Axis of Unethical Conduct

It’s Time To Play That Exciting New Game Show, “Who’s The Dictator?” !!!!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Hello everybody! Welcome to “Whose the Dictator?” the popular ethics game show!  Welcome panel! And here’s today’s challenge…

You see before you two Presidents: one, Joe Biden, a Democrat and current residence of the White House. Next to him is Donald Trump, previously President, and currently seeking to be the candidate of the Republican Party for his old job in 2024. Currently, the mainstream media is calling Mt. Trump an aspiring dictator, based on banter with Sean Hannity at a Fox News town hall. Here’s CBS’s report…as you know, CBS is the most trusted name in news, being the network that gave us Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and Dan…never mind, let’s stop at Walter:

Former President Donald Trump said Tuesday in Fox News Town Hall that he would not be a dictator “except for Day One” if he is elected to the presidency next year.

In a taped town hall with Fox News anchor Sean Hannity in Iowa, the former president was asked whether he would use the presidency to “abuse power, to break the law, to use the government to go after people” several times.

“You are promising America tonight you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?” Hannity asked.

“Except for Day One,” Trump said.

When asked to clarify, Trump said he would use the presidency to close the border and increase oil drilling in the U.S.

“That is not retribution,” Hannity said.

“I love this guy. He says, ‘You’re not going to be a dictator, are you?’ I said, ‘No, no, no. Other than Day One.’ We’re closing the border, and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator,” Trump said.

The Biden campaign immediately pounced on the comments in a campaign email and posted a clip of the exchange to X.

“Donald Trump has been telling us exactly what he will do if he’s reelected and tonight he said he will be a dictator on day one. Americans should believe him,” Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said.

The report didn’t bore anyone by discussing why “drilling, drilling, drilling” suggests dictatorial conduct or aspirations, or what the statutory authority is for the President closing the border legally and constitutionally, but, as you know, panel, the American voter is already fully cognizant of and sophisticated in its knowledge of these things, thoroughly educated on the President’s role in constitutional government and the limits of Presidential power thanks to the excellent training in civics that our public school system provides. Besides, everyone knows what Trump is like and what his real motives are, right?

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A Poll, More Headline Deceit, And “What’s Going On Here?”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

It begins with the prototypical “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!” decision by ABC News to bury the lede with a deceptive headline in an effort to minimize Joe Biden’s botching of his White House tenure. The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll had resulted in a stunning move away from Biden to Trump, showing the latter with a landslide level 51-42 lead if the 2024 election were held today. ABC’s headline: “Troubles for Biden not just his age in reelection campaign: POLL.”

This is a now common tool of the fake news game for those with the integrity to call it what it is: deceitful headlining to hide news that the media wants as little noticed as possible. The defensive rejoinder is always, “Oh, but that’s just the headline!”, but much of the public only skims the news and thus never sees more than the headlines of most stories. ABC News knows it, and when there have been stories that it (or other MSM propagandists for the Democrats) deems unhelpful to the cause, it uses this trick if not one of the other ones, like not reporting the story at all. Since this was ABC’s own poll, that one wasn’t an option.

Sure, the poll spelled “troubles” for Biden rather than just his age, as if anyone paying attention thought being old was the main problem with President Biden. But that’s not what the poll results indicate: they indicate that the public realizes that Biden has been a disaster as POTUS, and are pulling away from him at an accelerating rate. Bad polls affect party confidence, enthusiasm, morale and donations: that’s why most pollsters, who tend to be biased toward the Left like the media organizations that hire them, tend to skew poll results against Republicans. The honest headline for this poll would have been what was significant about it: “HOLY CRAP, A POLL RUN BY ABA AND THE POST STILL SHOWED TRUMP CLOBBERING BIDEN IN 2024! ARRRGH!!!” except that ABC’s partisan hacks didn’t want that to be the reaction in Trump Derangement Land.

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On The Washington Post, Its Readers, Its “Fact Checker,” And Spinning For Joe Biden

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

“If you can’t hide it, decorate it!” the maxim goes. Thus it is that someone in the ethics-free “resistance”/ Democrat/mainstream media alliance (“The Axis of Unethical Conduct” we call it in in these parts) decided that President Biden’s problem with the truth—he ignores, distorts, and denies it regularly—must be dealt with, since part of the strategy to defeat Donald Trump is to emphasize his “falsehoods” and “lies.” So a directive went out to the Washington Post’s “Factchecker,” Glenn Kessler: “Hey, Glenn, do one of your cool columns, the ones with the Pinnochio-head ratings system, about Joe’s fabulism, but make sure you’re careful which whoppers you mention, and make sure you don’t call them ‘lies.’ Trump lies. Joe…well, you know, he just does what he does, but it’s no big deal, in fact it’s kind of endearing.” And whoever it was—heck, it might have been Dr. Jill, Chuck Schumer or Merrick Garland!—added, “And besides, it will be good for you, too! It will prove that you’re objective, fair and non-partisan!”

