Kamala Harris

The U.S. “Isn’t Ready” For a Woman President? Oh Shut Up, Michelle!

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Michelle Obama‘s latest nonsense was too stupid for an “unethical quote” award and she’s never been elected to anything, so the “Incompetent Elected Official” designation is also beyond her grasp. If “Most Over-rated, Arrogant, Narcissistic First Lady in U.S. History” title was the prize, Michelle would lap the competition.

Here’s her whole, nauseating quote in response to actress Tracee Ellis Ross (Diana’s daughter) on whether there has been enough “room” created for a woman President, whatever the hell that means:

“As we saw in this past election, sadly, we ain’t ready. That’s why I’m like, don’t even look at me about running ‘cause you all are lying. You’re not ready for a woman. We got a lot of growing up to do and there’s still … a lot of men who do not feel like they can be led by a woman and we saw it.”

What? Who admires this woman, and how do they justify it? To begin with, Hillary Clinton, a woman last I checked, won the popular vote in the 2016 election, meaning that our bigoted, juvenile population still voted for a female President despite her running one of the most inept and offensive campaigns in U.S. Presidential history…until the next woman ran. You can see that one with full babbling cretinism flying in the video above, where Kamala gloats about her “three dimensional chess” brilliant strategy that lost.

It isn’t that the U.S. isn’t ready for a female President: it isn’t ready for a phony, blithering, incompetent female President. Kamala lost by less than 2 percentage points despite being unable to put together a coherent argument, getting an unearned nomination, picking a complete boob as her running mate, and praising the record of the even bigger boob who picked her as VP, and who was the Worst President Ever.

“Harris lost because of sexism” is a despicable, dishonest and insulting excuse for her party’s defeat, and the fact that Michelle Obama would stoop to it gives us one more, like, incompetent and untrustworthy, like, female not to vote for as, like, President.

What an asshole.

The Sec. of Transportation Tells Kim Kardashian That She’s an Irresponsible Ignorance-Spreading Fool. Good!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

In an episode of the reality show “The Kardashians” (My god, is that still on?) Uber Kardashian Kim, the only one of the breed who earned her celebrity (with a sex tape and a huge derriere), told actress Sarah Paulson that she had watched interviews with Buzz Aldrin, who was on the Apollo 11 mission with Neil Armstrong and the second person to walk on the moon, and they convinced her that the moon landing was a government hoax.

“I don’t think we did. I think it was fake,” the Kimster announced. “I’ve seen a few videos on Buzz Aldrin talking about how it didn’t happen. He says it all the time now, in interviews.” Does anyone know what the hell she’s babbling about? The last time I heard about Aldrin in relation to the moonwalk conspiracy theory, he punched a guy in the face for claiming it was true.

Then Kardashian repeated a trope of the ancient conspiracy theory: “There’s no gravity on the moon. Why is the flag blowing?” I view that statement all by itself as signature significance: anyone who says it once is too gullible to be let outside without a keeper, and anyone who says it publicly is an idiot. The “mystery” can be answered by viewing the archived videos or by 3 seconds of googling. Who goes on TV and asserts a non-fact that anyone, including her, can prove false in a trice?

This time, however, big guns were trained on the specific idiot. Sean Duffy, the US Transportation Secretary and acting administrator of NASA, rebutted the whatever-she-is on X. He wrote: “Yes, Kim Kardashian, we’ve been to the moon before … Six times! And even better, NASA Artemis is going back under the leadership of [President Trump]. We won the last space race and we will win this one too.”

Madison, Wis, bloggress Ann Althouse, in one of her “it’s not the topic, it’s the tangents” posts, asks,

“Why is a government official calling out a private citizen who expresses interest in a conspiracy theory? We’re Americans. We have our conspiracy theories. Keep your government nose out of our business. You’re only giving more ammunition to the conspiracy theorists. Why stick your neck out to deny what isn’t true? You’re making it more fun to believe the theory!”

Ann is evoking the “Streisand Effect” with her “You’re only giving more ammunition to the conspiracy theorists.” She’s wrong, maybe even at an Ethics Dunce level. This conspiracy is hardly unknown: there was even a movie about it, and I have encountered moonwalk skeptics periodically ever since the event. “Why is a government official calling out a private citizen who expresses interest in a conspiracy theory?” Because, Ann, celebrities are not “private citizens.” They are public citizens; they make their millions by being famous and by appearing, speaking and misbehaving in public. More Americans by far know who Kim Kardashian is than who know who Sean Duffy is. A disturbing number of Americans, maybe even a majority, believe that being a celebrity (and appearing on TV) indicates virtue, wisdom and intelligence. Celebrity culture helped get Donald Trump elected President. Doesn’t Ann Althouse understand that? Hasn’t she ever heard the rejoinder, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?”

