So Kamala Harris is “Exciting” Now? Fascinating.

I must confess, I have reached the point where the talking point memos going out to the Axis, its allies and useful idiots from the Democratic National Committee are so obvious that they are insulting. We have already been bombarded with the edicts from earlier memos: Trump is a “convicted felon” and a “threat to democracy.” If he’s elected, it will be our “last election” and “the end of American as we know it.” These memos are getting a bit frayed around the edges; the “threat to democracy” line is especially risible coming from a party that just chose a candidate for POTUS using no democratic tools whatsoever—no debates, no primaries, just a pre-rigged convention. This is the most Machiavellian choice of a Presidential candidate since a “smoke-filled room” produced a GOP Presidential candidate named Warren G. Harding—and didn’t that work out well! (To be fair to poor Warren, he was famously likable, which Harris is definitely not. Her staff had a 92% turnover in just three years; she is apparently roundly detested as a boss, almost as much as Donald Trump is.) These people really think Americans are idiots, and, sadly, they may be right. Since Joe Biden was kicked to the curb, I have heard double figures of delegates, Democratic officials and pundit describe the forced anointment of Kamala Harris as the party’s standard bearer in November described as either “exciting” or exhilarating.” This is only slightly more dishonest than the same people—and Harris—describing Joe Biden solving Rubik’s Cube blindfolded until they were shocked—shocked!—to discover that he was unable to maneuver through the complexities of Tic-Tac-Toe. For almost four years, the adjective to be most appropriately applied to Harris has been “embarrassing.”

Here at Ethics Alarms, I gave her a Julie Principle pass for the most part, meaning that I let dozens of absurd and dishonest, not to mention incomprehensible, statements by Harris go by without comment because it was obvious that—well, he’s how I put it before she was even sworn in, when she stole a Martin Luther King anecdote and claimed it was about her:

If, as many seem to assume, Harris is making stuff up to pander to the crowd, why fixate on this episode? We all know, or should, that the woman is shallow, has no core, and that saying whatever she thinks will endear herself to the most people at the moment is her defining characteristic. As Julie sang, “Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly”: Kamala’s gotta make stuff up to pretend she’s something she’s not for the gullible, the naive, the hopeful and the blind. This latest example doesn’t tell us anything we already don’t know.

Even with that call to be merciful, Harris ended up with a hilariously long (and terrifying) EA dossier , especially for a Vice-President. I had a post in March of 2022 musing about whether she was the dumbest Vice-President ever, which Newt Gingrich had claimed. Kamala made my head explode a couple of months later when she said at some public appearance, “We will work together, and continue to work together, to address these issues, to tackle these challenges, and to work together as we continue to work operating from the new norms, rules, and agreements, that we will convene to work together…We will work together.” That time I summed up Harris this way:

Her existence as the #2 elected official in the United States is a profound embarrassment to the nation, the public and the democratic system. That such a clueless dolt was chosen purely because of her gender and race insults that gender and those ethnic communities unintentionally complicit in her creation.

That the news media refused to enlighten the public about just how incompetent she is proves its uselessness.

That Harris and her supporters have the astounding cheek to cry “racism” if criticism is aimed her way, when she routinely insults the public by presuming that first-grade level verbal pablum is good enough to feed them because she doesn’t have the capacity to offer anything better, impugns everyone responsible for her presence in place of someone minimally responsible and trustworthy.

Wait, when did she become “exciting” and “exhilarating”? How did I miss that? It must have been like “Charlie,” the now forgotten movie that earned Cliff Robertson an Oscar for playing a—oh, what’s the acceptable term now? To hell with it: in the movie he was referred to as “retarded”—man who suddenly became a genius after taking an experimental drug. Then his IQ starts slipping away—like Biden’s—and by the end of the movie he has the mind of a four-year-old and is playing on a swing.

Non-political junkies hadn’t paid any attention to Harris, who also looked “exciting” and “exhilarating” when the Axis media designated her its favorite to be the Democratic nominee at the head of the 2020 ticket in 2019. Then she started debating, and talking, and showing her smug and obnoxious personality. Her unimpressive background started coming out too, how she rose to prominence in California by being California political boss Willie Brown’s mistress, how she was a law-and-order, anti-woke prosecutor until she ran for Senator, and suddenly morphed into a radical progressive to get elected.

