Comment of the Day: “An Ethics Alarms Hat Trick!Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga) Earns Ethics Dunce, Unethical Quote of the Month, and Incompetent Elected Official of the Month!”

This Comment of the Day on the recent EA post about the unethical, irredeemable embarrassment Rep. Greene is—there have been several of them—by CEES VAN BARNEVELDT is sufficiently long and self explanatory that I won’t delay your appreciation of it. Here you go…

***

Marjorie Taylor Greene is not a great student of history either. President Lincoln did not agree to a national divorce; he secured the unity of the United States at the great cost of 650,000 human lives.

Personally I am quite uncomfortable about the unity talk I am hearing from politicians. Unity is not an abstraction. Unity does not exist on its own; it has a focus, center, and purpose. Proper unity can only be based on a foundation of truth.

During the Civil War slavery was abolished, and after the Civil War the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendment secured rights for the former slaves. The unity that Lincoln restored could only be based on the foundational truth that slavery is evil and has no place in the USA, and that the rights mentioned in founding documents of the USA also apply to the former slaves.

That means that if we need to preserve the unity of the United States we cannot skip the issue of truth, and after the funeral of Charlie Kirk simply go over to the order of the day. The assassination may have a similar political importance as the caning of Senator Charles Sumner by Representative Preston Brooks in 1856. The subtitle of the book “The Caning” by Stephen Pulio” is “The Assault That Drove America To Civil War”.

I do not intend to be apocalyptic with all the Civil War references, because I do not believe that we are there yet. And to stay within the marriage metaphor used by MTG in her unintelligent ramblings, I do not believe that the GOP is required to act like the battered wife who meekly returns to her abusive husband. So no kumbaya solution that leaves everything unresolved.

Here is the take from John Daniel Davidson from the Federalist today:

Continue reading

A Full “Nelson” For The Democratic Party

The quote, attributed to Oscar Wilde, “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell [in Dickens’ “The Old Curiosity Shop”] without laughing” comes to mind, or George Will’s favorite term, “condign justice,” referring to punishment for misconduct that is especially fitting and appreciated by observers. At Ethics Alarm, I signify such delicious and amusing examples of metaphorical boomerangs circling back and breaking the thrower’s face with the mocking laughter of the “The Simpsons'” Nelson Muntz.

Axios reports that the self-inflicted one-two punch of Joe Biden’s epically awful Presidency and his DEI VP, Kamala Harris’s spectacularly incompetent 2024 campaign is still keeping the Democratic Party deep in a hole. Gee, what a surprise: you intentionally place the fate of your party in the hands of an aging and demented political hack who was never that bright to begin with and an inarticulate empty power suit whose sole qualification for high office has been her gender and skin-shade, and for some mysterious reason you end up in political Hell. Who could have seen that coming?

According to the report:

Continue reading

EA Ends Ann Althouse’s Suspension With An Ethics Quote of the Week!

A little more than a month ago, Ethics Alarms put Ann Althouse’s quirky but frequently provocative blog on suspension as a source here for engaging excessively in her trademark “fiercely” detached commentary (‘Yes, what X did was insidious and undermines national comity but what really interests me in the word he misused…’)to an obnoxious degree. I now return her to good standing by recognizing the last sentence in a post about how Democrats are blaming the Bidens’ for their current ill fortunes as an Ethics Alarms Ethics Quote of the Week, to wit:

“The Democratic Party has itself to blame for forcing Biden on the country in 2020 and for everything that happened down the line.”

Bingo!

Truer words could not be spoken. Since its November defeat, the party has attempted to blame everyone and everything but its own series of atrocious policies, totalitarian tactics, undemocratic cover-ups, spectacular dishonesty and incompetent decisions. Biden, as has become increasingly apparent as the truth is slowly uncovered regarding just how far from being in charge during his White House tenure Joe really was, is one of the least blameworthy. He didn’t nominate himself, after all, nor was he likely fully aware of how disabled he really was becoming as his four years dragged on. Biden was never seriously regarded as Presidential material when he had all of his marbles, but his Machiavellian party nominated him to run in 2020 anyway, not because there was a chance in the world that he would be an effective President, but because he was the most likely candidate to beat Trump, especially when a pandemic made it possible for Joe’s diminishing abilities to be hidden.

True, Biden chose the ridiculous Kamala Harris as his DEI VP, but again, Democrats didn’t have to nominate her as their 2024 Presidential candidate, just as the party didn’t have to become shills for open borders, out-of-control debt, race-based hiring, crippled law enforcement, social media censorship, politicized law enforcement, transmania and climate change hysteria.

Continue reading

Cowardly Grandstanding Of The Month:

Yeah, Nike is to blame for biological men invading women’s sports. Sure.

