Axis of Unethical Conduct

Wow. The Trump-Deranged Media Hacks Are Still Flogging the Ridiculous Alito Flag Angle!

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Now this is desperation. The upside-down U.S. flag incident that the New York Times treated as a “scoop” three-and-a-half years after it took place started falling apart almost immediately, so then the Times concocted an even more attenuated flag-based theory that Justice Joseph Alito had signaled his approval of the January 6, 2021 rioting at the Capitol. In neither case was there any evidence that Alito flew the flags or was aware of their significance; he explained the incidents, but, see, because he’s a conservative SCOTUS Justice, the Axis just assumes he must be lying.

The fact that the second flag was used by Black Lives Matter more prominently than by the J-6 idiots? Never mind. That the same flag had been flying without incident for 50 years outside the City Hall of the wokiest city on the continent? So what? That the sainted Justice Ginsburg unambiguously signaled her conflict of interest regarding all things Trump with a symbolic protest she made explicit? That the attack on Alito had to rely on the pre-women’s liberation, anti-feminist theory that a husband is responsible for the conduct of his wife? Hey, this is the American Left of 2024: Double Standards and Hypocrisy Don’t Matter when you’re trying to save democracy! That the Washington Post reporter who investigated the Alito home’s fluttering distress symbol when it happened decided it was a proverbial nothingburger?

About that…. serial Ethics Alarms Ethics Dunce Eric Wemple, who is the Washington Post’s “media critic” these days, thus telling you all you need to know about the credibility of the Washington Post, was actually allowed to issue an op-ed yesterday condemning his own paper for its “deference to Justice Alito” handing “a scoop to the New York Times.” In this thing, Wemple really says that the Post ignored a “sizzling tip” in 2021. That there was a nautical distress signal flag flying over the Alito home was a sizzling tip! Sizzling! Yes, he really wrote that.

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Final Ethics Observations on the Media’s Alito Flag Set-Up

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

…the main one being that the distress signal is appropriate, because the Axis of Unethical Conduct proved with this fiasco that it is ruthless, shameless, untrustworthy, and will do anything in 2024 to mislead the public if it might mean a few extra votes for Democrats. Or maybe the main one is that your friendly neighborhood ethicist was right about this story from the very start, which is why Fredo asked to make another appearance as my spokesman.

And this, my friends, is why we can’t have nice things.

Or a functioning republic.

Let me not get to far ahead of myself. Right now, the whole, biased, corrupt, anti-Trump, anti-conservative, Biden-protecting propaganda-spewing mainstream news media, the third partner in the Ethics Alarms-dubbed Axis of Unethical Conduct (“the resistance,” and Desperate Democrats completing the troika) is doing a mass Jumbo (“Flags? What flags?”) regarding what was its favorite earth-shattering scandal a week ago. This sudden amnesia was brought on because the Washington Post, perhaps seeking to embarrass its old rival, effectively eviscerated the Times’ “Get Justice Alito!” scoop, which EA first discussed here, and subsequently here, here, and here. (Don’t make me describe it again: I was sick of it days ago.)

Two days ago, the Post revealed that it had known about the first flag episode more than three years ago and had decided that it wasn’t newsworthy (because, as the revealed facts showed clearly, it wasn’t). Now-retired SCOTUS reporter Robert Barnes traveled to the Alito’s home on January 20, 2021, the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration, to follow-up on an anonymous tip he had received from some Alito-hating asshole neighbor about the flag. After investigating, Barnes and the Post concluded there was no story, because the flag-raising appeared to be the work of Martha-Ann Alito, Alito’s wife, not the Justice, as part of her dispute with her neighbors.

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Regarding Those “Shocking” Poll Numbers…

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

OK, this should really be the lead graphic…

but Claude Rains is always welcome here because he makes me laugh, and boy do I need one today.

Over the weekend the Axis needed one, because its members were freaking out over polls by organizations that in the past (like 2020), reliably employed their unethical bias to inflate pro-Democrat Presidential race poll numbers, now showing Joe Biden substantially trailing Donald Trump. Here’s another one:

James Carville is a good stand-in for the whole amusing spectacle…

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This Time I WANT to Defend Donald Trump…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The almost unanimous mainstream media mockery of former President Trump briefly snoozing during the kangaroo court “hush money” trial isn’t the most noxious example of biased, hostile news media coverage as the Axis attempts to, again, clothesline the American leader so many of them have pledged to destroy (Hi there, NPR!) , but it’s particularly contrived and ignorant. Attention should be paid: these are the people crippling democracy while claiming that they want to save it.

