Surely you have heard about this craziness (and ethics breach) by now; it was mentioned in the comments to this EA post yesterday. A post on the official Homeland Security X account revealed that reservations made at the Hampton Inn in Lakeville Minneapolis, a suburb about 25 miles south of Minneapolis, by I.C.E. officers had been cancelled with a message suggesting that they were not welcome at the hotel chain. The DHS post included a copy of the email with the sender and recipient redacted; indeed, it stated the property would not host immigration agents.
In an abundance of caution, I decided to wait to determine “What’s going on here?” What was going on here is that a bunch of rogue woke morons decided to grandstand in anti-Trump, pro-illegal immigrant, pro-Somali immigrant scoundrels Minnesota, where they think up is down, black is white, War is Peace and unethical is ethical.
If the Democrats, anti-Trump news media and Trump Deranged social media progressives had the sense and integrity to be able to grant that one of President Trump’s actions is beneficial, wise and effective when it should be clear to all that it is, they would have far more legitimacy and perceived objectivity when there is valid justifications for their criticism regarding other Presidential actions.
The removal of Maduro in a perfectly executed military operation is the best example of this yet. It removed an illegitimate dictator who lost his election overwhelmingly. He is a criminal drug lord who had been sending fentanyl into the U.S., a deadly and addictive drug. Under his rule, the nation of Venezuela, which has great natural resources and should be a wealthy and thriving state, had a disastrous economy. Maduro’s political opponent just won the Nobel Peace Prize. Venezuelans in and out of that country are rejoicing in the dictator’s removal. The capture of Maduro also weakens Cuba, a Maduro ally and another dictatorship in the Western Hemisphere.
The United States benefits from the capture of Maduro in many ways, and suffers no deficits from it at all. It projects American power. It demonstrates that U.S. leadership is not dominated by weenies (as in Joe Biden’s “Don’t!” and Barack Obama’s erased “red lines”) It puts America’s foes on notice. The action also re-establishes the Monroe Doctrine, which had been weakened for half a century.
In short, the Venezuelan operation should be an easy one for any rational, patriotic, astute American to cheer for, but the Axis of Unethical Conduct and the Trump Deranged just can’t do it, even in response to an unequivocal American triumph.
Going forward, they should have no credibility at all. They already didn’t, in my estimation, but this should settle the issue.
The Trump administration has ended the lease agreement for three public golf courses in Washington. The Interior Department said it was terminating the lease because the nonprofit that runs the courses have failed to meet the terms of the lease. That, at this point, is all we know. The D.C. bureaucrats who operate the courses say they have done a wonderful job. If so, it will be the only case I know of where D.C. bureaucrats have done a good job at anything, but I’ll withhold judgment until I have, you know, some actual facts.
Personally, I don’t see why the District of Columbia, a small area carved out of Maryland (and formerly Virginia) expressly to house the government of the United States should have any golf courses. Parks? Sure I get parks. Museums? Ok. But golf is an elitist sport that is too time consuming and expensive for a lot of people, takes up a ridiculous amount of space, and has been criticized by environmentalists and other critics for centuries. It is not, in other words, an unalloyed benefit to communities, society, and certainly not governments.
Until the public and the news media know, as in the question that should begin any ethics inquiry, “What’s going on here?,” there should be no criticism of the Interior Department’s action at all. None. And yet, just yesterday when the announcement came out, a Trump Deranged friend was certain, certain, that it was nefarious. Why? Because President Trump is evil!!! EVIL!!!
The news media’s coverage of this relatively minor story has been a parody of anti-Trump bias employing innuendo, false framing, speculation and presumption of guilt. Let’s take the Associated Press, shall we?
Right now I’m placing bets on which of my Stage 5 Trump-Deranged friends or relatives will bite first. Let’s see..
1. This logic is like that of the man who kills his parents and wants sympathy from the judge because he’s a orphan. Trump was impeached twice by Democrats in the House, in both cases without thorough hearings and with contrived accusations and dubious evidence. He was also acquitted in the Senate, and correctly so.
2. The “34 felony convictions” have been effectively vacated. Though the convictions have not been overturned yet, no conviction is final until appeals have been exhausted. The fraud case in question was always pure lawfare, designed by New York Democrats and a partisan AG to “get Trump,” as that Attorney General campaigned on: she promised to “get Trump.” After all, he was threatening to win the White House. Those convictions were also for a single act that all authorities agree harmed no one, was standard business practice, and would never have prompted legal action had not Donald Trump been involved.
3. My favorite fallacy here, however, is that academic credentials have any relevance to leadership ability or successful Presidencies at all. For that matter, presumed intellectual ability hasn’t correlated with Presidential success either. To take the obvious example, Abraham Lincoln had no academic credentials. Harry Truman, an average intellect at best, proved to be a far better President than many with advanced degrees (or Harvard educations), such as John Adams, William Howard Taft, Jimmy Carter, and Barack Obama.
