Trump Derangement

Look What Trump Derangement Super-Spreader Rachel Maddow Told Her Credulous Audience…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Remember, as you read this offal, that Maddow is arguably the least villainous of the assorted Marxists, racists and liars employed by MSNBC, and is certainly the smartest.

A New York Times story by reporter Alan Feuer claimed “Trump has made no secret in private conversations with his aides of his desire to solve his jumble of legal problems by winning the election. If either of the two federal trials he is confronting is delayed until after the race and Mr. Trump prevails, he could seek to pardon himself after taking office or have his attorney general simply dismiss the matters altogether.” Maddow, being a corrupt journalist herself, naturally assumes anonymous sources’ hearsay statements as interpreted by a New York Times propagandist is Gospel truth, even though its impossible to tell if the last part of the section (which Maddow read) is what Trump said, what the sources claims he said, or what Feuer thinks he meant (that would be double hearsay). Never mind: it was good enough for Maddow’s fearmongering purposes, so this was her follow-up analysis…

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THIS Is MSNBC!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Upset by Donald Trump’s mugshot, one of MSNBC’s racist hosts (it has several), Joy Reid, indulged herself in a full hate-rant meltdown, saying on the air,

“As a teenager living in New York, I’ve said it before, this is why I never watched ‘The Apprentice.’ I despised Donald Trump. He signified the rich white guy in Manhattan that absolutely hated and despised me. I still remember he made five teenagers my age  take a mug shot.  I despised Donald Trump because to me he signified the rich white guy in Manhattan that absolutely hated and despised me, my cousins, my friends”…So, people like Giuliani, and people like Trump, persecuted black and brown people in New York. It’s what they did for fun. It’s what they did for pleasure. They enjoyed it. They enjoyed lording over people who had nothing, who had no million-dollar lawyers. Who couldn’t change lawyers at the top of a hat and get a different hip-hop lawyer in the next day when they’re tired of one. Who couldn’t go to make their case on Fox, or a Newsmax, who had nothing, and who Donald Trump loaded his everything over. And still, people who looked like them, put him in rap longs. It was indignity, to me, that something I loved, a culture I loved, lionized that. To me, this is justice. The fact that Manhattan didn’t give him a mugshot, I thought was offensive. I thought that the feds, we know it looks like, he was the president of the United States. Okay, offensive. Everyone else had to take them. This case, and I think Fani Willis is a hero, she’s a national hero, because she, more than any other prosecutor in this country, and I respect Jack Smith, and I respect all the prosecutors that are doing this. She is the only one who said, these wealthy, powerful, privileged men and women are just American citizens and when they break the law, they will take that picture.”

No hate, bias, and fantasy here! Say what you may about Fox News and CNN, the other two outrageously untrustworthy, incompetent, biased and unethical broadcast news outlets (NBC, CBS, ABC and PBS are merely untrustworthy, incompetent, biased and unethical), at least they eventually dumped Tucker Carlson, Bill O’Reilly, Don Lemon, Chris Cuomo and Brian Stelter. There was a time when MSNBC had standards too: it fired Keith Olbermann when he went too too far (he always went too far), Melissa Harris Perry, another toxic anti-white racist, and Martin Bashir, but that was before Donald Trump ran for President, and MSNBC became the “anything goes” channel.

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A Clinical Example Of Hopeless Trump Derangement [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Trump Derangement fascinates me, I must admit. It is pathological, an example of raw emotions and the desire to be in line with peers, friends and colleagues literally–and I mean literally literally—disconnecting ethics alarms and basic critical thinking skills simultaneously. The phenomenon is important to study because it has done immeasurable damage to the nation and our republic, and promises to do far more before it has run its course.

Ethics Alarms reader and frequent commenter Steve Witherspoon was kind enough to send me this blog entry by Dave Cieslewicz, previously a Democratic mayor of Madison, Wisconsin. His title: “The Damage Trump Has Done to Liberals.” It’s an astounding essay; if you aren’t subject to depression, it is mordantly amusing. Here’s the main thrust:

Donald Trump has taken a wrecking ball to America. He has undermined our most cherished institutions, destroyed norms of decent behavior, made racism and misogyny acceptable, disregarded facts, lied with impunity and stoked nutty conspiracy theories. And I could go on….The problem is that when the other side is so clearly wrong — ignores or makes up facts or simply lies — it blows apart the desire on the part of moderate liberals like me to be fair to the other guys, to give their arguments a fair consideration and to ask ourselves if they might be right, even just a little.

