From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files:

Nice.

I’d say that qualifies as an unethical tweet, wouldn’t you?

It doesn’t matter what the Democratic Party’s social media account was responding to, does it? (Stephen Miller referred to Democratic Party candidate for Texas governor as “trans.” Not that there’s anything wrong with that..) What does matter is that the party that has (often justifiably) condemned Donald Trump for immoderate social media posts, lack of self-control in his rhetoric and an addiction to ad hominem attacks stooped well below anything Trump has ever tweeted with a “Sopranos-esque” “Shut up you ugly fuck!”

That doesn’t mean the President won’t eventually go that low, but for the nonce, I really don’t care to hear anyone from that party (or that pimps for it, like, you know, the news media) criticizing the President for unpresidential language.

The tweet also tells us, as others have, what the character and attitudes of young Democrats are. If you don’t like mis-installed ethics alarms of current Democrats and progressives, just wait for the ones coming up the ranks.

In related news, Chicago’s WGN reports:

“An alderperson for the City of Waukegan was charged after allegedly mailing in a vote on behalf of her dead mother. Dr. Sylvia Sims Bolton was charged with knowingly falsifying election material, a felony, and disregarding election code, a misdemeanor.The investigation began in March, according to the Lake County clerk’s office.According to election records, a vote by mail ballot for Mary Sims, her mother, was issued and mailed by the Lake County Clerk’s Office on Feb. 5.On Feb. 12, the Lake County Clerk’s Office processed the cancelation of Mary Sim’s voter registration after receiving notification of her death record from the Illinois Department of Public Health.

The ballot was returned on Feb. 26

During a review, election officials identified that the voter’s death record had been processed prior to the return of the ballot. After evaluating the returned envelope and confirming that the ballot had been submitted after the voter’s recorded date of death, the matter was escalated internally and reported to the Lake County Sheriff’s Office for investigation.

Bolton is accused of voting for her mother after she had passed away. She surrendered Wednesday morning.

‘The safeguards and verification procedures in place within our election system worked exactly as intended,’ said Anthony Vega. ‘Our staff followed established protocols, identified the irregularity, and immediately coordinated with law enforcement to ensure this matter is thoroughly investigated. Protecting the integrity of our elections remains our highest priority.’

The investigation did not uncover any facts linking the above allegations to her city duties as an alderperson.”

Gee, I wonder what party the “alderperson” belongs to? Since the media report doesn’t say, I’m assuming she’s a Democrat. (She is.) And how ironic that the only person who uses the mail-in ballot system to cheat happens to be an elected official!

Okay, I’m being arch. The Democratic party likes cheating and gaslighting. Just as Biden’s Homeland Security Secretary said under oath that the Southern border was secure and the entire party (as well as its media enablers) insisted that President Biden was “sharp as a tack,” it has claimed for years now that there is “no evidence” of widespread voter fraud and the more secure election procedures are “a return to Jim Crow.”

“The Unabomber Was Right”#10: DirecTV Proves It Can’t Be Trusted

They haven’t always been titled exactly that way. but the first “The Unabomber Was Right” post went up in 2017, and there have been nine since, with the most recent being here, in January. Today, however, I experienced an all-time classic.

Getting up earlier than usual, and waiting for my coffee to cool, I tuned in DirecTV channel 71 as I have been doing for, oh, 30 years or so. That channel is “News Mix”, which allows me to see sxi screens: CNN, Fox News, MSNow, BBC America, and two weather channels. To my surprise, the screen said the channel was not available, because I did not subscribe to it. Even more perplexing was the language of a second screen that popped up. “Newsmix is blocked. Our search for another channel does not indicate that your selection is available.”

Now that is the notice I get from DirecTV when a baseball game is blacked out because of regional restrictions. The news is blocked? Were we conquered by Iran overnight? I tried everything. Shutting down the TV. Disconnecting the satellite box. I kept getting those alternating screens.

So with a huge sigh of resignation, I realized that I was about to enter, once again, “The Customer Service Zone”:

“You unlock this door with a futile key of naive expectations. Beyond it is another dimension: a dimension of annoying AI bots, a dimension of infuriating repetition, a dimension of incompetence. You’re moving into a land of both impenetrable accents and ineptitude, of scripts, disconnections and ass-covering. You’ve just crossed over into… “The Customer Service Zone”!

DirecTV has a new, perky, sexy female voiced AI, but after I gave her all the information I asked for, she handed me over to the old AI, which asked me exactly the same questions I had just answered. I was told three times that the conversation might be recorded, so maybe someone will hear my shouts into the phone of “I already answered that!” and “And I answered that already too!”