What a lazy, intellectually dishonest, cowardly campaign this is. The people that these women should be petitioning and complaining to are progressives and Democrats who have abandoned their commitment to women’s sports because they are determined to pander to the sweet ‘smell of wokeness in the morning’ emitted by LGBTQ activists.

Women are a huge voting bloc, and the trans community is tiny (though demanding). If women put up a united front against biological men competing in women’s sports and made it clear that they were going to hold the Democratic Party responsible if this absurd distortion of common sense, biology and competitive ethics continues, the issue would evaporate like sweat on Lia Thomas’s stubbly chin.

These women don’t have sufficient integrity to do that, however. They would rather lose while blaming a corporation that gains nothing by injecting itself into a sports policy battle that isn’t any of its business anyway. Women’s sports being destroyed by unethical participation rules is the government’s business, but instead of protecting female athletes, the Democratic Party is rolling over and showing its belly to the trans lobby because it considers the female voting bloc “in the bag.”

This is essentially the same cynical calculation that allows Democrats to support its party’s anti-Israel and anti-Semitic component: they don’t believe reflex-Democrat Jews will ever abandon them for the Republican Party.

At least American Jews aren’t blaming Nike for the explosion of anti-Semitism.

Ethics Verdict: This Is Unforgivable, and Accountability Is Mandatory

“Holy Crap!” indeed.

I have to come to the harsh but unavoidable ethics verdict that anyone who votes for the same political party responsible for us having a President in this condition is stupid, irreversibly ignorant, completely uninformed, or a mindless partisan robot eager to love Big Brother.

As I recently reminded readers by quoting from this post in early 2020, the fact that Joe Biden was losing his already tenuous grip on competence was evident before the Democrats nominated him. I wasn’t unusually perceptive; the Democratic Party’s Dark Leaders had to know that the assorted demagogues, anti-US socialists and empty suits competing with him for the Presidential nomination that year had little chance of defeating the Evil Donald Trump, and also that Biden was literally unfit to hold office. Then the pandemic struck, and the party, which aspires to be called The Party henceforth, realized that they could hide Joe in the basement, pretend he wasn’t losing marbles daily, and use pandemic terror spread by its media allies to justify useful changes in election security. Voilà! Victory “by any means necessary.” [Harry Reid chimes in from the Lake of Fire where he now resides, “Romney lost, didn’t he?”]

Continue reading

The Message, Not The Messenger…Ethics Quote of the Week: RFK, Jr.

Just because I would vote for a Muppet before I would vote for Kennedy, he accurately described not only why he has abandoned the corrupt and undemocratic Democratic Party, but why any Democrat with integrity should.

Ann Althouse chose basically the same excerpt from the speech that I would have, so I’ll give her the pointer on the official Ethics Quote of the Week:

Continue reading

What’s a Petard? These Are Petards….

A petard is an archaic word for a bomb, before bombs were as big and destructive as they are today. The term “hoist by his own petard” means literally that some idiot blew himself up, kind of like this guy, except that in the classic example the bomb-wielder intends to damage something or someone else. The phrase is used to describe George Will’s condign justice,” meaning that a miscreant has reaped what he has sowed, received his just deserts, and “got what was coming to him,her, or it.”

In the future, when a nubbin asks, “Daddy, what does it mean to be ‘hoist by one’s own petard’?” the most vivid possible answer might be what is happening right now to the corrupt and Machiavellian Democratic Party and its corrupted allies. Exploding or soon to explode petards are everywhere.

An inventory (so far):

Continue reading

Another Democratic Party Strategy to Save Democracy: Blocking “More Choices on the Ballot”

I keep thinking some day, Democrats with ethics alarms and functioning cerebral cortexes are going to wake up, slap themselves sharply in the face, and shout, “This entire party is based on lies, deception, and hypocrisy! What the hell have I been doing?”

If today’s New York Times story titled “Democrats Prepare Aggressive Counter to Third-Party Threats” doesn’t have that effect, however, I wonder if anything will.

Since the Times here is carefully trying to inform readers about an organized effort by their readers favorite party that should be received as an indictment on its face, the article proceeds as if there are legitimate arguments pro- and con. “An army of lawyers aims to challenge the steadily advancing ballot-access efforts of independent candidates, who Democrats fear could peel votes away in swing states,” begins the Times. “The aim ”is to ensure all the candidates are playing by the rules, and to seek to hold them accountable when they are not,’ “the Times explains quoting one of the leaders of the party’s efforts. It doesn’t mention that this is pure deceit, as the paper has already explained the motivation for the assault on ballot access:

Continue reading

Ethics Quote of the Week: Justice Dept. Special Counsel Robert Hur

From the report issued today by the DOJ Special Counsel tasked with investigating Joe Bden’s storing boxes of classified documents in his garage:

Holy guacamole.

