A New York Times/Siena College poll just out purports to show that 64% of Democratic voters don’t want Joe Biden to be President after his current term expires, and the reason is that even they can tell the country is falling apart. Biden has been President for less than two years, and yet it has come to this already.
Assuming the poll is accurate (you know…polls) this result warrants a dirge from the tiniest violin in existence. How dare Democrats say this, when they foisted Biden on the nation with full knowledge that he was too old, declining mentally, and was a career mediocrity on the smartest day of his life? It was an epic example of irresponsible citizenship and a breach of trust, motivated, like most actions by members of their party since 2016, by pure, primitive, unreasoning, unquenchable hatred of Donald Trump. They would have voted for an inanimate carbon rod for President in 2020 if polls showed it to have the best chance of winning.
I am torn: this post screamed out for a Major Clipton introduction though the head-exploding tweet above by President Biden’s Chief of Staff (or head puppeteer) arguably needs no introduction. I think I’ll settle on both: we haven’t heard from the major for a while…
Proportion is an important ethical value that we don’t talk about enough. That idiotic tweet demonstrates a disastrous ethics flaw—not the only one, heaven knows–that underlies so much of the ongoing tragedy that is the progressive movement currently being inflicted on the nation by Biden and the Democrats.
Inflation is reaching crisis levels, harming virtually all Americans not candidates for a reboot of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” The national debt has reached and exceeded and then exceeded more any rational level that a responsible country should tolerate. Yet the White House wants a victory lap because two women instead of the traditional one will have their signatures on the currency. Continue reading →
Is it unethical to make really bad movies? I’m talking about irredeemable garbage, not inspired lunacy like Ed Wood films, so mind-blowingly terrible that they are hypnotic as well as unforgettable. Isn’t it irresponsible to spend money and mislead audiences when you have no talent whatsoever?
I’ve been thinking about this ever since we tried to watch “Birdemic: Shock and Terror,” which we were counting on to be amusingly bad, and it was, instead, bad beyond all expectations. Though it was obviously modeled on “The Birds,” no birds appeared until half-way through the film, and they may have been the worst special effects I have ever seen anywhere. The sound quality was poor, and the writer-director makes Wood seem like Orson Welles by comparison. The movie also makes Mystery Science Theater 3000’s “Manos, the Hands of Fate” seem like “Casablanca.” (That famously awful film, at a $19,000 budget, was still almost twice as expensive to make as “Birdemic.”) We had to bail on the film when the birds appeared, because screeching woke up Spuds and put him in a panic.
Here’s the whole film. The “birds” appear at the 47 minute mark, but the acting and dialogue really has to be experienced to be believed:
There is a sequel.
1. Is Jen Psaki the worst weasel ever to serve as a Presidents paid liar? It’s hard to say, but her exchange with Peter Doocy on the doxxing of the Supreme Court justices is truly despicable. (No wonder MSNBC wants to hire her.)
Doocy: “[Y]ou guys spent some time…talking about what you think are…extreme wings of the [GOP]. Do you think the progressive activists that are now planning protests outside of justices’ houses are extreme?”
Psaki: “Peaceful protests? No. Peaceful protest is not extreme.”
But the question wasn’t about peaceful legal protests. It was about illegal protests that violate the privacy—how’s that for hypocrisy?—of Suprem Court members and their families.
Doocy: “Some of these justices have young kids. Their neighbors are not all public figures, so would [Biden] think about waving activists that want to go into…neighborhoods in VA and MD?”
Psaki: “Peter…our view is that peaceful protests, there is a long history…of that.”
What? A long history of harassing and trying to intimidate SCOTUS justices at home? Even if that wasn’t an outright lie, the fact that there’s a long history of misconduct doesn’t excuse the misconduct. She could have given the same answer regarding tar and feathers.
Doocy: “Is [protesting outside the homes of justices] the kind of thing [Biden] wants to help your side make their point?”
