2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck

Ethics Verdict: The President’s Executive Orders On Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

This is easy: irresponsible, petty and stupid.

President Trump signed a pair of executive orders directing that there be federal investigations and other sanctions against high-profile administration critics from his first term. The first is former homeland security official Miles Taylor. He’s the jerk who wrote the anonymous New York Times op-ed in 2018 boasting about how he and others were working behind the scenes to sabotage the first Trump term. describing an internal resistance to Trump in his first term. The other is Christopher Krebs, the former head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), who worked to oppose Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was “fixed” and “stolen,” and was was subsequently fired.

In the case of Taylor, the President implied in his remarks that he engaged in “treason,” which is a stretch, to put it lightly. Krebs was fired: that should have been punishment enough. In either case, Trump has bigger fish to fry, as the saying goes, and these orders do nothing to advance his agenda.

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(Psst! Washington Post! Your Previous Motto Was Hypocritical, But Your New One Just Admits That You Lie!)

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I’m pondering whether to stop subscribing to the Washington Post digital version. I only do it for Ethics Alarms, and even then I am only moved to check the site every ten days or so. Now the once-essential newspaper is falling apart in chunks, and whether it can be saved—or should be— is very much in doubt.

Jeff Bezos is trying to do a Elon Musk imitation, saving the icon by making it less flagrantly biased and such a shameless progressive and Democratic propaganda engine. The problem is that when all of a paper’s subscribers, or most of them, are Trump-Deranged, pro-totalitarian leftists who want their news media to be a tool of a single party and the government if that party has it by the throat, making a sudden commitment to objectivity, fairness and ethical journalism will not be welcome.

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“Lying, Losing and Cheating Is No Way To Go Through Democracy, Democrats!”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Do Democrats really cheat more often than Republicans? It sure seems like it over the last year at least, when the party faked out the nation as long as possible pretending that Joe Biden was really President, then made Kamala Harris their substitute nominee without her winning a single primary vote. In addition, its plan for winning the Presidential election was t put Donald Trump in jail, or at least set him up to be labeled a “convicted felon.”

From Minnesota comes a particularly ugly example of ethics rot on the struggling left. There are 134 Minnesota House districts. When the votes were counted after the last election, Republicans had gained enough seats to deadlock the state’s House, 67-67. Ah, but one of the Democrats’ candidates had cheated! In House District 40B, Democrat Curtis Johnson falsely claimed to reside in the district and he didn’t, making him ineligible to run or serve under the Minnesota Constitution. The GOP filed an election challenge and it was successful, so a district court issued an injunction barring Johnson from taking that seat. A special election will be held to fill the seat at some time in the future—don’t ask me why Johnson’s cheated opponent didn’t automatically get declared the winner: I don’t understand Minnesota (Al Franken, Jesse Ventura, Tim Walz…) at all, and less with each passing year.

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Now THIS Is Trump Derangement…

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Maybe it would be therapeutic for January 6 to be officially declared “Trump Derangement Victims Day,” in honor of all the otherwise sane and reasonable Americans who were driven to fear, loathing and madness by the very exitsnace of Donald J. Trump. The villains who spread this destructive contagion are too many to list, although our lame duck, dying brain POTUS just awarded several of them citizen honors. Meanwhile, if we had such a holiday, those unfortunate sufferers could use the day therapeutically, and let all of their hate out like a primal scream.

I came to this conclusion after reading the following yesterday on a legal blog that I usually admire:

“There are arguments to be made that many who participated in the insurrection of January 6, 2021 thought they were being patriots defending a nation from a stolen election, even though it was a nonsensical lie fed to the willingly delusional by an amoral narcissist who wasn’t strong enough to endure the humiliation of failure. There are arguments to be made that some sentences imposed on J6 insurrectionists were excessive, even though capital police were beaten and bloodied. But there are no arguments that January 6th didn’t happen as it was seen, experienced and suffered that day, as Trump gleefully watched. Yet here we are, Trump re-elected and promising to pardon or grant clemency to his Hallelujah chorus. Here we are, Trump re-elected and urging the jailing of the January 6th House commission for prosecuting him too well, pretending that most of his own administration’s testimony against him didn’t exist or was somehow the result of tampering by then-Congresswoman Liz Cheney, of the radically progressive Cheney clan. Here we are, Trump re-elected as the former vice president acknowledges that the president demanded he violate the Constitution or be hung by Trump’s most violent sycophants…As his own Republican toadies scampered for cover and condemned his call to “fight like hell” that brought the worst of his followers to the second storming of the Capital, Trump relished in the glory of people willing to kill, or die, for him, not because he cared a whit for any of them but because he cared too much for himself…if you have chosen fantasy over reality, and want desperately enough to believe in the absurd excuses constructed around January 6th, so be it. Time will judge Trump’s administration. Time will judge Trump, the vulgar, deceitful, amoral, narcissistic ignoramus. But January 6th happened.