The idea, of course, is tit-for-tat: Republicans and conservatives (along with anyone with eyes and ears who isn’t so biased they can’t think) have been pointing out the obvious crisis that the man supposedly overseeing our government is failing mentally and physically, unable to keep a full schedule or speak coherently, almost certainly operating with a metaphorical hand shoved up into his suit and head to give the (barely credible illusion) that he is really calling the shots, in thrall to a dangerous far left cabal, and too old to be safely entrusted with the Presidency even if all of the forgoing weren’t true. Therefore the counter argument, juvenile as it is (“So’s your old man!”) is to default to “wahataboutism” (as well as the usual anti-Trump Big Lies). Trump’s too old! Trump’s no more able than Biden!

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Searching For a Tipping Point…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

This is probably too trivial an episode, but you never know. What might it take to cause a tunnel-visioned, propaganda-marinated, Trump-Deranged, ethically-stunted Democrat or progressive to slap himself,herself or whateverself briskly in the forehead and say, “What the hell? Why have I been supporting these people? They are corrupt and embarrassing!”

On April 17, our President informed a shocked nation that he thinks his uncle was eaten by cannibals. The purpose of his rambling discourse was, of course, the evilness of Donald Trump, as Biden repeated the now Axis-enshrined claim that as President, Trump refused to visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France in 2018 because the U.S. soldiers buried there were “losers” and “suckers.”

Here’s what Biden said:

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Race-Baiting! Is There Anything It Can’t Do??

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Branding all critics and opponents racists has been a standard progressive and Democratic Party ploy for a long time, though it shifted into high gear when that was the primary argument used to deflect legitimate observations that Barack Obama was poor POTUS with a great PR machine. Then it shifted into higher gear as the “Get Trump!” effort became an ongoing crusade. Trump didn’t oppose letting illegals cross the border with impunity because it was, you know, insane policy for any nation; his opposition was based in racism. The tactic is dishonest, unfair, divisive, despicable and indefensible, but as the late Harry Reid—forwarding address: Hell—explained cheerily as he defended the Big Lie he circulated about Mitt Romney in the 2012 campaign, it works.

I am now noticing that the Race Card has been designated as the Axis’s official counter to the looming GOP recycling of Ronald Reagan’s effective question during the 1980 campaign: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” By almost every objective measure, as with Jimmy Carter’s failed Presidency, the unavoidable answer today is “Are you kidding? NO!” It’s a powerful weapon. So the Axis has declared it to be racist.

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The Axis Alerts Us That It Intends to Try Impeachment Plan C Again

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The “Get Trump!” cabal is beginning to remind me of nothing so much as the Terminator as described by Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) to a skeptical and terrified Linda Hamilton in the scene above. “That Terminator is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It can’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop. Ever. Until you are dead.” One of the main reasons that I wish the country had some safer and more reasonable option than Trump with whom to seek refuge from the totalitarian-aspiring Democrats’ blundering attempts to remake American society into some kind of socialist hellscape is that again, the “resistance,”/Democratic Party/mainstream media alliance (the Axis of Unethical Conduct) will be spending his entire term of office in furious efforts to to deny Trump the power and prestige of the Presidency while turning as much of the public as possible against him irrespective of his policies, actions or accomplishments. They can’t be bargained with. They can’t be reasoned with. They absolutely will not stop.

We were shown this once again with today’s new appeal to Plan C among the Trump impeachment/coup theories. “Trump’s Social Media Company Opens New Avenue for Conflicts of Interest: Ethics experts say Trump Media, now a publicly traded company, would present a new way for foreign actors or others to influence Donald J. Trump, if he is elected president.”

