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!”
The facts: As of this date, Trump has about a 1.5% edge in the popular vote, and a decisive win, 312 to 226 over Harris in the Electoral College. By any analysis, it was a very close election. A single percentage point of votes flipping would have given Harris the popular vote lead, though her winning the Electoral College would have required pinpoint distribution of those votes.
What is a fair and ethical interpretation of this? Who’s lying, spinning, exaggerating or telling it like it is?
1. Today stories came out about Harris’s staff saying that internal polls showed her behind Trump from the start, and that they knew everything would have to break right for her to win. This in part is the campaign ducking responsibility: if Harris lost by only 1.5%, obviously she could have won. They are saying, absurdly, “It wasn’t our fault, the deck was stacked against us!” Harris ran a terrible campaign, and still came close. If she had run a better campaign, and got better advice (that she paid dearly for) that 1.5% would have been within reach. If she had competently answered a soft-ball question she got on “The View,” for heaven’s sake, that might have been enough. Or if she had agreed to the interview with Joe Rogan (and not fallen flat on her face, which is a big if). If she had not chosen The Knucklehead as her running mate. Any of these might have allowed Harris to prevail despite everything else.
Yesterday I was chatting with a woman whose two Golden Doodles are fond of romping with Spuds. She told me about her recent experience at a private school where her daughter attends, but soon will attend no more, as you will shortly understand.
This school is famously progressive, and among other things indulges “furry” delusions among its students. Don’t you know about “furries??
Oh, listen my children and you shall hear of this crazy fad the woke hold dear…
“I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country, and people violate laws any time they want. So, for me, if I violate this law, it’s because I want a court to pay attention to it. There’s nothing more important than counting votes.”
—Bucks County Commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia, excusing Bucks County’s decision to count misdated or undated mail-in ballots after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court clearly stated that such ballots were invalid.
[Expanded commentary is below, after the original post.]
You can’t get much more unethical than that in so few words.
1. The edict about the invalid ballots wasn’t a court precedent, it was a ruling. If she doesn’t know the difference, she has no business being a commissioner. If she does know the difference, then she was lying.
2. Next she invokes the hoariest unethical rationalization of them all, #1 on the list,, “Everybody Does It.”
3. The statement that people violate laws any time they want is false and a direct attack on the Rule of Law as well as the character of Americans. In fact, the vast majority of American obey the law. Continue reading →
Abe was the real winner last night. I have been evoking his famous quote about nobody being able to “fool all the people all of the time” for the entire campaign, and his faith in the public, American values, democracy, the Constitution and the Founders’ vision was beautifully and inspiringly validated last night. It was particularly satisfying that the People were, ultimately not fooled despite the nefarious effort of the Axis media, pollsters and corrupt “experts” to deceive them. Creeping totalitarianism was kicked in the metaphorical nuts last night. Good.
And now, a brief musical interlude…
I will await with anticipation the flowers, candy, hams and notes from all of the doomsayers, cynics and faithless out there (you know who you are) who rolled their eyes at my insistence several months ago that the ugly mess Democrats had made during the past four years, the cover-up (and not a very good one) of Biden’s senility, the gaslighting, hypocrisy and lies by the party and its media allies, and most of all, the Soviet-style elevation to attempted anointed leadership of a DEI radical leftist without any genuine qualifications for President would end in a national election rebuke.
Meanwhile, anyone who is not Trump-Deranged should feel almost as much satisfaction from Trump’s revenge on the Axis (“the resistance,” Democrats, and the their toadying mainstream media), which was not only a resounding Electoral College victory (And we see one of the great virtues of the much-maligned EC: showing a mandate for a winning candidate who has won a clear majority of the states and the varying values they represent when the popular vote is close. This was a Democratic Party theme after the very close 1960 election, the first close election since the 19th Century. (And watch how high his Electoral College soars after California,New York, Illinois, and the rest of the states that signed onto The National Popular Vote Compact go! Just kidding. “National Vote Compact? What elephant?”) Will Republicans and Trump supporters, having taken the Senate back with brio and the White House and very likely to keep control of the House as well, take moment to give the sneering, condescending, hateful, fearmongering Left the momentary but emphatic, “So there! You got what you deserve. To hell with bygones: you’ve been trying to undo our country, and your President called us garbage and enemies of democracy.” The Duke understood…
.If the Democrats and their media are capable of a course correction and a return to fairness and sanity, they will take last night’s result as decisive evidence that they have been perverted, and that they need to do some serious introspection, read some history books, get some ethics training, and reform. A panelist on Fox News last night opined that the loss would be good for the Democrats, because it would be a slap in the face (or a punch in the mouth) to shock them into returning to the party’s traditional values, and not to continue the march to the elitist, racialist, DEI-besotted “we know what’s best, Little People!” single party distortion of the republic that the Biden Administration embraced. The final insult was that they tried to foist off a phony, undemocratically-selected, babbling hack as a trustworthy leader, counting on her ability to avoid direct answers, to deny her previous positions, hinting at diametrically opposed positions depending on her audience…
…and to rely on teleprompters while the Left called the other party and its candidate fascists and an existential threat to democracy.