Harris’s candidacy didn’t even make it to 2020 because her polling sank to Titanic levels the more the public listened to her. The Democratic field was hardly a stellar batch (which is how Joe Biden ended up as the nominee), but Harris impressed less than such stars as Andrew Yang and Amy Klobuchar. Tulsi Gabbard mopped the metaphorical floor with Kamala in the pre-New Hampshire primary debate.

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AOC Is Here To Tell Us That…

Well, something. Yes, hold on to your butts: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is imparting what she regards as wisdom. I was going to make this an Unethical Quote of the Week, then I decided that I didn’t know what it was, except disturbing. Here is what she ranted last night in a live stream; I’ll have some rueful comments at the end…

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Why We Can’t Trust Polls, Chapter 6,741…

I saw the NBC poll showing President Biden leading Trump by 3% in a six-way race over the weekend. I thought, “What the hell? This is proof positive that the U.S. public is too stupid to vote, and needs to be put under a conservatorship or something. Had the “Trump is Hitler! AHHHHHHH!” propaganda campaign by Biden, the Democrats and the news media really obliterated the natural implications of facts, like the fact that the President’s mind is falling apart in chunks, and that leaving him in office amounts to surrendering to a Soviet-style shadow collective? As it quickly turned out, no, the demonization campaign probably got Trump shot, but the public as a whole isn’t quite that hopeless.

Oopsie! The network issued a correction yesterday, citing “an error with the original polling documents.” The corrected network’s online article reported that Trump led Biden by 3% in a six-way race including Green Party candidate Jill Stein, Libertarian Party candidate Chase Oliver and independent candidates Robert F. Kennedy, Jr and Cornel West.

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What’s a Petard? These Are Petards….

A petard is an archaic word for a bomb, before bombs were as big and destructive as they are today. The term “hoist by his own petard” means literally that some idiot blew himself up, kind of like this guy, except that in the classic example the bomb-wielder intends to damage something or someone else. The phrase is used to describe George Will’s condign justice,” meaning that a miscreant has reaped what he has sowed, received his just deserts, and “got what was coming to him,her, or it.”

In the future, when a nubbin asks, “Daddy, what does it mean to be ‘hoist by one’s own petard’?” the most vivid possible answer might be what is happening right now to the corrupt and Machiavellian Democratic Party and its corrupted allies. Exploding or soon to explode petards are everywhere.

An inventory (so far):

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Unethical (and Pathetic) Quote of the Week: President Joe Biden

“No one said I had to.”

That was the President of the United States, not just a grown man but the democratically elected leader of our government, in response to the question posed by George Stephanopolos last night in the interview designed to calm American fears that Joe Biden is not capable of doing his job.

How diminishing, damning, desperate and depressing.

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And Yet Even More Post Debate Ethics…

I hate it when I have to post repeatedly on a single ethics issue. Yesterday I heard an angry Greg Gutfield proclaim the revelation that the Axis has been actively deceiving the public about Biden’s true condition a bigger scandal than Watergate. It might be. On that basis, the extra posts are justified.

1. I heard the pathetically incompetent Karine Jean-Pierre at the White House Press briefing repeatedly explain Biden’s cognitive crash as a “bad night.” Yeah, Abe Lincoln had a bad night on April 14, 1865. She used all the other agreed-upon talking points too: it was late, he had a cold, and the President knows he isn’t as young as he used to be and isn’t as “smooth a talker” as he once was. This is simultaneously a “Just how stupid do the Democrats think the public is?” test and a “Just how stupid IS the public?” test.

2. Part of Joe’s “I am not a vegetable” tour is apparently going to include a press conference and an interview with George Stephanopoulos. Would it be too much to ask for the interviewer not to be a former Democratic Party operative? I guess so…

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Rueful Ethics Observations On This Biden Campaign Email…

Per conservative blogger Jim Treacher, the Biden Campaign sent this out to supporters today…

Wow.

