The ficks are running thick this spring!
You know “Mersault” is an unethical and untrustworthy pundit because he, she or it won’t let readers know who is writing this far left, biased, garbage. (That’s a photo of the writer above) The author had the nerve to send this substack post to me unasked, and given its quality and content, I regard that act as in the same category as putting a flaming bag of poo on my doorstep.
“Analysis: Failed peace talks leave Trump with few options to end Iran conflict“
That’s CNN.
Note the emphasis. This is Trump’s failure. The near universal framing of the Iran campaign is that the United States is losing, somehow, and it is Iran that has the U.S. at its mercy—you know, like the iconic Black Knight above from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail who insists that he is winning despite losing his arms and legs.
You see, the side that is being throttled in a war is the one with “few options,” and the collapse of peace talks are primarily a problem for the side that is losing. Ending the war is primarily in the best interests of Iran and its people. The anti-U.S., anti-Trump propaganda being spewed by the Axis news media in their reporting on the Iran war may be the most flagrant and unforgivable yet: it isn’t just Trump that they are hurting, or Republicans. They are deliberately harming our nation while giving Iran motivation to stall as long as possible.
Next, we will be reading “Poor Iranians” essays like the Times lament for Gazans. Our news media’s objective appears to be national euthanasia.
Seen on social media (with over 6,000 “loves”:
“Name one thing this administration has done that it promised it would.I can name a dozen ways this admin has backstabbed his base. I can’t name single accomplishment other than feeling good the day he won.”
It’s one thing to be deliberately obtuse, continue with absurd Axis narratives (“Trump is senile”) and to deny facts right in front of your face, which is what my Trump Deranged Facebook friends do daily. It is quite another to put a statement as fatuous as the one above in the web like a hanging curve over the middle of the plate to Aaron Judge.
Conservative lawyer Will Chamberlain replied as I might have,
“Border crossings to near zero. Net negative migration. 95% reduction in asylum grants. Lawsuits against a slew of woke universities. DEI getting crushed everywhere. Massive, beneficial deregulation. No tax on tips. No tax on overtime. Venezuela turned into an American ally. And that’s just off the top of my head.”
He left out winding down the Dept. of Education, finally getting rid of public funding for NPR and PBS, using tariffs to negotiate more favorable trade deals, making major progress in ending the war in Gaza, seriously addressing crime in major cities, gutting idiotic climate change policies, and making America Great Again, which means, in part, going to the Moon again, demonstrating American military power, and ending wokey military policies that have nothing to do with defending the country. And that’s just off the top of MY head. It is also relevant that Trump has only been in office less than 15 months.
As for the alleged “endless wars” betrayal, any President who would not do what Trump did in Iran after assessing new developments and intelligence because of a campaign promise has breached his oath and his duty. That’s unethical as well as cowardly.
I know, I know…I promised to do an exhaustive and thorough post about what constitutes Trump Derangement beyond disapproving of the Presidents tweets, rhetoric, style and dubious taste in appointees. I hope I find time to do it (living up to my promises)…in the meantime, I’ll be addressing the issue piecemeal.
…or at least stop weighing in during this President’s term.
What does it take for the Trump Deranged and hopelessly biased (or hopelessly stupid, or hopelessly dishonest) to be embarrassed? Surely there has to be a tipping point where the public starts pointing and laughing. Surely. Surely.
No? Wasn’t it obvious that Trump’s “war crime” ultimatums were designed to get Iran to make concessions? I don’t mean just obvious to me (“I’m smart! I’m not dumb like everyone says!”) but obvious to doctors, lawyers, beggarmen, thieves and Indian chiefs along with anyone else who has watched this guy operate since his real estate days? Seriously? Really? No? Wow.
I’d like to make Rep. Ro Khanna the poster fool for this malady. Shortly after this EA post, Trump announced the two week cease-fire and Khanna did a double back-flip with a twist, stood on his metaphorical head and called the President a TACO, as in “Trump Always Chickens Out”! This is another clear Trump Derangement symptom. Attack the President on the presumption that he is doing or will do one thing, then attack him when he does the opposite.