Friday Open Forum!

As I turn the topic choice over to you, I’m going to choose now to mention the astonishing gaslighting going on yesterday at Kash Patel’s confirmation hearing and on CNN and MSNBC as they did their best to echo the nonsensical fantasy version of the FBI being painted by such hucksters as Senator Amy Klobuchar. Patel has been a harsh critic of the FBI, as anyone who has paid any attention in the past decade or so is forced to be. The organization is political, frequently incompetent, and untrustworthy. Yet over and over yesterday I heard that it was completely non-partisan, had no agenda but to serve justice, and is staffed by heroes. Even though Patel’s opening statement documented many examples that contradict this idealized image (which is promoted in the entertainment media to an absurd, indeed boring extent), the same message kept coming: the FBI is wonderful. How dare anyone criticize it?

Given the ugly history of the agency, this “It isn’t what it is” defense is especially weird.

There. Whew! As Jimmy Durante used to say, “I’m glad I got that out. On my last X-ray, it showed up as a safety pin!”

The Apparent Strategies To Overcome Democrat Responsibility For Inflation: Gaslighting And Insulting Voters’ Intelligence

I saw “Biden’s” idiotic tweet about corporations and inflation last week and I decided it was so obviously dishonest that it wasn’t worth writing about. (That, and the fact that anyone who thinks the President actually tweets anything himself would buy the Brooklyn Bridge twice.) Then the Atlantic said, “Hold my beer…”

From the article, which is behind a paywall and I would have paid NOT to see what is available for free:

You would think, with prices as high as they are, that Americans would have tempered their enthusiasm for shopping of late; that they would have pulled back spending on luxury items; that they would have sought out budget and basic options, bought smaller packages, fewer things.

This is not what has happened. Consumer spending rose 0.2 percent, after accounting for higher prices, in October, the most recent month for which the government has data. Online shopping jumped 7.8 percent over the Thanksgiving long weekend, more than analysts had anticipated. The sales of new cars, dishwashers, cruise vacations, jewelry — all things people tend to give up when they are watching their budget — remain strong. Consultants keep anticipating a recession precipitated by the “death of the consumer.” Thus far, the consumer is staying alive.

People hate inflation, just not enough to spend less: This is one of the central tensions of today’s economy, in which things are going great yet everyone is miserable. And in some ways, Americans have nobody to blame but themselves.

That garbage elevates “blame the victim” to a fine art. It is insulting to be expected to be persuaded by such an argument, but apparently the Left’s propagandists are desperate, they really think Americans are idiots, or both.

How Can Any Democrat, Never Mind Anyone Else, Trust House Minority Whip James Cliburn (D-S.C.) After This Op Ed?

Heck, how can anyone trust a political party that would install such a calculated liar (or, in the other Hanlon’s Razor alternative, an utter moron) who would issue such cynical, obvious, “it isn’t what it is” piece of unconscionable gaslighting?

Clyburn has one of the most damning Ethics Alarms dossiers of any member of Congress, which is impressive, considering what an awful collection of corrupt and destructive incompetents “low-information voters” have elected to govern us. He, or more likely a soulless aide—the best defense Clyburn could offer for this thing is that he allowed his name to be attached to it without reading what it said—gave the ludicrous primal scream against democracy to CNN, which dutifully published it instead of handing it back laughing and saying, “Good one. Now where’s the real op-ed?”

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Now THIS Is Gaslighting…Or Outright Lying…Or Senility…

President Biden said yesterday, as he boasted about a misleading jobs report, “The American people are smart as hell and know what their interests are. I think they know they’re better off financially than they were before. It’s a fact.”

It’s not a fact. There were a number of counter factual assertions there. First, the American people are NOT “smart as hell” or they would not have elected a dementia victim who was never too sharp to begin with as President of the United States, Second, Biden and his party routinely act as if the public does not know “what their interests are,” presuming that Big Brother knows best. Moreover, even the substantially dim-witted members of the pubic are smart enough to know they are not “better off financially than they were before,” before meaning, as it should, before the pandemic and the progressive-led lockdown created an artificial crater which any administration would be able to crawl out of and show a relative improvement. The only question is whether Joe Biden believes that “Bidenomics” is working.

