On Trump’s Rejection Of Another Debate…

It is amusing, in a mordant way, to hear Kamala Harris tell her rallies that Donald Trump has an obligation to voters and democracy to agree to a second debate with her. She might as well be wearing a giant blinking “I am a shameless hypocrite!” neon sign on her head, as would be her party, if it had a literal head.

Democrats in general are ethically estopped from making this complaint. President Biden and his party rejected debates before the Democratic primaries. Harris was awarded her DEI Presidential nomination without having to test herself against any other potential nominees, in a debate or on a ballot. Trump, meanwhile participated in a training-wheels debate against whom he was assured would be his opposition in November, and when that presumed nominee metaphorically burst into flames, the Democrats demanded and got a Mulligan.

If I were Trump, I wouldn’t have agreed to the last debate.

The way ABC rigged the debate to boost Harris’s chances made Trump’s decision to eschew future public muggings by the Axis of Unethical Conduct (“the resistance,” Democrats and the mainstream media) obvious and unassailable. The moderators “factchecked” Trump five times and Harris not at all: now there’s neutrality for you. (Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!) It’s not as if Harris didn’t repeatedly misrepresent facts and repeat familiar Democrat Big Lies, because she did. The decision had apparently been made by ABC brass to “Get Trump!”

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Ethics Quote of the Week: PJ Media Pundit Stephen Green [Expanded]

“The Dems got what they wanted tonight. The Progressive Axis — Harris and her ABC News foils — got under Trump’s skin and stayed there…”

Stephen Green, aka Vodkapundit, on last night’s debate.

Finally. This is the first time I’ve seen anyone adopt the Ethics Alarms description of the anti-democratic cabal as “the Axis.” I did a search just now: I may have missed one somewhere, but Green’s is the first I can find. Good. Ethics Alarms has been using the term “Axis of Unethical Conduct” for years. It is fair, descriptive, and appropriate.

The coordination last night between Harris and the unabashedly biased ABC moderators during the debate was one of the more obvious examples of the Axis at work.

Added: I bailed out when the ABC hacks let Harris’s Big Lie about Trump calling white supremacists “fine people” go with being “factchecked” after the Axis pair had repeatedly challenged Trump. Presumably I wasn’t the only one who noticed.

Aw, Isn’t That Cute…The Axis Media Is Pretending To Be Shocked—Shocked!— About Lies That Support Harris’s Candidacy, Even Their Own!

1. Item: PBS. During a Monday night segment of her PBS News program, long time progressive hack Judy Woodruff said, “The reporting is that former President Trump is on the phone with the Prime Minister of Israel, urging him not to cut a deal right now, because it’s believed that would help the Harris campaign.” It was a total fabrication. The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office immediately denounced Woodruff’s reporting, and Netanyahu’s office released a statement denying an Axios’ report about a phone call between the prime minister and Trump about the Gaza hostage and cease-fire deal that the outlet claimed happened on August 14. Trump also denied both reports.

Woodruff subsequently issued an apology and retraction on Twitter/X, explaining that her false statement was “was not based on” her “original reporting,” and that she was only “referring to reports” she had read in Axios and Reuters. She was apparently lying about that, too. Nobody can locate any items either in Axios or by Reuters that Trump urged Netanyahu not to “cut a deal.” And, as several have pointed out, the Woodruff retraction was on Twitter to the fools who follow Woodruff, a far smaller group than the millions who inexplicably watch PBS news.

Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was “rigged” are “baseless, you know. The people who are trying to rig this one say so.

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CNN and Brianna Keilar Give a Symposium on How the News Media Tries to Rig Elections

Incredibly and against all odds, the mainstream media is demonstrating that it is even more biased and determined to swing the 2024 election to the Democrats than they were in 2008, 2012, 2016 and 2020. Not only that, but its propagandists are being more obvious about it.