Psaki: “Look, [his] view is that there’s a lot of passion, a lot of fear, a lot of sadness…We want people’s privacy to be respected.”
Translation:“Emotion justifies everything, and I don’t want to answer your question.”
Steve-O-in NJ was inspired by the EA commentary on the Washington Post editors’ batty contention last week that Joe Biden was a “huge” upgrade over President Trump to write this Comment of the Day. I was reminded of it—I had intended to give Steve’s opus COTD honors earlier, but got distracted— when I realized that MSNBC was pushing the same gaslighting, prompting the previous post. The historical truth is that Joe Biden’s White House tenure so far wouldn’t give him a claim to being as a “huge upgrade” over any President using objective standards rather than partisan ones, as in “all Republican Presidents are worse than all Democrat Presidents,” which is the kindest way to explain the Post’s absurd assertion.
I am always interested in the topic of Presidential rankings, so after Steve-O has had his say, I’m going to follow up with an examination of how to assess who is the Worst POTUS Ever. Remember, leadership is also an official area of concentration for Ethics Alarms.
Just more proof that a lot of folks are so blindly partisan that they would not only vote for a ham sandwich if it had a D next to it, but wouldn’t vote for God Himself if He didn’t. Biden is so far headed for being 46th of 46. Grant probably no longer occupies the bottom of the ratings list. Harding was a corrupt, philandering son of a b****, but he had the wisdom to stand back and let the economy correct itself after the Panic of 1921. Obama was pretty feckless, but thankfully didn’t face any big new crises. Clinton was a pig, but the economy didn’t crash on his watch. So far, I can only compare Biden to Carter, the only president in recent history and even not so recent history who I can honestly and truly say has no strengths. Continue reading →
You know, at some point, this has to matter, doesn’t it?
For four years, the mainstream media, Democrats and the Trump-Deranged claimed that anything that President Trump said or tweeted, whether it was gaffe, a mistake, a joke, hyperbole, puffery or, as was indeed often the case, deliberately misleading, was a democracy-threatening lie. This media theme was an exaggeration on its own, and a damaging one, diminishing Trump’s public trust and making it difficult for him to do his job—as indeed was the whole point of the “Trump lies” obsession.
So what is the American public supposed to conclude when President Biden says something that is clear and unequivocal, and the official White House position is that he didn’t say it?
Nothing like dancing camels to end a perfect day. If only this had been a perfect day…
Meanwhile, I’m so proud! Having told my undergraduate institution that it had so embarrassed me that I would not be attending my BIG reunion this Fall, which I once was looking forward to greatly, it was thrilling to see my law school alma mater, which I also worked for over the next four years after graduation (It liked me! It really liked me!), receive a major honor. Yes, The FIRE named Georgetown University Law Center one of the 10 Worst on its yearly list of educational institutions that do not adequately respect and bolster freedom of speech.
Congratulations, GULC! You’ve worked hard for this the last few years, and the honor is richly deserved.
1. Quit, Whoopi, but let me write your resignation letter. It is being reported that Whoopi Goldberg is furious that she was suspended by ABC for her dumb, ill-considered, offensive but provocative comments about the Holocaust on the dumb, ill-considered, offensive but provocative show “The View.” Her worst statement? I vote for “Well, this is white people doing it to white people. So, this is y’all go fight amongst yourselves.” That was part of her explanation of why the “Final Solution,” in which Hitler’s crazies decided to see the purification of the white race by exterminating “lesser races” like the Semites—just guess what would have happened to the Whoop’s people when Germany took over the U.S. by getting the A-Bomb first!—wasn’t about race. She feels, we are told,“humiliated” at being disciplined after she followed their advice to apologize. No, no, that’s not what Whoopi should quit over. Charles C.W. Cooke explains it well in “Whoopi Goldberg’s Suspension from The View Is Illiberal and Irrational” at the National Review. Meanwhile, many are asking the unanswerable question, how come Disney, who owns ABC, fired actress Gina Carano when she said on social media—not on TV, not under Disney’s banner, that the repressive political speech climate reminded her of Nazi Germany. The “Mandalorian” star was also dropped by talent agency UTA and Lucasfilms, leading some writers to compare her treatment to the Fifties blacklist. Whoopi got a relatively minor two-week suspension. Double standard there, obviously: Whoopi is a black progressive, Carano is a white conservative. Neither should be punished for an opinion unrelated to their competence at their job. If Whoopi quits, she could do some good by making it clear that it’s in defense of free speech and people being unafraid to speak freely. Continue reading →
I haven’t had time to finish the second part of this post, but Gabbard’s tweet regarding Biden’s stunningly unpresidential demagoguery in his public, hyper-partisan tantrum this week keeps the topic properly warm. The President of the United States publicly labelled the opposing party as the equivalents of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy—in other words, racists and traitors. This is how the leader of the Democratic Party wants to “save democracy.”