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From The News Media And Democrats, Another “It Isn’t What It Is” Orgy [Expanded]

There is no excuse for this, but apparently it works because the American people are generally as gullible as puppies, as lazy as Homer Simpson, and as irresponsible as eight-year olds with firecrackers. Democrats and their news media henchmen and henchwomen once again decided that it was prudent to gaslight the American people on the topic of abortion, where they have no logical or ethical legs to stand on, but never mind, it’s only about “choice,” after all.

During the first GOP candidates debate in Wisconsin, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Senator Tim Scott and former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson all agreed that, in DeSantis’s words,”the Democrats are trying to….allow abortion all the way up to the moment of birth.” That is unquestionably true, but most Americans don’t like the idea of killing viable babies in the womb—if that’s okay, why not wait until after a birth and decide then if you want to kill the little bugger?—so the troops were called out to deny reality. (This is the current Rationalization of the Century in Woke World: #64. Yoo’s Rationalization or “It isn’t what it is”)

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From China, An “It Isn’t What It Is” For the Ages: “Rat Head Gate”

“War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength.” The frighteningly Orwellian progressive movement and its Democratic Party facilitators have emulated Big Brother in their conviction that if you repeat an obvious lie often enough (and the news media helps out by at least looking the other way), enough lazy, careless citizens will accept whatever you say. Thus biological men have no advantage over women in athletic contests, the Southern border is secure, the economy is great, hiring people because of their color isn’t racial discrimination and a fetus isn’t a human life. On the Ethics Alarms Rationalization List, this is #64. Yoo’s Rationalization or “It isn’t what it is,” named after the Bush Administration lawyer who explained that waterboarding wasn’t torture. Totalitarian regimes depend on #64, which is why its emergence as a Democratic Party staple is especially ominous.

China, speaking of totalitarian regimes, has developed a culture in which “It isn’t what it is” has become the proverbial hammer for authorities who see every controversy as a nail. At the cafeteria of the Jiangxi Vocational Technical College of Industry Trade in Nanchang, China, a student found a desiccated rat’s head in his bowl of rice and memorialized the unordered meal item on his cell phone. When he confronted the cafeteria staff, however, he was assured that it wasn’t a rat’s head, but a duck’s neck. (That’s apparently considered just yummy in China. They even charged the student extra. I’m kidding…)

I’d include a photo, but it’s too disgusting; trust me, the head belonged to a rat. It has fur, it has little rat teeth. The nauseated student’s video quickly spread on Chinese social media, but the school stuck to its duck head story, because “It isn’t what it is” only works if you repeat your lie with gusto, and forever. Last week, the Jiangxi Vocational Technical College put out an official statement that the thing was duck, not rat, and the local food supervision bureau also confirmed that it was a duck neck. School officials warned students not to discuss the incident online anymore, or they would face serious consequences.

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Unethical Quote Of The Month: Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries

We will never compromise our principles. House Democrats will always put American values over autocracy. Benevolence over bigotry. The constitution over the cult. Democracy over demagogues. Economic opportunity over extremism. Freedom over fascism. Governing over gaslighting. Hopefulness over hatred. Inclusion over isolation. Justice over judicial overreach. Knowledge over Kangaroo courts. Liberty over limitation…..”

—-New Democrat Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries following Republican Kevin McCarthy’s election as   Speaker of the House

 Is this the greatest gaslighting speech of all time? I can’t imagine a more blatant one. Let’s see: Continue reading

Unethical Quote Of The Week: NYT Pundit Nate Cohn

“The disconnect between Mr. Biden’s popular policies and his personal unpopularity is a little hard to understand.”

—New York Times columnist Nate Cohn, either actively trying to gaslight his readers or demonstrating the after effects of a lobotomy.

I hate to pick on Cohn, because this is just the most recent example of what appears to be the latest progressive/news media tactic to somehow rescue Democrats from the accountability at the ballot box they so rightly deserve. Just as the Big Lie used as part of the battle plan to remove President Trump was Big Lie #5: “Everything is Terriblewhen everything obviously wasn’t (too many things were good under Trump, see, and that was terrible for Democrats), the new Big Lie is “Joe is doing a great job!,” which is ridiculous. The mystery with Cohn and others who are publicly scratching their heads and wondering out loud, “Gee, what is it that the public doesn’t like?” is whether they really are so biased that they have become too stupid to be let alone to cross the street, whether they think the public is so stupid that they can be convinced by repetition,, Orwell-style, that Ignorance is Strength and Inflation is Good, or if they are really engaged in mass gaslighting, relying on the Jumbo, “Total policy failures? WHAT total policy failures?”

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