Yikes.

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Ethics Quote of the Week: “Victory Girls” Blogger Nina Bookout

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“This sentencing decision by Merchan is, in my opinion, based upon pure spite.”

—-Nina Bookout, one of several conservative female pundits who populate the “Victory Girls” blog, correctly assessing the planned conclusion of one of the many contrived “lawfare” cases against Donald Trump that ultimately failed at their mission, which was to stop him from returning to the White House even at the price of emulating totalitarian regimes.

Gee, ya think, Nina?

There has been a lot of spite emanating from the Angry (and justly humiliated) Left lately, with Biden giving civilian honors to the likes of Liz Cheney, Hillary Clinton, and George Soros. The latter, among other revolting uses of his billions, funded anti-Israel/pro-Palestinian/pro-Hamas/pro-terrorism demonstrations on college campuses. Bookout’s particular focus regarding spite is New York’s Judge Merchan ruling last week that President-Elect Trump will be sentenced on January 10, less the two week from his swearing in as POTUS. Merchan also made it clear that the sentence will include no jail time, an “unconditional discharge,” which is what New York criminal courts call a non-jail and non-probation sentence that carries no other obligations.

The objective, Bookout surmises, is so the resistance, Democrats and the corrupted mainstream media (the cabal that Ethics Alarms refers to with the term, “The Axis of Unethical Conduct, or “Axis” for short) can continue to deride Trump as a “convicted felon” and the “first U.S. President to be convicted of a felony.”

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Ethics Dunce and Human Smoking Gun: The Ridiculous Stacey Abrams

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Oh, just shut up, Stacey.

Is she still around? I would have thought that Abrams had so beclowned herself that even MSNBC wouldn’t…no, never mind, that’s impossible. I was about to write that even MSNBC wouldn’t be so silly as to give her a forum, but at this point MSNBC is so desperate to keep woke (and Trump Derangement) alive that it will give any progressive hack air time.

In an interview with Chris Hayes (talk about “Oh shut up!”) the always self-promoting Georgia “voting rights activist” wanted everyone to understand that Donald Trump won the 2024 election “but it wasn’t a landslide. It was an evenly divided nation. He got more people, but this was not the seismic shift where 57, 58 percent of America said no. It was less than 50 percent of the electorate who said this is what we want.”

Abrams is a laughing stock, or if you aren’t laughing at her, then you are part of the American Left’s problem. She managed to run twice for Georgia governor without any serious qualifications, losing both times. While the Axis was condemning Donald Trump for insisting that the 2020 election had been stolen and refusing to concede, Abrams was refusing to concede that her first loss to Republican Brian Kemp for the Georgia statehouse wasn’t legitimate while her party and its press embraced a damning, “Well, in her case, it’s OK!” double standard because she’s black, female, and “gooble gobble one of us!”

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‘Nah, Those Prosecutions of Trump Weren’t Political!’

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

One inconvenient aspect of creeping senility is that the sufferers often say out loud what is normally filed in the brain file labeled “Never Speak of This, Ever.” And so it is that, as the Washington Post reports,

“In private, Biden has also said he should have picked someone other than Merrick Garland as attorney general, complaining about the Justice Department’s slowness under Garland in prosecuting Trump, and its aggressiveness in prosecuting Biden’s son Hunter, according to multiple people familiar with his comments. [….] Had the Justice Department moved faster to prosecute Trump for allegedly seeking to overturn the 2020 election and mishandling classified documents, they say, the former president might have faced a politically damaging trial before the election.’

Of course, we all knew that the plan was to burden Trump with dubious and politically motivated prosecutions in the year leading up to the election, and with a normal human being, it would have worked, or at least caused him to have a stroke or a breakdown. Instead, the Democratic Party’s “democratic norms”-wrecking strategy alienated Americans who don’t like to see their government acting like the Stasi. It showed a strength of character and fighting spirit that Americans still seek in their leaders. It proved how desperate and hypocritical Trumps foes and adversaries were. But the Axis denied it all—and now the intended beneficiary of the plot to make Donald Trump run for President as a “convicted felon” and “adjudicated rapist” has admitted that a better Attorney General would have nailed Trump before he could get elected.

And Donald Trump was the existential threat to the republic, this same man told us.

Has there ever been a time in our history when an entire political party and all of its voters and supporters so deserved to wear paper bags over their heads in disgrace?

Wait, I’m Sorry, I’m Getting All Confused: WHICH Is the Party That Is An Existential Threat To Democracy?

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Yesterday, Ethics Alarms noted [Item #6] that Democrats in Pennsylvania had voted in favor of counting mail-in ballots that were ruled invalid by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and will be counting those disqualified ballots to try to overturn the apparent victory of GOP Senator-elect Dave McCormick over incumbent Sen. Bob Casey in the upcoming recount. The Associated Press called the race for McCormick on November 7, and he is now leading Casey by over 17,000 votes.