That is what the Left, and certainly the now totally disgraced news media, should do, because regaining the trust they have squandered is paramount for the future of the nation. I’m sure they won’t. Oprah’s galpal Gayle King whined to the CBS morning audience today, “What about checks and balances?” See, when the other party holds the White House, the Senate , the House with a conservative SCOTUS, it’s undemocratic! This comes from a supporter of the party that would have tried to pack the Supreme Court if it had the kind of majorities the GOP will have over the next two years. Funny, I didn’t hear the news media or any Republicans make that fatuous protest when Barack Obama had a similarly supportive Congress…
No, they won’t snap out of it—they are too far gone. Harris could have signalled a commitment to restoring the traditions of respect and official deference to newly elected Presidents by graciously conceding last night when it was obvious to anyone not in denial that the jig was up. Like Hilary in 2016, she didn’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t, but at least Hillary had good reason to be stunned, and she was ahead in the popular vote. Because Harris couldn’t show any class, courage or contrition, I don’t fault Trump for not mentioning her name last night. No Presidential candidate of a major party has ever been so disgracefully savaged during a campaign.
I’ve run out of time, but I’ll be back. The riots haven’t started yet; Trump winning the popular vote might stifle them, but I doubt it. We should all celebrate Abe’s victory, but heed the warning of Samuel L. Jackson…
When I was writing the predecessor to Ethics Alarms, The ethics Scoreboard, I would issue “The Dirty Dozen,” a compendium of the most unethical candidates for elected office every two years. For the first election cycle in Ethics Alarms’ history, I posted on “The Untrustworthy Twenty” and thereafter, I don’t remember why, discontinued the tradition. Sloth? Hopelessness? I just forgot?
After George Santos (above) slimed his way into Congress in 2022 after lying about virtually everything, however, I resolved to resuscitate the project as depressing as it might be. In that old post (2010) I began,
“Trust is the connective tissue that holds societies together: it can be strengthened by demonstrations of ethical values like integrity, loyalty, honesty, civility, responsibility, competence, and courage, and weakened by proof of unethical traits like fecklessness, dishonesty, lack of independent judgment, selfishness, lack of diligence, greed and cowardice. For decades, the American public’s trust in its elected representatives and governmental institutions—and other critical institutions like the news media and the legal system—has been in steep decline. This is not because of some inexplicable public fad or the poisoning of public perceptions by an unholy alliance of the pop culture and Fox news. The decline in trust has occurred because a significant proportion of America’s elected leaders have not been trustworthy, and the reason this has been true is that American voters have thus far refused to make proof of ethical values their main priority in electing them. Because politicians know this, they feel empowered to engage in corruption, self-enrichment and deception in the confidence that partisan supporters will vote for them anyway, as long as they mouth the same policy positions and deliver their quota of pork, earmarks, and government contracts. This, of course, does not benefit of country in the long run, but weakens it. It also creates an increasingly arrogant and power-obsessed political class to which ethical values are like Halloween costumes, donned at regular intervals to disguise who they really are. The core principles of the democratic process do not matter to many of these people, and they don’t see why they should matter.”
Isn’t itreassuring to know that things haven’t changed in 14 years? In fact, they have: they are much worse. I could easily compile an unethical 50, or 100. The two most untrustworthy major party candidates for President of the United States ever to face off in a Presidential election are on the ballot tomorrow, to succeed a a strong competitor for Worst President Ever who has made such a mess of the office and our traditional Presidential election process that the political system may never recover. In that 2010 post, I wrote,
“Public trust cannot keep declining indefinitely, you know. Eventually, a government that cannot be trusted will collapse. Just as addressing America’s fiscal crisis will take hard measures and sacrifice, addressing its equally dangerous crisis in trust requires sacrifice too. It will require voters to establish the principle that being “effective,” experienced or having the “right” policy positions will not be enough to justify electing or re-electing individuals who are demonstrably trustworthy. Voters must establish untrustworthiness as absolutely disqualifying a candidate for election to public office. Any ethical, honest candidate with integrity must be seen as per se preferable to a corrupt, dishonest or unethical candidate, regardless of past achievements or policy views.”
I still believe that, despite being forced to vote for an untrustworthy candidate in this election because a cruel or sadistic god has chosen to make him the only available option to combat an organized and relentless effort to unmake the United States as it was envisioned by its Founders.
In that post, I offered a list of factors that do not justify determining that a candidate is necessarily untrustworthy: Continue reading →
“!! The Washington Post just announced it won’t endorse a Presidential candidate. This is not only a victory for Trump, it should send Democrats to their panic rooms. The message is how terrible a candidate Harris is, and the narrative that she is otherwise has collapsed.”