Well, I assume this document will authoritatively put an end to the dissembling Democratic narrative that President Biden is as sharp as a tack. The status of Biden’s mental facilities was relevant in making the determination of whether charges should be filed, if prosecutors were doubtful about whether and jury would convict someone who is described as a doddering old man, as in this passage:

“…We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory. Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him—by then a former president well into his eighties—of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”

Continue reading

Ethics Quiz: Is A Candidate Who Records Herself Urinating In The Snow And Posts The Video To Social Media Fit To Serve In The Virginia Legislature?

I’m kidding. This isn’t really an ethics quiz post. It’s a “When did the Democratic Party completely lose its collective mind?” post.

In Old Virginny, where I live, where multiple communities feel it necessary to criminalize over-age trick-or-treating, where the state Democratic Party felt that Clinton bag man Terry McAuliffe was a fine choice to be governor, and where the same party was until recently running a candidate who performed sex-acts for cash with her husband on a porn site, Jessica Anderson (shown proudly peeing in the snow above) is a nominated and widely endorsed candidate for Virginia’s House of Delegates.

Her professionally-designed website describes her as “not a politician; she is an everyday person who advocates for her community.” When did people who piss in the snow and publicize the process start qualifying as “everyday people”? I’ve known a lot of normal and abnormal people in my epic life, and I’m fairly certain that none of them have done this or would consider doing this. In truth, I was considering an ethics quiz involving another TikTok post by Jessica; this one:

The question would have been, “Is it fair to judge a grown woman who dresses as an eggplant and flaunts herself doing so online as not sufficiently trustworthy to be an elected official?”

Close reading of Jessica’s website reveals other red flags, one being that she favors unconstitutional “red flag laws” inflicting pre-crime breaches of due process and individual rights based on vague standards applied by the government. Her aspiring totalitarian explanation: “The idea that someone is seen as a substantial threat and could face little legal ramifications and endanger members of our community, should warrant stricter criminal consequences.” Being “seen” as a threat warrants criminal consequences! That the mark of a 2023 progressive Democrat, even one who doesn’t revel in peeing in the snow…

The peeing eggplant candidate also proves herself to be deliberately misleading, describing abortion (one must assume that’s what she’s talking about) on her site’s homepage as “reproductive rights,” the current cover-term now that “choice” has been outed as the disinformation it is. If one clicks through, abortion is finally extolled by the candidate, but the page presents another red flag regarding Jessica’s fitness: professionally designed as it is, her campaign site reveals her as careless, ungrammatical and inarticulate or, in the alternative, someone who delegates to incompetents. Here’s the text on the abortion issue, highlights mine:

Youngkin and VA-GOP have advocate for abortion bans, recently pushing for a 15 week ban specifically, Yet, they fail to discuss that a 15 week ban does NOT stop elective abortions and instead causes doctors to hesitate, putting patients at risk of sepsis, blood loss, organ failure, reproductive organ loss, coma and even death. These types of laws also eliminate families ability to make a personal decision when they are presented with the horrible reality that their wanted child is not viable and will not survive childbirth. We also know that 93% of all abortions nationwide, occur by or before 13 weeks, with only 6% occurring between 13 and 20 weeks. So we need to ask ourselves why politicians are trying to legislate a 15 week ban, that only impacts 2.5% of all abortions, which are medically necessary due to fetal abnormalities and/or maternal mortality. Legislators have no business in our doctor’s offices, making our personal and life-altering medical decisions, and putting our healthcare providers at legal risk simply for providing us care. I believe the long-standing law in Virginia, which allows for abortion access through the 2nd trimester and that in the rare instance of a 3rd trimester abortion, healthcare providers must respond quickly and ethically. It outlines that if a pregnancy is terminated in the 3rd trimester, it requires a physician along with 2 consulting physicians, to deem the procedure medically necessary. The further arbitrary laws being discussed and introduced are nothing more than political grandstanding and serve no purpose than to control this deeply personal decision.

This section and others on the site do explain why the candidate believes that education is important, I suppose. I also concede that this is how most “everyday” people think and write. Elected officials and representatives responsible for our laws and policies, however, should be better and smarter than the average American, a rather low bar to clear. The 2023 version of the Democratic Party and their progressive allies clearly don’t accept this rather obvious principle (See: Rep. Jamaal Bowman). Anderson’s endorsement page shows that she’s the darling of all the usual suspects, and enthusiastically supported by the leaders of her party in Virginia, who, by extension, apparently also applaud public peeing.