This fondness for counting void votes is, of course, passing strange conduct from the party whose captive journalists keep saying that President-Elect Trump’s four years of claims that the 2020 Presidential election was “stolen” from him are “completely groundless.” Pennsylvania’s electoral college votes are among those the incoming President felt were stolen. Call me crazy and paint me puce, but I’d say deliberately and openly counting votes the state Supreme Court says are invalid is prima facie evidence that this a party not above cheating to hold onto power.

Now, after the Republican National Committee sued last week after several counties decided to openly cheat by counting ballots with incorrect dates, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court today reiterated its decision from November 5. Justice David Wecht wrote in his concurring statement that it is “critical to the rule of law that individual counties and municipalities and their elected and appointed officials, like any other parties, obey orders of this Court.” Justice Kevin Brobson likewise wrote that local election officials do not “have the authority to ignore Election Code provisions that they believe are unconstitutional.” The Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed on November 1 that requiring mail-in ballots to have handwritten dates is constitutional.

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It’s Time To Accept Reality: We Can’t Trust Science Writers, So We Can’t Trust What We Read About Science

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The ethics rot of “Scientific American” came to a climax last week with the firing of longtime editor-in-chief Laura Helmuth after she went on a social media tirade against Trump voters and tried to blame it on the demon Pazuzu (well, not explicitly, but that was what her “apology” amounted to). During her tenure she had politicized the once respected science magazine, using it to advance her own social justice agenda which dovetailed nicely with that of the extreme progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Weaponizing science for political advantage is more totalitarianism on the hoof, and one might think that Helmuth’s demise might slow down or even begin to terminate this dangerous trend, once rampant on the Reactionary Right, now characteristic of the Doctrinaire Left. Nope.

Based on the latest from esteemed (not by me, but still…) science writer John Horgan, who modestly calls himself “The Science Writer”—he’s a science writer—the political roots of the field’s ethics rot is already embedded too deeply to extract. Horgan has strong credentials, as he’d be the first to tell you. He’s been writing for Scientific American since 1986 with an eight year break in the middle, and also authors pieces on science issues for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, Washington Post, Time and Newsweek. He has written several books; he’s has been interviewed on PBS, MSNBC, NPR, AP, BBC, and other broadcast media. He’s  lectured at Harvard, Yale, MIT, Caltech, Princeton, McGill and the London School of Economics, among other institutions.

Yet Horgan still thinks that scientists are correct to be driven by political bias and to let it affect their work. His recent essay in the wake of Hormuth’s oh-so-well-deserved demise is a flashing neon warning that science, as an objective, fact-driven, intellectual pursuit for the good of mankind (aka “a profession”) is as dead as Darwin, or mighty close to it. Horgan’s website piece is titled, “Scientific American Loses Its Bold Leader.” “Bold” is a terrific ambiguous cover word. In the case of Hormuth, it means courageous and reckless to the point of subverting her duties. From there, The Science Writer argues,

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The Most Deranged Anti-Trump Lie of All, And Other Election Day Morning Ethics Musings…

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

I realized, as I woke up with a bang this morning earlier than I wanted to, that I am far more emotionally, intellectually and patriotically, never mind ethically, invested in the Presidential election result in 2024 than in any previous election.

The reasons, I hope, have been made reasonably clear here, not just over the course of the campaign, but over the past eight years, ever since the 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck chugged out of the metaphorical station. I also am, alternately, furious and amused by the ridiculous reality that the candidate I feel so strongly has to win today for the good of the nation is probably the worst Presidential candidate one of the two major parties has ever offered to the American public on Election Day, at least since the Civil War, with the exception of Woodrow Wilson, Trump himself and Hillary in 2016, and Joe Biden in 2020. I also am more anxious about what the Post 2024 Election Ethics Train Wreck will bring.

I am certain that if Trump wins, the Left will riot, and as the rioting will occur during a dead-in-the-water Democratic Administration, it will not be controlled and may even be encouraged. Make no mistake, this will be 100% the fault of the Axis of Unethical Conduct and the Harris campaign. They have used fear and hate as primary weapons against Donald Trump when they weren’t trying to impeach him or lock him up, and raised the intensity of this unethical—I could say “evil”—strategy to previously unimaginable levels when they realized that they had nothing positive—well, unless you consider aborting more babies positive—to justify another Democratic Presidency.

The party and its unethical news media useful idiots deserve to be punished, though I am not sure how. Both may have damaged themselves sufficiently to qualify as condign justice, but I doubt it. They have divided, wounded, scarred and imperiled the United States of America. There has to be accountability; there have to be consequences.

The first penalty needs to be a defeat today.

Other related ethics observations:

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