Why isn’t this embarrassing to those exposed again and again as reflexively criticizing whatever the President does? Let’s see: the ethical values here are fairness, honesty, integrity, accountability, consistency (being consistently inconsistent doesn’t qualify), prudence, proportionality, humility…there are more, but I don’t feel like looking up the list. Ethics, analysis, logic and reality has nothing to do with how these critics react. It’s all emotion and the Cognitive Dissonance Scale:
Imagine, however, that sub-zero section reaching down forever to infinity, with Trump there rather than only at -10. Prof. Festinger’s theory holds that a negative bias that strong is enough to pull anything…literally anything, people, ideas, books, policies, bunnies, rainbows, babies, The Beatles, Taylor Swift, Nancy Guthrie, opposing cannibalism…into negative territory. What’s going on here? THAT’S what’s going on.
Podcaster Dave Rubin wrote on X: “Trump has been running the same negotiation playbook forever. Pressure, escalation, chaos… then leverage a deal. We’ve watched it happen again and again. This wasn’t complicated. It was basic pattern recognition.” Yup! What does this tell you about people who refuse to see that pattern? Go ahead: come up with a kind description. I can’t think of any.
While Fox News and even CNN were properly reporting on the developments in Iran (Not a word about Nancy Guthrie!) do you know what MSNOW decide was the big news? The danger that Trump was going to come up with some way to steal the mid-terms! Yes, that well-used “future news” subcategory of fake news.
Anyone who watches MSNOW for anything but amusement or intelligence on what the Axis of Unethical Conduct is plotting next should also be embarrassed. How I long to post an entry like this on Facebook…but that would be mean. But fun. But mean…
Over at the New York Post, conservative pundit and law prof Glenn Reynolds wrote, before yesterday’s late developments,
I have made it clear with several posts, including this one, in June, and this one, in October, that I yield to no one in my contempt for the “screaming at the sky” “No Kings” demonstrations. From the June post:
We don’t have a king, and Donald Trump doesn’t act like one. If he did (or could), all the obstructionist, partisan judges we have seen over-reaching to block his legitimate policies would be in prison, without heads, or on the lam. The anti-democratic citizens (and illegals) demonstrating yesterday are not the supporters of our elected President and our system that elected him, but those who still refuse to accept that election (or his first one, for that matter).
Nevertheless, a lot of my good friends, formerly thoughtful, rational people, are either participating in the latest iteration of this…well, let me hand over the floor to Otter for a moment…
A futile and stupid gesture! But three of them (or is it four)? I have measured these protests against the Ethics Alarms Protest Ethics Checklist and found the “No Kings” tantrums to be 0 for 12:
1. Is this protest just and necessary?
2. Is the primary motive for the protest unclear, personal, selfish, too broad, or narrow?
3. Is the means of protest appropriate to the objective?
4. Is there a significant chance that it will achieve an ethical objective or contribute to doing so?
5. What will this protest cost, and who will have to pay the bill?
6. Will the individuals or organizations that are the targets of the protest also be the ones who will most powerfully feel its effects?
7. Will innocent people be adversely affected by this action? (If so, how many?)
8. Is there a significant possibility that anyone will be hurt or harmed? (if so, how seriously? How many people?)
9. Are the protesters prepared to take full responsibility for the consequences of the protest?
10. Would an objective person feel that the protest is fair, reasonable, and proportional to its goal?
11. What is the likelihood that the protest will be remembered as important, coherent, useful, effective and influential?
12. Could the same resources, energy and time be more productively used toward achieving the same goals, or better ones?
However, I am considering whether the checklist is missing a possible redeeming feature of not only these protests but other protests as well. There is the possible #13:
This is a “rest of the story” post but I don’t need Paul Harvey. That image is how I feel right now.
The story began when I posted this meme…
…that had been endorsed on Facebook by a dear friend, a religious and smart woman, whom I have known for decades in many capacities. Naturally the thing attracted the usual “likes” and “loves” on the platform despite being, as you can see, moronic, dishonest, arrogant and offensive. I posted a very brief summary in reply admonishing my friend for spreading ignorance. I got a disappointing response from her suggesting that I wasn’t “caring” enough, which is emotional blackmail, and several other really stupid replies from her pals, including one that said she hoped I was “comfortable with” my “lies.”