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Ethics Alarms Encore: “Unethical (And Stupid) Columbus Day Quote of the Decade: Kamala Harris”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

[ This was last year’s Columbus Day post, and I decided that I couldn’t improve on it, so up it goes again. It is, after all, the proverbial two-bird stone: a straight reminder of how much we, and the world, owe to Chris, and how narrowly we avoided electing a pandering idiot as President. Another Columbus Day Ethics Alarms post worth visiting is this one, because it has the link to Stan Freeberg’s immortal Columbus riff on his “Stan Freeberg Presents the United States of America,” one of the most inspired pieces of musical satire ever.

But back to Columbus Day: its cancellation in some woke-lobotomized states (Indigenous Peoples Day) was part of the “America is evil and we should all be ashamed” cultural poison that the Mad Left has been trying to choke our society with for a long time. President Trump has more pressing challenges as he takes on the herculean task—it compares to Herc cleaning out the Augean Stables, the last and most disgusting of his Twelve Labors—of repairing our culture, but clarifying the significance of Columbus finding the New World is part of it. Let’s be clear: by any utilitarian analysis the European migration to North America was a very good thing indeed, probably inevitable, and beneficial to the entire world. Thank-you, than-you, thank you, Columbus. ]

“European explorers ushered in a wave of devastation, violence, stealing land, and widespread disease.”

—Kamala Harris in 2021, pandering to the “America is a blight on the Earth and the world would have been better without it” bloc in the Democratic Party  in a Columbus Day address.

Boy, what an idiot. Continue reading →

Late Wednesday Ethics Notes

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

1. Ethics Dunce: The New York Daily News, which joined my Rogues Gallery of websites that use unethical tactics to force readers to tolerate ads or pay to subscribe. This was a new one, though: I disabled my ad-blocker, and was returned to the Daily News home page. But now the link I had opened was no longer available. I searched for it: the piece, an editorial, was gone, at least for me. Assholes. If they think I’m going back to that site again or ever link to it here, they can bite me.

2. Damn ethics alarm: I was in a tight time frame this afternoon and had to deposit a check and mail a letter (returning a jury questionnaire saying I was willing to do my civic duty even though getting stuck in a trial is the last thing I need) then get back to the office and handle a problem. I mailed the letter and was rushing to my car when I saw a young black man painfully crossing the parking lot using a walker, with both hands holding plastic grocery bags. So I had to ask him if I could help—I had been stuck using a walker not that long ago—and he demurred…but also wanted to talk. He was so grateful that I, anyone, had cared enough to ask. He wanted to share the horrible sequence of events that had but him in his current state of limited mobility, his bad medical advice, his work interruption, the burden on his family. So I listened. I wasn’t going to walk away saying, “I’m sorry, but I have things to do.” This was a pure Golden Rule situation, Ethics 101, non-ethical considerations vs. the ethical values of kindness, compassion, empathy and respect. Once upon a time, before Ethics Alarms, before I began teaching ethics, I would have ignored that ethics alarm, if it rang at all. The man’s name was Kevin, incidentally.

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Open Forum! [And One More Complaint About “The View”…]

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

I woke up today with so much already happening on the ethics front that I immediately knew I had no chance of making a dent in it, especially since I am facing deadlines and crises on other fronts. Let me get one minor matter out of the way before I turn it over to you, dear EA contributers.

There were two items in yesterday’s potpourri post relating to the persistent insanity on “The View.” I wonder if I should just ignore that idiot program from now on, applying the Julie Principle. Occasionally the thing makes news, but it is a blight on the culture and social discourse. Barbara Walters, who started it, needs to be marked down in critical assessments of her career because her creation inflicted Joy Behar, Whoopie and Sunny Hostin and the rest on our social and political discourse.

Here is one last “View”-related ethics ugliness. Speaking on the “Behind the Table” podcast this week (who listens to these things?), Hostin, arguably the worst of the worst on the current panel, discussed the moment when Kamala Harris declared on the show that she wouldn’t change a thing her alleged boss, Joe Biden, had done during his Presidency. Harris’s fatuous response—did she ever say anything that wasn’t fatuous?—came after Hostin tossed the Democrats’ DEI nominee the softest of softball questions: what would she do differently from Biden? “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” said Kamala.

Many believe that Harris lost the 2024 election in that moment, which is scary to think given how many other reasons she gave the voters to vote Republican. Hostin, in the podcast, said, “I knew it instantly when she answered it. Which is why I asked the follow-up question, ‘is there one thing?’  Because I knew, I could see the soundbite and I knew what was going to happen, but I thought it was a really fair question and I thought it was a question that she would expect… I feel terrible.” 

