump Deranged Facebook Post…

“I’ve have been a professional waiter in DC for the last 30 years. Today is the first time I was cut from my shift (of two waiters) during the popular restaurant week. People here are terrorized becauseof that POS in the White House Trump shits on EVERYTHING. He is a disaster for working Americans.”

Does anybody have a theory why Trump is being blamed for restaurant business declining in D.C.? There is no question that the extra presence of the National Guard makes the city safer for tourists, diners, visitors, residents. Is the drop in eatery reservations because those in the Greater D.C. area are watching, listening to and reading fear-mongering hysterics who are characterizing the cleaning up of the nation’s Capital, which has been a dangerous, crime-infested mess for decades, as some kind of apocalyptic institution of a police state?

Is it because restaurant patrons in D.C. are overwhelmingly white, and mostly don’t live in the District? How does an otherwise intelligent person (I know the Facebook poster) make the connection that President Trump is responsible for a restaurant laying him off? The likely culprits are the Axis media and the fools who won’t eat in D.C. because they are less likely to be robbed or murdered.

The downturn in D.C. restaurant business was a 2024 development, with rising costs being the major cause. Also, D.C. eliminated the tip credit that allowed restaurants to use tip income to reach the minimum wage requirements. Yet now it’s President Trump’s fault.

What’s going on here?

Addendum: Joy Reid’s Rant

This little factoid is too rich to pass up. As noted yesterday in the pot pourri post, the execrable racist Joy Reid had done an interview raging about how everything whites invented had been stolen from black innovators, focusing especially on music. “We black folk gave y’all country music, hip hop, R&B, jazz, rock and roll, they couldn’t even invent that. But they have to call a white man The King. Because they couldn’t make rock and roll. So they have to stamp The King on a man whose main song, was stolen from an overweight black woman,” the former MSNBC star said.

The “overweight black woman” she was referring to was Big Mama Thornton, the original artist to sing “You Ain’t Nothing But a Hound Dog,” which she recorded on August 13, 1952. It was Thornton’s only hit record, selling over 500,000 copies. Elvis, of course, subsequently recorded the song and it became not only an even bigger hit, but his breakthrough record.

Mark Hemingway of The Federalist pointed out on “X” that, as usual, Reid didn’t know what she was talking about. For while Big Mama was black and was the first to sing the song, she didn’t write it. “Hound Dog” was written by the immortal Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who were as white as Elvis.

They wrote or co-wrote over 70 chart hits including many of Elvis’s most famous songs. Among their hits for other artists: “Stand by Me,” “Leader of the Pack,” “On Broadway,” and Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?” Peggy was very white. Lieber and Stoller were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1985 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.

Quoth Hemingway: “Reid is an idiot.” Yes, and she’s a racist idiot who makes anyone who listens to her more ignorant than they were when she started talking.

Mid-August Ethics Round-Up, 8/19/25

This is the life I have chosen: I just was hit with a $400 charge (350 euro) for mistakenly using a licensed image last year that—get this—belongs to Germany. With all my posts, its only the second time this has happened: my practice is to apologize, take the graphic down, and pay the fine. This is what ethicists do. This one hurts a bit more than the last ($750) charge, just because of the time of year (cash flow is rough) and the confluence of projects. Hey! EA is due for another installment of my mass tort/ non-lawyer partner law firms/ litigation financing scandal report! Watch this space….

1. Weird story of the day: A park ranger at Yosemite was fired for mounting a Pride banner (above) on El Capitan. Of course, NBC, in its report, drips with sympathy for the (trans) woman, whom it insists on calling “they” resulting in a completely confusing report:

“‘I’m devastated,’ said Joslin, who is trans and uses they/them pronouns. “We don’t take our positions in the park service to make money or to have any kind of huge career gains. We take it because we love the places that we work. I have a Ph.D. in bioinformatics, and I could be making a lot more money in Silicon Valley, which is only a few hours away, but I made career choices to position myself in Yosemite National Park, because this is the place that I love the most.’”

Then why did you use your position to make an unauthorized political statement while marring the natural beauty that tourists expect to see in National Parks? More from NBC (them)…

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Trump Says He’s Going To Try To End Mail-In Balloting. Good.

The President hinted yesterday that he’s planning on using an Executive Order to shut down mail-in balloting. Of course the Axis is going bonkers, although they would probably be going bonkers if Trump said that he wanted to make mail-in balloting universal across America—whatever he says, does or wants to do is by definition evil, you see. Also naturally, the President paired his warning with his usual off-the cuff exaggerations, giving foes wonderful targets for tangential attacks. No, the U.S. isn’t the only nation or even one of just a few nations to use mail-in ballots, as CNN and others were quick to note in “Nyah nyah nyah! He lied again!” fashion, to which my response is “So the Hell what?” Both “everybody does it” and “everybody doesn’t do it” are invalid rationalizations.

The Multiple Sclerosis News Network this morning felt that a strong argument against Trump’s war on mail-in balloting is that he urged voters to use the device to vote for him and Republicans in 2024. Stupid pundits appeal to stupid people: of course he did. That was the system in use: Trump foolishly hamstrung his own campaign by telling Republicans not to vote by mail in 2020. The Axis advocates of insecure elections (all the better to cheat you with!) also say that the fact that Trump won the popular vote in 2024 (by a slim 1.5% margin) proves that he is wrong about mail-in ballots and that the system doesn’t favor Democrats.

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Incompetent Re-Branding of the Decade?

Amazing. Mediaite, an MSNBC cheerleader, calls this thing above as ‘surprisingly elegant.” Elegant? MS is best known as a disease, and a nasty one. If someone says, “I have MS now,” the proper result is, “I’m so sorry! What’s the prognosis?” More pandering from Mediaite: “Media rebrands usually stink. Quibi. Tronc. Syfy. The graveyard is crowded with names that sounded bold in the boardroom and ridiculous everywhere else, which is why MSNBC’s new identity as MS Now feels like such a surprise. It’s not perfect. It’s not thrilling. But it’s… smart.” Hey, everybody! It’s smart to make your new identity the common name for a dread disease! Is it possible that no one mentioned this among the dozens—hundreds?—of alleged professional marketers and image consultants involved in the process? Just to make sure I’m not imagining this, I just Googled “MS.” The result:

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Ethics Quote of the Day: President Donald Trump

“I am totally convinced that if Russia raised their hands and said, ‘We give up, we concede, we surrender… we will GIVE Ukraine and the great United States of America, the most revered, respected, and powerful of all countries, EVER, Moscow and St. Petersburg, and everything surrounding them for a thousand miles, the Fake News Media and their Democrat Partners would say that this was a bad and humiliating day for Donald J. Trump, one of the worst days in the history of our Country.’ But that’s why they are the FAKE NEWS, and the badly failing Radical Left Democrats. Thank you for your attention to this matter!!”

—President Donald Trump, on his own social media platform, Truth Social

I was thrilled to see this (Thank-you, Ann Althouse, for reading Truth Social so I don’t have to) today because I had already resolved to post about the unconscionable and, in my view, expressly unpatriotic and destructive mindset of the Axis media as well as, of course, the Trump Deranged, to actively root against the elected President of the United States, their own nation, no matter what he does and no matter what his objectives are.

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