I had challenged the Ethics Alarms commentariate to dive into a thorough fisking of the meme, as I was not in the mood. As evidenced by his subsequent Comment of the Day post, Ryan Harkins responded with an ethics tour-de-force that was civil, thorough and devastating.
I decided to confront my friend and her bubble by posting Ryan’s masterpiece along with a long, also civil and measured, introduction as a further response to the stupid meme. I waited to see how the Bubble would respond. I waited to see how my friend would respond. Was there a rational, substantive retort to Ryan’s work?
The above ahistorical, moronic and infuriating cartoon was posted by a long-time friend and—believe it or not!—a tenured history professor at Georgetown. I am reaching the end of my patience with once smart people deliberately making less-educated people stupid, and for the second time this week (the first was prompted by this Facebook meme) I couldn’t wrestle my fingers to the floor fast enough and responded to my Trump Deranged freind, “Now, you KNOW this is untrue. I know it’s untrue, and I know you know it’s untrue.”
And this is Trump Derangement! People who actually have the education, wit and critical thinking skills to reject false framing and imaginary facts, yet who nonetheless betray their own principles and integrity in order to attack the President. I’m hoping Steve-O-in NJ will gift us with one of his excellent historical retrospectives about how the United States was, at great risk to FDR, aiding Europe in fighting the Germans well before Pearl Harbor, and what the U.S. sacrificed in lives and treasure to indeed rescue Europe as well as that civilization thingy. We also rebuilt Europe with the Marshall Plan and have been bolstering European military defenses ever since.
It’s bad enough for a UK cartoonist to issue that crap, but for a U.S. historian to endorse it? Truly despicable. OK, for me, long friendship plus Trump Derangement and aging brain cells equals forgiveness.
Barely.
UPDATE: There is hope! My old friend the professor reacted to my mild rebuke with a “thumbs up.”
I went to bed last night having decided that the first post here today would be about President Trump’s blunt, characteristic, in-your-face reaction to the death of Robert Mueller, who led the cynical and destructive Axis of Unethical Conduct effort to cripple Trump’s first term with a contrived, partisan plot based on false accusations that he and his campaign “colluded” with Russia to defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. The quote, an ethics quote because of the natural debate it fosters, an unethical quote because it intentionally breaches societal norms that dictate being respectful of the dead in the immediate aftermath of their deaths and a President should always model the best behavior for the public, and an ethical quote because it is true, was..
It’s not a close call whether this was an ethical thing to state in public, which Trump did on Truth Social. It wasn’t, and isn’t for many reasons. It is gratuitously cruel to Mueller’s family for POTUS to say such a thing immediately after their loved one’s death. It accomplishes nothing but relieve Trump of some of his apparently inexhaustable back-up of bile. It makes the Trump Deranged hate him even more than they already do, which qualifies as deliberately being divisive, something else leaders should never do. And it accomplishes nothing positive. Such an act does, however, take another step in making this Ethics Alarms 2015 post look as wise and prophetic as it was.
“See? I’m smart! I’m not dumb like everybody says!”
Before I sat down to compose a post that would have essentially said what I did in far fewer words above, I decided to check whether Ann Althouse, the red-pilled Madison Wisconsin retired law professor/bloggress had posted on the quote for her followers. She had, briefly. But what did I discover in the comments to her post was that the topic had provoked none other than our own Steve Witherspoon into not only doing battle with the vocal Trump Deranged and Mueller defenders (in truth defenders of the anti-Trump plot Mueller knowingly participated in) but being allowed to do so by Althouse!
Ann carefully moderates her commenters, and seldom allows an extended back-and-forth between commenters, a policy that Ethics Alarms, obviously, does not embrace. Steve (who was frequently derided on EA along with Steve-O-in NJ by self-banned Ethics Alarms troll “A Friend”) was measured, fair, polite, balanced, ethical and relentless as he was swarmed by Trump-Deranged attackers like the “The Birds” going after Tippy Hedren in the attic. Unlike Tippy however, Steve knew what he was getting into.
He was courageous, and he was right. Meanwhile, his adversaries’ comments were weak and illogical; the main defense of Mueller was that he was a decorated Vietnam veteran. This is rationalization #21, Ethics Accounting, or “I’ve earned this”/ “I made up for that,” as regular readers here know.