As a case study, let us examine CNN’s handling of the Tim Walz scandal. Walz has been falsely representing himself to the public as a combat veteran for many years and in many ways. In addition, he abandoned the leadership of the troops he had trained with as soon as they were ordered to deploy in Iraq. This isn’t even a matter of serious dispute, yet the Harris ticket’s promoters in the news media, aka “almost all of it,” have been furiously spinning, obfuscating and ignoring inconvenient facts. Under different circumstances (such as, say, a VP nominee on a Republican ticket), the news media would be all over this story like Jaws on Pippin. It would be a daily feeding frenzy.

In the past few days, more of Walz’s former almost-comrades-in-arms have come forward to condemn Walz’s conduct and character. For example, the chaplain of Walz’s field artillery regiment said there was no excuse for the him to have abandoned his National Guard unit before a critical deployment. “In our world, to drop out after a WARNORD [warning order] is issued is cowardly, especially for a senior enlisted guy,” retired Capt. Corey Bjertness, now a pastor in Horace, North Dakota, told the New York Post. This wasn’t even newsworthy to most news sources: it might take public attention away from the fact that Trump keeps claiming Harris is misrepresenting the sizes of her rally crowds.

CNN’s spin debacle regarding Walz’s “stolen valor” was special, however.

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So Democrats Are Really Trying To Elect A President By Not Letting Voters Know Who She Is and What She Believes. Democracy! Some Observations…

I had already decided to open this Saturday’s Ethics Games with a post on this topic when I read this section in NYT left-wing columnist Nate Cohn’s (gleeful?) column this morning about a Times-Sienna poll that has Kamala Harris suddenly topping Trump in several “battleground states” where he has been leading Biden. Cohn wrote,

…One way to think about her position is that she has become something like a “generic” Democrat. This might sound like an insult, but it’s really not. In fact, nothing is more coveted. An unnamed generic candidate — whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican — almost always fares better in the polls than named candidates, who are inevitably burdened by all the imperfections voters learn about in the process of a campaign.

Isn’t that wonderful? Cohn clearly thinks so. He also explains that in earlier polls an “anyone but Trump” hypothetical generic candidate beat the former President by 10 points in these same states. Harris now leads Trump by five, meaning only half of the “anyone but Trump” voters have no clue who Kamala Harris is….but hey, that might just be enough! So the Democratic Party, in its fervor to save democracy, are going to try to keep it that way.

Can you guess why Abe is at the top of this post? I bet you can!

I resolved to discuss this early yesterday, when the same Kamala surrogate—I had never seen him before, but he was a youngish black man and appropriately glib—was making the rounds of the news networks (even Fox News) arguing that Harris never has to agree to be interviewed and answer questions without a script or a teleprompter, and there isn’t anything wrong with that. After all, he argued while several talking heads expressed exasperation (notably Harris Faulkner on Fox and S.E. Cupp on CNN), the public doesn’t need spontaneous answers to learn what they need to know. Kamala Harris doesn’t do as well off script (Ya think?), so why should she agree to present herself in less than the best light?

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Democracy! The Biden Administration Tagged Biden Critic Tulsi Gabbard As a Potential Terrorist

Yesterday Matt Taibbi, the red-pilled former “Rolling Stone” reporter who turned against the Axis (that’s the Axis of Unethical Conduct, or AUC: “the resistance,” the Democratic Party, and the mainstream media) when he realized he was working for the bad guys, revealed what should be a “Holy crap!” story about former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard.

She has been targeted by the Biden Administration as a potential terrorist, placed on a no-fly list, and harassed at multiple airports. Coincidentally <cough> this came just a few weeks after Gabbard again criticized the current regime’s conduct and rhetoric.

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Presenting a Continuing Ethics Alarms Series Until November: “This Is Kamala Harris”

I couldn’t get the video to embed, but here’s the link to the Democratic Party’s anointed candidate for President angrily chiding Americans for celebrating Christmas because children illegally transported across the border “won’t have a Merry Christmas.”

Evidence like this will be buried, ignored, or denied by the mainstream media, just like Hunter Biden’s laptop, until enough Americans have been deceived to put Harris in the White House. Meanwhile, of course, each word out of Donald Trump’s ever-open mouth will be spun and fact-checked to put him in the worst light possible. (Sometimes he will deserve it.)