I am accepting the fact that the blog from here to election day is likely to be politics heavy, and I regret that. It can’t be helped. Kamala Harris and the Democrats are operating the most nauseatingly and dangerously unethical election campaign nationwide since the days of Jim Crow, and the Presidential campaign that has been inflicted on America by Harris is stunning in its cynicism, relying on Big Lies and ad hominem attacks exclusively. A supplement to that is that the campaign is also relying on unethical, indeed anti-democratic journalism.
For the much coveted “October Surprise” that is supposed to save Harris, the best the Axis news media could come up with was an alleged Trump inflammatory quote regarding a dead soldier, one that was not even attached to a named source and that was subsequently denied by both the family of the soldier and others who were supposedly witnesses to the statement, and another private quote by disgruntled former Trump aide John Kelly supposedly praising Adolf Hitler. Yes, its back to that: after 12 years, a Trump term in office in which he resembled Adolf not at all, after a four years of a Democratic Presidential term in which Kamala Harris’s party emulated totalitarian attitudes and tactics (and that witnessed as well a frightening rise in anti-Semitism, we’re back to this…
…because, shockingly, that’s literally all they’ve got. Harris’s disastrous CNN “town hall” made this undeniable among all but liars and fools: she wouldn’t or couldn’t answer straight questions, periodically slipping into untranslatable Kamala-speak when she wasn’t obviously reciting memorized talking points.
How could such a metaphorical empty suit get to this point, where she is one national mental breakdown from the White House? Easy: she was yanked onto the 2020 Democratic ticket only because of her color and genes, handed the top spot four years later without once offering herself to voters as a Presidential candidate based on her performance as VP—which was uninspiring (and I’m being kind)—and then selected Soviet-style without giving national convention delegates a choice. And this is supposed to be a party obsessed with “choices.” It is also the party now warning the public that their opponents are threats to democracy.
If it were not so depressing, and if it did not have a chance of working, this last-ditch strategy would be funny. It should also signal the end of the Democratic Party. But it isn’t, and it won’t.
Unfortunately, I’m going to have to write more about this; there is more of it than I have time for, frankly, but it’s important. You don’t have to, though. So don’t, not here.
This guy needs to pull out of the race. Now. What is the matter with these people? And why does the Republican Party keep nominating them?
In a short clip posted on Republican Derrick Anderson’s campaign website and YouTube channel, the Republican running for an open Congressional seat in Virginia’s 7th District poses alongside a smiling woman and three girls in front of a suburban house and then is shown seen sitting with them at the family table. Anderson is unmarried and childless, and apparently “borrowed” a friend’s family.
“Derrick Anderson is so desperate to mask his anti-abortion views and look like a family man that he’s posing for fake family pictures,” Democratic Party spokesperson Lauryn Fanguen said. “He’s clearly not above misleading Virginians and definitely can’t be trusted to represent them in Congress.”
That seems fair.He seems even less trustworthy than the pro-abortion Democrats who mischaracterize the Dobbs decision and abortion itself in every TV ad I see on their behalf in Northern Virginia.
Anderson’s campaign claims the video innocently shows the veteran posing with “female supporters and their children.”
Right.
George Santos, kicked out of Congress for lying about almost everything to fool half-asleep voters to elect him, still didn’t sink so low as to invent a fake family.
Just say you’re a knucklehead, Derrick. It might work!
Duh. The election isn’t “like” 2022 or 2020, and obviously so. If anything, the election is more like 2016, except that Trump has already been President for four mostly successful years, at least theoretically proving that he can do the job, and Hillary Clinton, as certifiably awful as she is, still was more qualified and substantive that the ridiculous Kamala Harris.
Apparently pollsters are relying heavily on so-called “recall vote” weighing, in which how a voter cast a ballot in the last election gives valid data about how he or she will vote in 2024. First, 2022 was a mid-term election, and the dynamics were completely different from a Presidential race. Indeed, everything is completely different from this Presidential election.
Using the last Presidential election as some kind of guide to figuring out this one using Trump 2020 as a comparison to Trump 2024 is also invalid. The election during the pandemic lockdown was sui generis. Trump was the incumbent stuck with miserable conditions thanks to events outside his control, but still: voters tend to blame incumbents. Trump is in 2020 Biden’s position now as the one offering a change from a rotten situation, and Harris, well, who knows what she is, or will be regarded as once enough voters get their heads out of anatomically impossible places and pay attention? That is, if they ever do.
Cohn writes at the end, “A near repeat of the last presidential election is certainly a plausible outcome. In today’s polarized era, who could possibly be surprised by a repeat in Mr. Trump’s third presidential run? If it’s a near repeat, the polls weighted by recall vote won’t just have an excellent night themselves, but they might also spare the entire industry another four years of misery.”
Wait, a repeat of what? A Trump loss to Biden? No, that can’t be it. Trump doing better than the polls? If that happens, Trump wins, and if Trump wins, how could 2024 be a repeat of an election that Trump lost? The election being close? Do we need polls to guess that?
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