Observations:

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Answering Prof. Volokh’s Questions…

On his blog, The Volokh Conspiracy (which I have loyally followed from its independent days, to the Washington Post, and now at Reason), Prof. Eugene Volokh offers a series of rhetorical questions in his post, “Sad Thoughts About American Politics.” Volokh, whom I have corresponded with occasionally over the years, is the Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. More importantly, he’s a rational, fair analyst with keen ethics alarms. The point of rhetorical questions is to elicit a response inherent in the question’s phrasing and context. Nonetheless, I thought I’d warm up my faculties first thing this morning by answering the questioned he poses. These are just the question, now. In the post, he had considerable context and commentary. But I assume you know the context, and you can read the commentary at the link. Here are the questions…

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Ethics Villain: “Morning Joe” Scarborough, But You Should Have Known That Already

If Joe Scarborough had a scrap of decency, an atom of responsibility, or a wisp of the capacity for shame, he would voluntarily end his “Morning Joe” show, retire to private life, and ideally wear a paper bag over his head ’til the end of his days. Of course, if MSNBC was a professional news operation and not a den of hacks, it wouldn’t allow Scarborough back on the air next week.

I nearly posted about Scarborough two days ago, before I saw this clip today. He was featured in the Times piece titled “One by One, Biden’s Closest Media Allies Defect After the Debate.” The main three close Biden “media allies” mentioned were Morning Joe, Van Jones and NYT columnist Thomas Friedman. I was going to write something along the lines of, “Scarborough, Jones and Friedman! Would it be possible to gather an array of less credible, more ethically-revolting weasels? Having allies like them mean nothing, and having allies like them abandon you means nothing. Has the fable of the Scorpion and the Frog ever been more applicable?” Here’s the last addition to Van Jones’ Ethics Alarms dossier: he’s a proven anti-white race-huckster and face-man who cleans up nice for cameras and usually keeps his inner racist at bay so he can keep his lucrative CNN gig. The last time Friedman made the blog was in 2019, when he wrote that President Trump was “protected by big media outlets”! He really wrote that.

Now here’s how the sad Times story begins, talking about Scarborough:

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More Post-Debate Ethics [Expanded!]

To a substantial extent, the aftermath of the oogy Presidential debate this week has been more revealing than the debate itself. Nobody who has been paying attention should have been surprised by President Biden disturbing performance. Just the fact that he was willing, or was allowed, to participate in the debate at all had me thinking that day, “Well, I guess they must have figured out some way for Joe to keep his dementia at bay for 90 minutes.” They hadn’t. Biden could have pulled out of the debate with relatively minimal damage, citing his health (he did have a cold) or something else. The blow-back and speculation would have not significantly more critical than what he received for skipping the traditional Presidential live appearance on the Super Bowl broadcast.

There is speculation that Joe was deliberately set up to fail. In the previous EA post about this debacle—and anyone who was pleased or amused by Biden’s distress needs an ethics transplant—I attributed the President being subjected to the national and international humiliation to his party’s, campaign’s and staff’s incompetence. Hanlon’s Razor still compels that verdict, but I must say some of the recent conspiracy theories sound increasingly plausible.

In this post from May 21, I harshly criticized George Mason professor Jeremy Mayer’s USA Today column headlined, “How Biden Can Save America From Trump’s Return To The White House: Drop Out of the Race.” Professor Mayer was gracious, good-natured and gutsy enough to come here to defend his position and also join the comment wars. He’s an admirable person and a thoughtful one, obviously. I just realized that I never apologized for calling him an “idiot” in my post. I still disagree strongly with his article, but he’s not an idiot, and I hereby apologize for that slur. It was unfair and wrong. I’m sorry, I regret it, and I will try to restrict my use of “idiot” in the future to genuine idiots.

But I digress. I would be fascinated to know how the events of this week have altered his position, if at all. To quote the USA Today piece: “Biden could announce, anytime this summer, that he’s out. He could use the same logic that got him the nomination in 2020. He sincerely and accurately believed that he was the Democrat with the best chance to beat Trump. Now, he is one of the few national Democrats who could get Trump reelected.”

Based on Biden’s defiant rally yesterday, I don’t see how he could reverse himself and withdraw without looking bullied and being further humiliated. One thing we know about Biden’s personality is that he is insecure, and as a lifetime over-achiever he bristles at criticism and being, in his view, underestimated. Many are evoking the model of President Lyndon Johnson, who withdrew from his re-election campaign in 1968. Johnson was more popular than Biden at the time, and he withdrew much earlier, in March. He also had a divisive and much hated Republican looming as his likely opponent, Richard Nixon. But Johnson really was, as George W. Bush claimed to be, “a uniter not a divider.” He saw his presence in the race as further dividing what was already an ominously divided country, as well as his party. Biden has actively encouraged division as President. Biden’s no Johnson.

Other points…

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