Maine joined Colorado in barring from its GOP primary ballot yesterday, as Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows (D) decided that she “had no choice.” She had no choice because she is a rapid partisan Leftist who, like many Democratic operatives in various positions of power within the legal establishment, she is determined that President Biden be rescued from his election peril by any means necessary. Trump’s actions before and during the January 6, 2021, riot in the U.S. Capitol do not justify charging him with inciting a riot, much less an “insurrection” that would trigger Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Maine’s completely partisan and anti-democratic move is sure to be appealed along with Colorado Supreme Court’s finding last week that Trump could not appear on the ballot in that state under the 14th Amendment provision designed to keep members of the Confederacy that prevents insurrectionists from holding office. The U.S. Supreme Court will review the case, one hopes quickly, and had better resolve the issue of whether Trump can run again or if the nation will be thrown into Constitutional chaos by allowing some states to block him.
I shouldn’t even be writing about this completely silly and worthless story. It exemplifies, however, the cesspool that we are going to be dunked in for all of the next year. Here’s how it goes:
ACT I
The mainstream news media decided to exploit the Christmas season as an opportunity to take a cheap shot at Donald Trump, since that is considered the patriotic duty of anyone who has ever had contact with him, and because he is a threat to democracy. So, as Columbus’s twin “Home Alone” movies were au courrant once again, Rolling Stone and some other enterprising Trump-bashers dredged up a three-year old Business Insider interview in which has-been movie director Chris Columbus, apparently looking to curry favor with the monolithic woke Hollywood community, revealed that Trump had “bullied” his way into the cameo he performed during “Home Alone 2.”
At a New Hampshire town hall, long-shot GOP Presidential wannabe Nikki Haley was asked what she believed caused the Civil War. She answered,
“I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run. The freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do….I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are. And I will always stand by the fact that I think government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people. It was never meant to be all things to all people. Government doesn’t need to tell youhow to live your life. They don’t need to tell you what you can and can’t do. They don’t need to be a part of your life. They need to make sure that you have freedom. We need to have capitalism. We need to have economic freedom. We need to make sure that we do all things so that individuals have the liberties so that they can have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to do or be anything they want to be without government getting in the way.”
When the questioner said it was “astonishing” that she didn’t mention slavery, Haley replied: “What do you want me to say about slavery?” and called for the next question.
A New Hampshire law protecting the integrity of elections is being challenged in court by Democrats and the Biden administration as a threat to voting rights. The reality is that the law is a threat to Democratic tactics used to win elections illicitly. The fact that the lawsuit exists is more evidence that speculation about the legitimacy of the 2020 election is far from “baseless.”
Senate Bill 418, signed into law by NH. GOP Governor Chris Sununu last year, requires those who register to vote on Election Day without photo ID to send in verifying documentation to the New Hampshire Secretary of State. Such voters submit an “affidavit ballot” on Election Day, which will be excluded from the final vote count unless the citizen complies with an identity-verification process within seven days of the election. If such a voter misses the seven-day deadline, his or her vote will not be counted under the law, and the Secretary of State would be required to turn over the voter’s name to the state attorney general’s office for possible criminal investigation.
...Trump might blow the race to Joe By acting crazily. Christmas Eve found Donald Roasting no chestnut Trump’s deranged for Christmas He’s in a nasty rut!
Here is what the man who wants to be trusted to hold the most powerful job on earth sends out to the public…
I take some solace from the Wall Street Journal poll that shows Nicky Haley clobbering Joe Biden in a hypothetical 2024 election. It is the strong evidence I have been searching for that a healthy majority of the public recognize what an epic disaster the Biden administration has been.
Seeing the accumulating polls elsewhere showing Biden trailing Trump by a couple of percentage points here and four or so there, I felt like Hillary, in one of her many pathetic 2016 campaign ploys, asking how it was possible that she wasn’t far ahead of Donald Trump, given the undeniable fact that he was, well, you know, Donald Trump. The WSJ poll (which gives Trump just a 4-point advantage over Biden, 47-43) restores a bit of my faith in the civic competence of the American people. Haley isn’t a particular impressive alternative, but she has executive experience, can put a coherent sentence together, is well short of retirement age, and appears capable of learning. All of this makes her infinitely preferable to Biden or Trump. She is, as I have pointed out before, a weasel whose integrity is dubious at best, and has not displayed enough of the kind of character traits that I believe a trustworthy leader must have in abundance, but if it’s her, Biden or Trump, the choice should be easy. A substantial number of my fellow Americans agree.
This is good. The American public, those with a firm grip on reality and some sense of self-preservation, apparently know that electing either Biden or Trump for another four years is a blind leap into the abyss, hoping to land on a ledge or find a branch to hang onto. Unfortunately, the poll is a) just a poll and b) doesn’t matter as long as Republicans, who get to choose the nominee, are dominated by Trump cultists impermeable to common sense.
Moreover if, by some amazing confluence of good luck and random events along with a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon rainforest, Haley were to prevail over Trump, it is nearly guaranteed that this destructive narcissist would run a third party campaign emulating the 1912 Teddy Roosevelt tantrum that gave the nation its most destructive POTUS since George mapped out a workable template. Trump would throw the election to Biden out of spite. Do you doubt that? Does anyone?
He’s the Once and Future Asshole.
Well, who knows—chaos theory and the fickle finger of fate (Cultural reference pop-quiz!) may have surprises in store. At least the poll provides evidence that most of the public realize how awful the Democratic reign has been. They also realize just how unpleasant—I’m choosing my words carefully—another four years of Trump will be, especially after progressives have been programed to believe he’ll be emulating Pol Pot.