The Post dutifully agreed, because it is not objective, fair, or non-partisan. Neither is Kessler, whom I have tried mightily over the years to regard as a man who tries to do his job ethically, but because bis biases make him stupid, can’t quite manage it. Ethics Alarms officially recants that sympathetic assessment. Yesterday’s Post feature by Kessler headlined “Biden loves to retell certain stories. Some aren’t credible” clinches it. Kessler is a disgusting hack with no shame or integrity, and the Washington Post is a full-time agent of the Democratic Party and an enemy of democracy.

As for its readers…well, I’ll get to them.

“President Biden, like many politicians, likes to tell stories — stories that attempt to connect his life story with his audiences and make up an essential part of his persona,” Kessler begins. He uses a “everybody does it” approach right away, mitigating Biden’s serial lies and sliding over the fact that lies from the president of the United States are not in the same category as lies by “everyone.” “The Fact Checker” also defines Biden’s lies out of existence by labeling them “stories.” Stories are entertaining! Stories are fun! Stories aren’t lies. See, when Donald Trump said that he saw Muslims in the U.S. celebrating after the 9-11 bombings—it was on TV someplace—that wasn’t a story, that was a lie. When he described how he vehemently opposed the Iraq invasion from the very beginning (in fact, he initially said he agreed with it), that was a lie too. But when Joe says that he never, ever, ever discussed his slime-ball son Hunter’s business dealings with him that’s just a story. When Joe says that U.S. citizens weren’t allowed to own cannons in the 18th Century (which he does almost every time he talks about gun control), that’s just a story too, a charming, completely made-up story, like George Washington and the cherry tree. Stating that he attended a “historically black college” while addressing an African American audience? A harmless story! Saying that Beau was killed in Iraq? A comforting story from a grieving father. Understand?

Yeah, I understand, all too well.

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Look What Trump Derangement Super-Spreader Rachel Maddow Told Her Credulous Audience…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Remember, as you read this offal, that Maddow is arguably the least villainous of the assorted Marxists, racists and liars employed by MSNBC, and is certainly the smartest.

A New York Times story by reporter Alan Feuer claimed “Trump has made no secret in private conversations with his aides of his desire to solve his jumble of legal problems by winning the election. If either of the two federal trials he is confronting is delayed until after the race and Mr. Trump prevails, he could seek to pardon himself after taking office or have his attorney general simply dismiss the matters altogether.” Maddow, being a corrupt journalist herself, naturally assumes anonymous sources’ hearsay statements as interpreted by a New York Times propagandist is Gospel truth, even though its impossible to tell if the last part of the section (which Maddow read) is what Trump said, what the sources claims he said, or what Feuer thinks he meant (that would be double hearsay). Never mind: it was good enough for Maddow’s fearmongering purposes, so this was her follow-up analysis…

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The “Axis Of Unethical Conduct” Really And Truly Does Want The Government To Block Speech, And Can No Longer Credibly Claim That It Doesn’t

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The “Axis” is, in Ethics Alarms parlance, “the resistance,” or those who believe that the existential threat of Donald Trump justifies suspending laws, traditions, fairness, standards and the Constitution; Democrats, who believe that their path to permanent power must be achieved by any means necessary, and the news media, which has become the propaganda arm of both entities and an active participant in the restriction and control of political speech.

All three groups were horrified yesterday when Judge Terry Doughty, Chief U.S. district judge of the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, delivered a sweeping ruling in Missouri v. Biden in which he issued an against what he called “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”

Doughty declared that “in their attempts to suppress alleged disinformation, the Federal Government, and particularly the Defendants named here, are alleged to have blatantly ignored the First Amendment’s right to free speech.” He restricted the Biden administration from communicating with social media platforms regarding their decisions on which content should appear online, explaining that “Plaintiffs allege that Defendants, through public pressure campaigns, private meetings, and other forms of direct communication, regarding what Defendants described as ‘disinformation,’ ‘misinformation,’ and ‘malinformation,’ have colluded with and/or coerced social-media platforms to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content on social-media platforms.”

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On The Trump-Deranged And Totalitarian Left’s Elon Musk Twitter Takeover Freakout

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Rick Wilson is the disgraced Republican operative who helped fund the corrupt Lincoln Project to undermine President Trump. His recent self-indicting tweet was another product of his Trump Derangement once Trump’s purely partisan banishment from Twitter was ended by its new CEO, Elon Musk. The argument that it does anything but constrict public discourse to block a former President and current political leader from using a social media platform is untenable on its face. Wilson’s amusing unmasking, however, was small potatoes compared to how the entire resistance/Democratic Party/mainstream media alliance has donned neon-blinking signs reading: “I’m a totalitarian and proud of it!” on their heads.