4. Best of all comparisons with Trump is this one, authored by social media wit David Burge in response to that meme above:
I know this guy (not the guy in the picture: that’s Ben Stiller as “Mr. Furious” in “Mystery Men”), an opinionated retired lawyer convinced of his own intellectual superiority. I was still surprised at the bias and incompetence of his recent substack post titled “Trump: Death by Yesbuts.” Yet because it is another manifestation of extreme Trump Derangement, my Trump Deranged Facebook friend, another retired lawyer whose intellect is to Mr. Hirsch’s as Elon Musk’s is to a sea sponge, actually linked to this thing approvingly on Facebook. It is to weep. Is stupidity contagious now? Do we need a vaccine?
The author signals his incompetence and ethical vacuum in his very first paragraph by mocking jurors in a hung jury who told him, “Of course there was a reasonable doubt, but he was guilty.” We are not even told which side the jurors voted for, a factor rather crucial to making sense out of his analogy. That statement by itself would be consistent in the mouths of any of the jurors in Reginald Rose’s “Twelve Angry Men” who finally acquit the almost certainly guilty accused because the prosecution didn’t sufficiently prove the case against him. It was very reasonable for any juror to conclude that the kid committed the murder but that nonetheless, he was not proven guilty in court. In fact, this was my conclusion after watching the whole O.J. Simpson trial.
The rest of the article quickly devolves into standard anti-Trump distortions, name-calling and bias, as well as the familiar narrative discussed in my previous post. Hirsch writes,
Back in 2017, [Trump] told the Conservative Police Action Conference that “Nobody loves the First Amendment more than me.” But, he added, “The fake news doesn’t tell the truth. It doesn’t represent the people. It never will represent the people. We’re going to do something about it.”
In other words, “Yes, but….” “Freedom of speech” is a great phrase but the speech better not say bad things about me!
False translation, but then bias makes you stupid. Fake news doesn’t serve the people. Fake news is a blight on democracy, and it is very important to do something about it. Trump was not talking about news “saying bad things,” he was talking about the deliberate manipulation of facts for partisan gain.
This is persuasive anti-Trump data, don’t you think?
Yes, the same lawyer friend who posted the previous Occupy Democrats attack on I.C.E. to Facebook just endorsed that brilliant analysis. Scandinavian nations gorging on anti-American propaganda have decided to boycott the U.S. for vacations because they don’t like the government Americans elected? Brilliant. Bite me. Nobody’s telling you to dump your character-suffocating nanny states. You want to eschew the glories of the USA to make some kind of ideological point? Go ahead. It’s your loss, Sven
I don’t think I’ve ever vacationed in a foreign nation whose government I did like. Great Britain is rotting on the vine, but I’d go to see Westminster Abbey, the Tower, the Lake District and the British Museum in a heartbeat if I could afford it. All of Africa is a hopelessly corruption-crippled mess, but I’d go to see landscape and the wildlife. I’ll visit Broadway even after Mamdani turns the Big Apple into worm-eaten mush.
Or maybe the gentle Swedes et al. don’t want to be killed and raped by our illegal aliens, after so many of them have been victimized by their legal ones. Just spitballing here.
I am worried that sooner or later one of these moronic posts is going to cause me to snap and lay out in unrestrained terms how stupid and offensive I find this bombardment of intellectually dishonest and biased garbage by someone whom lots of people look to for enlightenment and perspective. It is an inexcusable misuse of influence and status, and worst of all, it’s boring. Every day, it’s the same thing. He’s still talking about Epstein, for heaven’s sake.
If I snap, I will instantly see my list of friends crater to 12, and probably lose more clients. But I won’t…
I still am noodling about how exactly to define Trump Derangement beyond listing the symptoms. I’d say, for example, that a retired and distinguished lawyer re-posting with favor a typical Occupy Democrats Facebook rant qualifies as one. This particular Occupy Democrat post—is that group worse than Move-On, better, or the same?—expressed outrage over “US citizen and Army veteran George Retes'” testimony to Congress over (if he is to be believed) a mistaken arrest and abusive treatment by I.C.E., as it mistook him as an illegal immigrant. Naturally, since he was recruited by Democrats to impugn the agency, my friend (and a somewhat famous classmate who has been engaging in what I would call borderline unethical conduct by regularly attacking his former client, President Trump) automatically accepted his account over that of Homeland Security, which in a release rebutted Retes’ claim as well as that of others who have been cited by critics as being falsely detained or arrested.
A good friend and widely- (and justly) admired lawyer who has been displaying his Trump Derangement symptoms on his Facebook page all year just provided an excellent example of the malady with his Thanksgiving post.