Here’s the full transcript of Steve’s interactions regarding Trump’s quote. I will have occasional asides in brackets.
—NYT “investigative journalist” Julia Angwin, dragging a flase and ignorant attack on President Trump into her op-ed about a lawsuit having nothing whatsoever to do with him.
Once again, I challenge the oblivious defenders of the New York Times and those who insist that the Axis news media isn’t a full-time Democratic propaganda operation to defend a passage that should never have made it into print.
The essay was headlined, “Why I’m Suing Grammarly,” and the writer had a valid and interesting story to tell on a hot topic: the failings of artificial intelligence. The A.I. editing service Grammarly apparently attaches the names of prominent writers to some of its re-write suggestions. Not only have the writers “quoted” not agreed to the use of their names and authority, the suggestions attributed to them might make them sound like unpublished hacks. Angwin writes,
“Like all writers, I live by my wits. My ability to earn a living rests on my ability to craft a phrase, to synthesize an idea, to make readers care about people and places they can only access through words on a page. Grammarly hadn’t checked with me before using my name. I only learned that an A.I. company was selling a deepfake of my mind from an article online. And it wasn’t just me. Superhuman — the parent company of Grammarly — made fake editor versions of a range of people…In my home state of New York, the century-old right of publicity law prohibits a person’s name or image from being used for commercial purposes without her consent. At least 25 states have similar publicity statutes. And now, I’m using this law to fight back. I am the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against Superhuman in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging that it violated New York and California publicity laws by not seeking consent before using our names in a paid service…”
Fascinating and informative…and absolutely irrelevant to President Trump, the Iran War and the Constitution. But Julia couldn’t help herself. She couldn’t help herself because she is surrounded all day by Trump Deranged hysterics and bubble-dwelling boobs who spend every waking hour hating everything the President of the United States says or does, so she couldn’t resist inserting an attack on POTUS in her column, even though it was as wrong as it is was gratuitous.
Back in 2024, I posited, only half in jest, that “The View’s” resident lawyer on the all-female idiot panel, Sunny Hostin, had made such a stupid assertion on the program that it should trigger legal ethics Rule 8.3, which mandates that a lawyer who has knowledge of another lawyer’s conduct that substantially calls into question that individual’s fitness to practice law must—must—report that unfit lawyer to bar authorities for professional discipline. Hostin had surmised that “climate change” causes earthquakes and eclipses, and stated this cretinous conclusion on national television, on an ABC News program, which is what “The View” purports to be.
I wrote in part (and in disgust):
“[S]ome people with law licenses are demonstrably too stupid to be trusted by clients. Hostin is screaming proof of the validity of this conclusion, yet there is nothing in the disciplinary rules governing the minimal ethics requirements of lawyers that mentions basic, personal intellectual competence as a mandatory component of professional, legal competence.
There should be. One would think that the challenge of graduating from law school and passing the bar exam would be sufficient to ensure that a lawyer is at least smart enough to come in out of the rain, but in extreme cases like Sunny, one would be wrong….believing that climate change causes solar eclipses is signature significance. You can’t come to such an idiotic conclusion and not be an idiot. This delusion [shows] a crippling deficit in critical thinking skills. One cannot be a trustworthy lawyer without minimal critical thinking skills. When a lawyer demonstrates such a deficit beyond a shadow of a doubt, that ought to be considered a legitimate reason for disbarment.”
Remember, professionals are special members of society whose important roles require that they be trustworthy. True professionals include the clergy, doctors, lawyers, judges, law enforcement officials, military leaders, public servants, accountants, psychiatrists, and teachers, and though it sounds absurd today, journalists. Really, really stupid people are not trustworthy, in fact it is dangerous to trust them. If they are sufficiently stupid, they should not hold any of those societal roles and positions.
Ethics Alarms, as those of you who have read the commenting rules here know, has among its provisions that the moderator, that’s me, may at his discretion ban a commenter who has demonstrated to my dissatisfaction that said commenter is too intellectually deficient to contribute substantively to the discussions. I believe that I have only had to invoke it twice.
Which brings me back to “The View”…
Ethics Alarms 