It’s a good news/bad news joke. Not a particularly funny one, though.
For decades now, I had held on to the hopeful fiction that at least one factchecking organization, the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s FactCheck.Org, at least could be relied upon to make a good faith effort to do its job objectively. Oh, it has always had a left-leaning bias, make no mistake about that. Many years ago I was at a conference where the keynote speaker was the head of FactCheck.Org. She proudly proclaimed the organization’s “absolute objectivity and non-partisanship.” When it came to time for audience questions, I couldn’t restrain myself: bypure coincidence, I happened to have in my briefcase a recent “factcheck” by the group that outright misstated a fact to minimize negative characterizations of Bill Clinton. I read the relevant passage to the speaker, and asked, “How can you honestly describe that passage as anything other than partisan and biased?” Her response was, as I recall, “Huminahuminahumina...”
But still, I am a sap. I so wanted to believe that there was an exception to my conviction that factcheckers are all Democrat propagandists. And now FactCheck has engaged in an instance of flagrant (and inept) propaganda under the guise of factchecking…
Now fast-forward to the post-Hamas massacre progressive crisis. FactCheck.Org posted a factcheck titles, “Cruz Distorts Facts on Biden Support for Israel.” Writer Eugene Kiely concluded that there is“little support” for Senator Ted Cruz’s claim in a Fox News interview that “literally from within minutes of when this horrific attack began on Oct. 7, the Biden White House has been telling Israel, do not retaliate, cease-fire, stop, do not kill the terrorists.”
Heck, anyone who reads Ethics Alarms could have debunked the debunker. I wrote here,
Yes, The Horror!New polls by The New York Times and Siena College imply that if the 2024 election were held today between the two most likely candidates of the two major parties, President Biden would lose to Donald Trump by margins of 3 to 10 percentage points among registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania, five of the so-called “swing states,” with Biden only leading in Michigan. That projects Trump winning at least 300 electoral votes.
Discontent pulsates throughout the Times/Siena poll, with a majority of voters saying Mr. Biden’s policies have personally hurt them. The survey also reveals the extent to which the multiracial and multigenerational coalition that elected Mr. Biden is fraying. Demographic groups that backed Mr. Biden by landslide margins in 2020 are now far more closely contested, as two-thirds of the electorate sees the country moving in the wrong direction. Voters under 30 favor Mr. Biden by only a single percentage point, his lead among Hispanic voters is down to single digits and his advantage in urban areas is half of Mr. Trump’s edge in rural regions. And while women still favored Mr. Biden, men preferred Mr. Trump by twice as large a margin, reversing the gender advantage that had fueled so many Democratic gains in recent years. Black voters — long a bulwark for Democrats and for Mr. Biden — are now registering 22 percent support in these states for Mr. Trump, a level unseen in presidential politics for a Republican in modern times.
Well all righty then! What, if anything, can we glean from this, beginning with the understanding that it’s just a poll, we can’t trust polls or pollsters, and we can’t trust the New York Times or the news media? This poll could have been deliberately manipulated to push Democrats into dumping Biden, or to gull Republicans into nominating Trump, or to scare Democrats out of their deluded back-patting, or to make the GOP foolishly confident. Or the poll itself is just wrong, even today, never mind where things could go by November of 2024. Granted. But let’s suppose it is relatively accurate, arguendo, as lawyers like to say. Then what?
Proving that Alexa is right, the LA Times recruited Tom Rosenstiel, a former reporter and current journalism professor ,to author a candid but frightening essay that demonstrates exactly how deep the unethical cesspool of American journalism is today. The article is “How not to cover Donald Trump’s bizarre 2024 campaign for president,”and it broadcasts its bias and intellectual dishonesty at every turn, including the headline: Trump’s campaign is bizarre only because Democrats have taken the unprecedented and dangerous step of trying to stop a political adversary by using the criminal justice system as a partisan weapon.
The column states outright that it is the obligation of good journalists to cover the Trump campaign and candidacy in such a way that it fails. “It’s a dereliction of the press’ duty to ignore powerful dissemblers and liars in public life,” the professor writes. “We have an obligation to explain what’s false and offer clear and persuasive evidence of the truth. We have to help the public understand.”
If that last sentence doesn’t cause the date “1984” to start flashing in your brain, it should. These people really believe that their “understanding” is the right understanding. They are the perceptive ones, they are the arbiters of all disputes, disagreements and controversies. The arrogance is chilling, particularly because, as Ethics Alarms has pointed out repeatedly, journalists are not especially smart, wise, erudite or creative people. Some are, of course, just as one of my smartest and most ethical friends had driven a delivery van for 30 years. But the idea that reporters and journalists have the critical thinking skills, the breadth of knowledge and the depth of experience to tell the public “what’s false” would be hilarious if it didn’t do so much damage to the proper functioning of democracy.
Donald Trump was on thin ice making fun of Chris Christy’s weight, but he just proved that he had better eschew impugning Joe Biden’s age-related cognitive decline as well.
Addressing the Pray Vote Stand summit in Washington, Trump said, “We have a man who is totally corrupt and the worst president in the history of our country, who is cognitively impaired, in no condition to lead, and is now in charge of dealing with Russia and possible nuclear war. Just think of it. We would be in World War II very quickly if we’re going to be relying on this man, and far more devastating than any war.”
Oopsie! Trump presumably meant (I hope!) World War III, not the conflict that ended in 1945. That was a Bidenesque gaffe, and the equivalent of a pundit making a grammatical error while writing about how current high school grads can’t write. And that wasn’t all. Later in the same speech, Trump started confusing Biden with Barack Obama.
Ethics Alarms 