Harris’s distorted values, cracked logic, obnoxious character and arrogance are all intolerable, and most normal people will see that, if they only are allowed to read, watch and hear. The mainstream media is the enemy of the people. Ethics Alarms pledges to do its best to help foil them.

On the Biden Withdrawal Whitewashing (Or Whitewashington?) Narrative

Author Mary McCarthy (“The Group”) famously said of playwright Lillian Hellman (“The Children’s Hour,” “The LittleFoxes”), that “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.” The Democrats and their mainstream media minions have just about reached this point trying to not merely excuse the way Joe Biden was unceremoniously dumped from his re-election campaign, but to recast in the public’s mind as some kind of noble sacrifice Biden, which it was anything but. In other words, once again, “it isn’t what it is,” the motto of the New Democrats—you know, the ones who pretend to be defending democracy while they are dismantling it.

Is nobody paying attention? Is everyone devoid of critical thinking skills? Biden went on ABC and told George Stephanopoulos that he didn’t believe the polls, that he was the best chance of defeating that evil fascist Hitler monster Donald Trump, that there was nothing wrong with his brain, and that nothing short of God himself coming down and telling him to quit would make him do so. That pretty much wrapped it, don’t you think? Short of a burning bush’s signature being found in the White House logs, I’d say that it is indisputable that Biden’s decision to suddenly pull out was anything but voluntary.

God didn’t come down to guide Joe, but the nearest thing for Democrats, Barack Obama, might have. Investigative journalist Seymour Hersch wrote on his substack that his sources in Washington DC and the White House confirmed to him that former President Barack Obama pushed Biden out of the 2024 presidential race by telling him that he would orchestrate a humiliating 25th Amendment removal process if Joe didn’t bow out gracefully. “I went over [reports] this week with a senior official in Washington who helped me fashion an account of a White House in complete disarray,” Hersh said. “Obama called Biden after breakfast [on July 20] and said, ‘Here’s the deal. We have Kamala’s approval to invoke the 25th Amendment.’” Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Hakeem Jeffries were reportedly directly involved. “[Obama] had an agenda and he wanted to seek it through to the end, and he wanted to have control over who would be elected.” Democracy! Seymour Hersch’s reputation is a bit tarnished, and so are his mysterious sources, but that version of events makes more sense than the one being peddled by the Axis liars.

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Busted! The “Completely Independent” Government Transparency Website” Proves It Is Just Another Democratic Party Propaganda Agent [Expanded]

The effort across the news media and elsewhere in the Axis to distort Kamala Harris’s past record and documented positions sufficiently to render the public totally misinformed regarding the candidate whom Democrats are offering for President in November is rapidly reaching comic proportions. It reached Orwellian proportions some time ago.

GovTrack promotes itself as being independent, unbiased,and trustworthy. For five years, it included an entry on that esteemed site that ranked Harris as the most liberal U.S. Senator in 2019—more liberal than, for example, Bernie Sanders, who is a proto-Communist, and Elizabeth Warren, who advocates a confiscatory wealth tax, wants to cancel most student loan debt, proposes to break up Big Tech companies, and wants a $20 trillion “Medicare for all” program paid for by taxing the living daylights out of businesses. Kamala’s more radical leftist profile is not, one may assume, a policy agenda the majority of Americans favor, so our unethical journalists and related villains are trying mightily to convince voters that Harris “isn’t what she is.”

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Still More Mandated Rhetoric From the Axis of Unethical Conduct

Ann Althouse put that montage together, highlighting the sudden use of “selfless” among the agents of the Axis of Unethical Conduct (“the resistance,” Democrats, and the mainstream media as they work to rig this election the way they tried to rig the last—let’s see, at least four, to favor the Democratic Party’s candidate. I wrote about the same phenomenon yesterday here, and it looks like this will be an ongoing theme until November. The sooner the public realizes how Orwellian this is, and how fond the Left is of the tactic, the safer we will all be.

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