He re-posted the following Occupy Democrats “X” entry attacking J.D. Vance for his speech to the troops this week, as if anything issued by that extreme partisan propaganda outfit is reliable, fair, or trustworthy:
Then my friend, a lawyer, someone who knows as well as anyone that hearsay is unreliable and that biased sources will make you look foolish, wrote:
“If this is accurate it is one of the most bizarre rants by an American politician that I have ever read or heard about. What other American vice president has ever taken on and dumped all over in such crass language the most sacred symbol of one of our most important national holidays? I guess it’s remotely conceivable that Vance was trying to be funny, but if so it seems he needs major schooling on how to amuse an audience of soldiers desperately sick for home at Thanksgiving. MAGAS? Any thoughts on this? Are you proud of this man?”
Never mind that Occupy Democrats is infamous for its distortions of reality to demonize Republicans. Never mind that the video of Vance’s remarks are easily accessible on YouTube. Never mind that a good lawyer like my friend would never dive in with an opinion after writing “If this is accurate” when he had every opportunity to determine on his own whether it was accurate or not. He wanted the biased assessment of Vance’s speech to be true, because he wants to believe the worst about President Trump and anyone who supports him, and he knows that nobody on Facebook, save, perhaps, me, and I have a sock drawer to organize, will call him out on his unethical post.
I did watch the speech, which is posted above. The bit about turkeys was a small segment of the speech as whole. It was not a “rant.” His point was that Americans celebrate Thanksgiving with a roasted turkey out of tradition rather than because it is the yummiest main course imaginable. Of course he was trying to be funny, and because we can’t hear the audience reaction, it is impossible to tell if his routine worked (I could give him a few tips on his delivery) but so what? That was a minor section of the speech. Nor was he using “crass language.” Vance ad libbed “You’re full of shit!” to the soldiers raising their hands as part of the gag, and anyone who believes using the common if vulgar phrase in front of military personnel will be regarded as crass doesn’t know that audience.
But this is Trump Derangement! Neither Trump nor anyone connected to his Presidency gets or is owed good will or the benefit of the doubt. Everything that is said or done or suggested by the President or his supporters is presumed to be terrible, and the Trump Deranged don’t want to be bothered by context, facts or perspective. Their minds are made up. I am watching previously fair, wise and rational people debase themselves without even realizing it, because, you see, the President is “deeply evil.”
Right now, a sniffling groups of women including past victims of the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking operations are standing in front of the Capitol before Congress’s vote on releasing “the Epstein files,” whatever that means at this point. One speaker—they are all saying not just kind-of the same thing, but exactly the same thing but in different words (sometimes) said that their lament isn’t about politics. It’s obviously about politics. Both CNN and MSNBC, the most aggressive Democratic propaganda agents broadcasting, are showing the demonstration live, as if it’s important news. Fox News is barely mentioning it.
The issue is political and partisan. The proof is irrefutable. Why didn’t the victims, or whoever organized them, or the mainstream media, insist that the Biden Administration release the files when the power to do so was entirely within its grasp? Nobody thought of it? The Democrats were fabricating ways to “Get Trump” and had been since 2015; everyone knew he had once been pals with Epstein; and the scandal was 20 years old. The Epstein revival only became a thing when the Axis of Unethical Conduct became desperate in its efforts to slow down Trump 2.0 as his administration began dismantling the Obama-Biden nascent totalitarian state. Naturally, Axis media was all in. Naturally, publicity hound Marjorie Taylor Greene, who comprehends neither law nor logic, decided to use it to get cheap clicks. Maybe she really thinks a rehash of the evil deeds of a man who has been dead for six years is a good use of her time; who knows? She’s an idiot.
President Trump sat down for a full interview with “60 Minutes” yesterday, and was grilled by CBS correspondent Norah O’Donnell (as I was once, though not on that show). The transcript and the video are here. Under the new regime of CBS News Czar (“Editor-in-Chief”) Bari Weiss, there were no deceptively edited sections as in the infamous and unethical (and, I believe, illegal) Kamala Harris interview a year ago when the network switched around her responses to try to deceive voters into believing that the Democrat isn’t, you know, a babbling idiot.
This post’s purpose isn’t to critique O’Donnell’s questions. She was appropriately respectful, aggressive and professional except that her facial expressions conveyed her hostility, which is unprofessional but now common practice among Axis broadcast journalists. The shot above was typical: she looked at the President of the United States as if he were a six-foot talking cockroach. Nor am I going to praise or criticize the substance of Trump’s responses, though I note that he showed an excellent knowledge of American Presidential history when he pronounced Joe Biden as our Worst President Ever.
It is simply to point out that the Trump Derangement narrative that this President is mentally failing and as cognitively disabled as Joe Biden (“Just in a different way” as one sufferer told me on Halloween) is either delusional or deliberately dishonest. The interview was slam-dunk proof of that, and yet this slander/libel is Axis cant now. I regard the claim as evidence of a genuine disruption of thinking ability. Bias makes you stupid, and in this case, bias is making these poor people ridiculous.
Ethics Alarms 