The tantrums over the prospect of an even playing field on Twitter have been voluminous, indeed too many to catalogue. The “clear and present danger”: conservatives, Republicans and objective critics of the Left’s agenda, policies and protected tribes will now have the same opportunity to engage on Twitter as their esteemed opponents have had for years. This is, we are being told in various levels of hysteria, a threat to democracy. After all, criticism of the Left’s pets and pet projects is hate speech; criticism by the Left of those conservative fascists is just warning the public. Accurate assertions that the Left finds inconvenient are “misinformation”—you know, like Hunter Biden’s laptop—while fake news and false assertions that demonize Republicans and conservatives are legitimate political speech.

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Update: The Axis Of Unethical Conduct’s 2022 Mid-Term Elections Freak-Out

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I’d like to know who was the genius that suggested “The evil, fascist Republicans who want to destroy democracy caused the violent attack by a whack-job on Nancy Pelosi’s husband with their hateful rhetoric must be stopped by any means necessary” would be a smart and persuasive argument to turn the Red Tide and pull off an upset on November 8. Then I’d like to have those among the “resistance,” Democrats, and mainstream media—that’s the Ethics Alarms Axis of Unethical Conduct—- who reacted with, “Hey! That’s brilliant!” explain their reasoning before checking themselves into a hospital, because they’re the ones who are acting like they have been hit in the skull with a hammer.

Can they really not detect the obvious hypocrisy and self-contradictory reasoning of this strategy? Apparently not. Yet it was Democratic Senate Majority Leader who pointed the way to an eventual assassination attempt on Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh by shouting, “I want to tell you, Justice Kavanaugh and Justice Gorsuch, you have unleashed a whirlwind, and you will pay the price.You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions!” Then just this month, Nancy Pelosi told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell that she would have attacked President Trump on January 6, 2021 if he had come to the Capitol “I would have punched him out. I said I would have punched him out. I would have gone to jail. And I would have been happy to do so.”

Because Republicans, and especially Trump, are evil and dangerous, you see. And they engage in hateful rhetoric that incites their supporters (of which Paul Pelosi’s attacker was not one by all indications) to take violent action! As Olsen Johnson so wisely observed,

Here are some recent examples of the commentary arising from that parallel universe:

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“By Any Means Necessary”: The Final Stage In The Axis of Unethical Conduct’s 2022 Mid-Term Election Freak-Out Begins

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The frantic efforts of the news media, some Democrats (Rep. Jackie Speier tweeted: “While the motive is still unknown we know where this kind of violence is sanctioned and modeled.”) and ranting bloggers and tweeters like this guy to try to link the certifiable lunatic who attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer to Republicans is just the beginning. Pop that metaphorical popcorn—between now and a week from Tuesday, this will get crazier by the day. Reality has set in. The piper must be paid, the chickens are coming home, the walls are closing in, the jig is up and there’s no way out. The vast majority of those active in the Axis of Unethical Conduct (“the resistance”/the Democratic Party/the mainstream media) are evidently going to thoroughly embarrass themselves and soil our political discourse by ensuring as much confusion, bitterness and division as their imagination, energy and ethics void will permit. It’s going to be ugly, perhaps historically ugly. In “1984” terms, those hungry rats are about to be let loose on these dunces and villains faces, and they will do or say anything, betray any individuals or principles, to avoid the horror. They are in the throes of Rationalization #31, The Troublesome Luxury or “Ethics is a luxury we can’t afford right now” nd #40. The Desperation Dodge or “I’ll do anything!”

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On “Decertification,” Everybody’s Wrong (Or Lying)…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

When everybody’s unethical, it begins to be difficult to figure out what “ethical” would be.

In Wisconsin, some Republican officials have launched a serious (though ridiculous) “decertification” effort, an effort to persuade the Wisconsin Legislature to rescind the state’s 10 electoral votes, thereby starting a movement in other states where President Trump lost by a narrow margin and there are reasons to doubt the integrity of the count. In Arizona, a Republican state legislator running for secretary of state, and other GOP candidates for Congress, have also called for withdrawing the state’s electoral votes, which went to President Biden. Last September, Trump wrote a letter to Georgia officials asking them to decertify Biden’s Peach Tree State victory, but there was no response, appropriately.

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Ethics Observations On The Death Of The Isis Leader

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

President Biden announced yesterday that the leader of ISIS, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, had died during an assault in Syria carried out by about two dozen American commandos. Later we learned that women and children were among at least 13 people killed during the raid in Atmeh, a town close to the border with Turkey in rebel-held Idlib Province. This morning, we learned that the trapped terrorist had blown himself up, and others, including women and children, with him.

Well, that’s what people like Hashimi al-Qurayshi are good at.

Ethics Observations:

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