Bob Hoge writes at Redstate, “Such are the depths to which our mainstream media has sunk, that a professional pundit doesn’t have regrets about trying to push an incompetent candidate on the country; no, her real regret is that Kamala was exposed.”

Sad but true.

Your turn!

KABOOM! Well, My Head Just Exploded, and If You Read This, Yours Will Too…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Unbelievable. Outrageous. Disgusting. Amazing.

And yet, oddly satisfying and welcome!

That “60 Minutes” segment on Kamala Harris in which CBS and the once-respected new magazine tried to influence the 2024 election by editing a Harris interview to make her seem like less of a babbling, intellectually-challenged fool — the subject of Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit against CBS — was nominated yesterday by Emmys for “outstanding edited interview.”

The revelation that the television industry approves of deceptive partisan propaganda that helps Democrats and advances progressive agendas isn’t the shocking aspect of the nomination. Anyone paying attention know that already. What is head-blowing is that the Emmys would be so open about its bias and rejection of ethics.

The nomination is a direct and flagrant gesture of defiance to President Trump. It is not merely political and partisan, but openly and intentionally political and partisan. Trump sued CBS for $20 billion as a result of this all-time low-point in fair, unbiased, and trustworthy journalism, and should have, if only to make sure the smoking gun “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!” episode wasn’t jammed in a metaphorical memory hole as the Axis media continues to pretend that it is interested in informing the American public rather than manipulating it.

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It Was the Candidate, Stupid!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Before I discuss a head-blowing essay (a loooong essay) in New York Magazine arguing that it was not the Democratic Party’s insane, far left, ultra-woke policies that lost the election but that their argument to remain in power wasn’t progressive enough (yes it really does say this), let me relate some of what Kamala Harris said over the weekend when she attended a Broadway show. After the performance, she was fawned over by the performers—you know, actors. My largely deranged Facebook friends from the theater side of my life probably would have behaved similarly.

Kamala said in part, as reported by the New York Post,

“When we think about these moments where we see things that are being taken, but also let’s see it, you know, nature abhors a vacuum. Where there’s a vacancy, let’s fill it. Let us know that the reality is that the progress of our nation has been about the expansion of rights, not the restriction of rights…

…said the woman whose hand-picked selection for Vice-President wants to ban “hate speech” while she insisted that social media should be censored…

“We have to be clear-eyed. And it doesn’t mean we don’t see the beauty in everything. These things all co-exist, but I believe we fight for something, not against something.”

Translation: Ramalamadingdong.

I know, I know: if anyone deserves the pass conferred by the Julie Principle, it’s Harris, at least as long as she fades into the obscurity she so richly deserves along with past national embarrassments like Spiro Agnew, Carol Moseley Braun, Howard Dean and Harold Stassen. I decided her latest attack of word salade niçoise was notable after I read this stunner in the New York Magazine’s ironically named “Intelligencer.” Titled, “Wokeness Is Not to Blame for Trump: How a misdiagnosis of the 2024 election has calcified into self-defeating conventional wisdom,” the essay by Rebecca Traister is too long to fisk (and so nutsy-cuckoo that it’s not worth the effort), but here are some samples of her reasoning…

  • “The first weeks of Trump 2.0 have featured imperialist promises of foreign conquest, unconstitutional power grabs, gargantuan data and national-security breaches, ICE roundups, and the severing of life-saving aid and medical trials to millions around the world. Thrumming behind the whole shebang has been Trump’s promise to eradicate “DEI,” a term that in MAGA-land stands for the encroachment on our public, professional, and political spaces by people who are not straight, cisgendered white men.”
  • “Trump has falsely blamed a plane crash on diversity and scrubbed information about HIPAA protection for reproductive care, threatening easier surveillance of reproductive lives. Trump’s cabinet nominees have been accused of sexual assault or of having covered it up. Musk’s team includes the “I was racist before it was cool” guy who also suggested repealing the Civil Rights Act.”
  • “Just as every fiber of every testosterone-injected muscle of the executive branch is being flexed in an effort to terrify and threaten people who have still not gained full equality in this country, the press and the dazed opposition remain fixated on the idea that identity politics is what got us here. The problem is that evidence of the unpopularity of “wokeness” — a term for the messy, sometimes pedantic, frequently annoying, occasionally righteous calls for greater awareness of structural privilege based on race, sex, gender, and ability — is thin at best, and at worst undergirds a dangerous misdiagnosis that will ensure Democrats lose again the next time around.”