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From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: “Nah, There’s No Big Tech Bias!”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Talk about smoking guns…

Big Tech is all in with the rest of the Axis (“the resistance,” Democrats and mainstream media) to rescue President Biden from his own blunders and ineptitude by bringing Donald Trump down by any means necessary. This is no conspiracy theory: they may not “steal” the election, but we can already see that they are doing anything they can think of to rig it. Here’s an example so flagrant that it is almost funny, or would be if it wasn’t emanating from the same people who claim to be “saving democracy.”

On March 16, Trump made his “bloodbath” comment, discussed on Ethics Alarms here and here. Even though his metaphor was unambiguous in its context (the economic plight facing American auto manufacturers if Biden remained President) a memo went out to the Left’s cabal dictating that the comments should be reported as a threat by Trump to encourage violence should Trump not prevail in November. On March 18, FactCheck.org, still biased leftward but perhaps the closest we have to an objective fact-checking service, pointed out that among “bloodbath’s” definitions was “a major economic disaster.” At that time the Google online definition of the word included “a period of disastrous loss or reversal,” and the sentence used to illustrate it was, “A few mutual funds performed well in the general bloodbath of the stock market.”

But that definition exonerated Donald Trump. Thus Google, being good patriots and all, changed the definition! See..

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Trump’s NATO Comments and the Contrived “Axis” Freakout

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The Axis of Unethical Conduct, or AUC, the collective leftist and antiTrump allies consisting of “the resistance,” Democrats and the mainstream media, certainly had themselves a pounce orgy when Trump said over the weekend that he wouldn’t allow the U.S. to protect a NATO nation that didn’t contribute its fair share of defense funds to the alliance.

“You don’t pay your bills, you get no protection. It’s very simple,” Trump said at a South Carolina campaign event. “Hundreds of billions of dollars came into NATO, and that’s why they have money.” He also claimed that he told NATO members this when he was in office. This was the part that really caused Trump’s foes (and some of his supporters) apoplexy:

“One of the presidents of a big country stood up, said, ‘Well, sir, if we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?’ I said, “You didn’t pay. You’re delinquent?” He said, “Yes, let’s say that happened.” “No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.”

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Is the Biden/Special Prosecutor/Biased MSM Hand-off To Terrify Voters Deliberate?

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I don’t think so, because I don’t think they are that smart. But if it is deliberate, I have to admit that it’s pretty slick. Unethical, despicable and dangerous, but slick.

Let’s start with Biden’s speech yesterday, described as his first campaign speech of 2024. The Democrats are really going to do it; they really are going to base their whole campaign on Big Lies (and smaller lies) and fearmongering. Biden’s speech was basically “Soul of the Nation” (aka. “The Reichstag Speech”)II. The first time around, it was already the most irresponsible, unfair, and dangerous speech a President of the U.S. has ever delivered. I wrote that the speech signaled the “complete corruption of the Democratic Party for anyone to see who isn’t in an ethics coma.” That was a correct analysis. Nevertheless, Biden, his party and progressives think it “worked,” so now we’ll be hearing it over and over again.

The speech cites “the soul of the nation” almost immediately. It is riddled with lies, familiar ones, like calling the January 6 rioting an “insurrection” (thus telling the legally ignorant that the Supreme Court should obviously allow Democrats to block Trump from running) and saying “Jill and I attended the funeral of police officers who died as a result of the events of that day.” The Bidens attended exactly one such funeral, and it has been reported over and over again that officer Brian Sicknick died of a stroke days after the riot, and that there was no indication that his death was related to the events of the 6th. The New York Times issued a false story that they had to retract, and Biden has been citing the misinformation for almost four years.

The whole speech is an attack on Donald Trump and his supporters, massaging and distorting Trumps words repeatedly. Of course we got the spin that Trump said “he’d be a dictator on day one.” That’s pure deceit, as we’ve discussed. Biden said: ”He called and I quote, the terminate, quote, this is a quote, the termination of all the rules, regulations and articles, even those found in the U.S. Constitution should be terminated if it fits his will. Even found in the Constitution, he could terminate.” (That’s a “quote,” mind you!) Here’s the actual quote, from one of Trump’s typical rants on Truth Social a year ago:

“Do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

It was an especially stupid outburst even for Trump, and it begged to be weaponized by the Democrats, but the post was not an assertion that Trump as President could or would “terminate” the Constitution.

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