The President is rapidly getting into Trump territory, saying so many outrageous things so frequently that it feels churlish to call him on it. Is it time to invoke the Julie Principle? I wonder. Ethics Alarms actually called for Joe to have the benefit of it in 2020, but that was before he became President, which clears the slate.
This past week alone, Biden has made one obnoxious, dishonest, absurd statement after another. Notably, he pronounced himself blameless for the Democratic Party wipeout in Virginia and elsewhere: nice accountability there, Joe! I wouldn’t expect your history-censoring party to know this, but after Pickett’s Charge that guy whose statues Democrats got pulled down did NOT say to his returning, bloodied troops, “This wasn’t my fault!”
But that exchange with the reporter reasonably asking Biden about his administration’s reversal regarding his categorical denial that his administration might be paying up to $450,000 to illegal immigrants claiming that the Trump policies separated them from their children was even worse. First of all, his claim that the reporter whose assertion he called “garbage” had suggested that all illegal immigrants were going to be paid $450,000 was a lie. It was explicitly about settling a lawsuit, and when the President said “That’s not going to happen,” he was referring to the settlement—or he was confused because he doesn’t know what’s going on his own administration. The ACLU and his own Justice Department quickly corrected him, so Joe cannot say that he was making a correct response to the ridiculous question he falsely said was asked by Fox’s Peter Doocy. I knew what Doocy meant: it was clear to me.
What was shocking wasn’t that Biden was polling horribly, but that he was polling so horribly that MSNBC would report it. Not only are polls unrelaible at best, they are manipulated to confuse and mislead the public by left-biased media contractors (only the Fox News polling is showing Terry McAuliffe trailing Glenn Youngkin in Virginia, for example, which he is, and badly). Moreover, the news media routinely buries or misrepresents polls that carry bad portents for Democrats.
The poll found that 42% of U.S. adults surveyed approved of Biden’s job performance and 54% disapproved, despite a 49%-48% split as recently as August. The survey was conducted jointly by Hart Research Associates and Public Opinion Strategies.
Great. Now the United States of America has had two Presidents in a row who couldn’t tell an ethics principle from beef stroganoff. This is obviously not a good thing, since our leaders inevitably bolster or short-cicuitour culture’s ethics alarms. In Joe Biden’s case, of course, this should come as no surprise, just as Trump’s ethics void couldn’t have surprised even the previous President’s most fervent supporters. Still, it would be hard to invent a more phosphorescent example of ethics ignorance than Joe’s comments on the harassment of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va)., and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, (D-Ariz.) because they refuse to accede to the Democrats’ insane $3.5 trillion infrastructure-plus-socialism wish-list spending scheme, “Build Back Better,’
Last week, several protesters affiliated with the Center for Popular Democracy and other groups showed up in kayaks at the Potomac River dock in Washington, D.C., where Manchin keeps his houseboat. That was relatively mild compared to what Sinema endured over the weekend, when illegal immigration activists from Living United for Change in Arizona confronted Sinema in a building at Arizona State University, eventually following her into the bathroom.
Ethics Alarms 