Traister is convinced that the problem with the Harris campaign was that she tried to represent herself as more moderate when she should have doubled down on the radical positions that got her bounced out of the Presidential primaries in 2020. “Analysts regularly attribute surprise Democratic victories to low-turnout midterms, but at the pinnacle of the “woke” era, Democrats emphatically dominated a presidential contest,” she writes, in a masterpiece of selective history. “In 2020, millions protested racist police violence, sparking a reckoning in which people lost jobs for racist infractions from their past and present. A few Democratic lawmakers did join calls to “defund the police,” and more signaled that they understood the need for criminal-justice reform. Democrats not only won back the White House, but they did so by turning Arizona and Georgia blue and in the process securing two crucial Georgia Senate seats.”

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To Nobody’s Surprise But the Brainwashed, Trump-Deranged and Axis Useful Idiots, the “60 Minutes” Unedited Transcript Proves CBS Was Unethically Helping Harris

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

That unedited “60 Minutes” transcript that took so long for CBS to release is a smoking gun. We finally got to see it today:

BILL WHITAKER: “We supply Israel with billions of dollars in military aid, and yet, Prime Minister Netanyahu seems to be charting his own course. The Biden administration The Biden Harris administration has pressed him to agree to a ceasefire. He’s resisted. You urged him not to go into Lebanon. He went in anyway. He has promised to make Iran pay for the missile attack, and that has the potential of expanding the war. Does the US have no sway over Prime Minister Netanyahu?”

KAMALA HARRIS [the response shown on Face the Nation]: “Well, let’s start with this, um, on this subject. The aid that we have given Israel allowed Israel to defend itself against 200 ballistic missiles…that were just meant to attack the Israelis and the people of Israel. And I think that is the most recent example of why what we do to assist in their defense around military aid is important. And when we think about the threat that Hamas, Hezbollah presents, Iran, um, I think that it is without any question our imperative to do what we can to allow Israel to defend itself against those kinds of attacks. Now the work that we do diplomatically with the leadership of Israel is an ongoing pursuit around making clear our principles which include the need for humanitarian aid, the need for this war to end, the need for a deal to be done which would release the hostages and and create a ceasefire and we’re not gonna stop in terms of putting that pressure on Israel and and in the region including with other leaders in the region including Arab leaders.”

Now Harris’s supposed answer to the same question shown on “60 Minutes: “[T]he work that we do diplomatically with the leadership of Israel is an ongoing pursuit around making clear our principles…”

Note that this is not only in the middle of her actual answer, it’s the middle of a sentence that wasn’t broadcast in its entirety.

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Ethics Alarms Will Now Be Kind To Kamala…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I always feel for the losers in Presidential elections. It has to be one of the most crushing career failures that any human being has to endure, certainly in politics.

In “Inherit the Wind,” Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee’s famous play based on the Scopes Trial, the wife of “William Harrison Brady,” the character who is a thinly veiled version of William Jennings Bryan, has a moving speech about how no one can imagine the pain her husband has suffered losing three Presidential races, as Bryan did (a record). In modern times, losing just once usually ends a candidate’s political career, no matter how young they may be or how close the election.

I think that it is highly unlikely that Kamala Harris, the DEI Vice-President who had no business running even once, will break the recent pattern. She will sign a book deal, cash in, and fade into obscurity, a bad memory for Democrats, a living joke to everyone else. Unfortunately for her, Harris is still our Vice-President, and cannot start fading away yet.

Yesterday she was again the object of derision and mirth on social media and on the conservative websites for her very Harris-like performance during an unscripted Oval Office briefing on the Palisades fire crisis. It was this section, a trademarked Harris “word salad,” that attracted the ridicule:

“It’s critically important that, to the extent you can find anything that gives you an ability to be patient in this extremely dangerous and unprecedented crisis, that you do.”

I can’t say anything nice about the idiotic content of that statement, for telling people whose houses are burning to be “patient” is about as tone-deaf as a political figure can be. However, I finally have figured out why she keeps issuing those “word salads.” It isn’t because she is a dullard, although she is. The reason for her malady should have occurred to me earlier when I considered giving her a permanent Julie Principle pass on them.

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Ethics Hero: VP Kamala Harris

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Harris has had, in my estimation, several opportunities to earn Ethics Hero status here in the past, and whiffed every time. Yesterday, she achieved that status by the easiest route imaginable: by simply doing her job, indeed one of the very few requirements of a job that has always been under-burdened by official duties.

Vice-President Harris officiated as the two houses of Congress met in joint session to formally count the Electoral College votes for President and certify the results. “The votes for president of the United States are as follows,” Harris declared, as she was bound to, after each state’s totals were read. “Donald J. Trump of the state of Florida has received 312 votes.” When Republican members of Congress rose to their feet to applaud, Harris managed to look non-committal, even if she might have been thinking, “Fuck you all.”

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