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Ethics Quiz: The Comic Strip’s Hidden Message

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Yikes.

In February, 2019, venerable ( and usually funny) Sunday comics feature “Non Sequitur” included a hidden message tucked into the corner of a strip . Cartoonist Wiley Miller had scrawled, barely legibly, “Go Fuck yourself, Trump.”

This led some newspapers that had run the strip to cancel the comic permanently. Most, however, did nothing: the strip is still running in, for example, the Washington Post.

Dallas Morning News editor Mike Wilson said that Miller was going “around his editors and even his own syndicate to publish something he must have known we wouldn’t accept. We’ll have no trouble finding a better way to spend the $8,000 we would’ve paid for that strip.” For its part, Kansas City-based Andrews McMeel Syndication, which distributes “Non Sequitur,” apologized, saying,

“We are sorry we missed the language in our editing processIf we had discovered it, we would not have distributed the cartoon without it being removed. We apologize to ‘Non Sequitur’s’ clients and readers for our oversight.”

Miller’s explanation was essentially “Oopsie!” He said he had entered the vulgarity in the corner when he was angry with then-President Trump, and forgot to remove it. He wasn’t trying to sneak the insult by anyone.

Okaaay. Do you believe that?

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

What is the fair and responsible punishment for Sunday comics cartoonist who does what Miller did?

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“Nah, There’s No Big Tech Bias!” Google’s AI ChatBot Provides A Smoking Gun

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I think the first appearance of the ironic refrain, “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!” in an Ethics Alarms headline was in 2018. Since then, I’ve used it dozens of times, and easily could have justified using the sarcastic refrain hundreds, indeed thousands of time since. Even though the evidence of sinister, relentless, intentional and unethical biased reporting by the mainstream media is manifest and continuing daily, its allies (and naive “useful idiot” defenders) continue to argue that declaring that it is what it is constitutes a conservative “conspiracy theory. In doing so, they aid and abet the attempted destruction of American democracy.

The mainstream media’s perceived role as propaganda and deception merchants for the Left is reinforced by similar efforts by social media, the entertainment industry, and Big Tech, though the latter’s machinations are a bit more difficult to nail down. Google, a prime villain, has so many ways to slant public discourse and hamstring non-compliant voices, one main way being through the alignment of search results through its mysterious algorithms. Google’s latest innovation, however, unintentionally provides a window into the biases of the people behind the tech.

Google’s just launched an Artificial Intelligence chatbot called “Bard” as a competitor of ChatGPT, which had been getting lots of publicity lately. Bard’s screaming progressive/Democratic bias quickly revealed itself when conservative users ran some basic tests.

“Not the Bee’s” tech specialist Neo submitted two identical questions to Bard:

The answer to the first question:

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Unethical Tweet Of The Month: Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Larry Tribe

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

  • No, it doesn’t look like that at all.
  • An extensive and expensive investigation held by anti-Trump-biased lawyers found otherwise, and
  • This kind of claim regarding a stolen election has been called “baseless” by the mainstream media and Democrats as a virtual mantra for more than two years, and is routinely categorized as “misinformation.”
  • Tribe, as a law professor, is presumed to know what evidence is, but there is no “evidence” of what Tribe claims, and the Mueller Report specifically stated so, as painful as it must have been.

Tribe’s reputation-scarring delusions, however, are confirmation for the Trump Deranged, who think, for example, this meme by Occupy Democrats is profound: Continue reading →

Trump’s Tax Returns And Trump Derangement

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I’m using the Fredo clip from the Ethics Alarms clip library because I was right in my assessment of the Trump tax return nonsense when it surfaced in 2016. So were a lot of other commentators. I didn’t write all of the conclusions down on Ethics Alarms, but I had plenty of discussions about it with my Trump Deranged friends and others. A summary:

  • Trump was obviously lying in 2016 when he said that there were legal reasons he couldn’t release his tax returns as had become the norm for Presidential candidates, but that he would release them as soon as the issues were resolved. He’s the first business tycoon to run for President, and he knew that the returns would show exactly the kind of legal tax avoidance that the returns of every other wealthy, risk0taking, entrepreneurial individual shows. This would arm Democrats and others to make the usual “rich people are crooked and evil” attacks, as is their wont, and he judged, probably correctly, that his chances of being elected were better if he kept the returns private, as he had every right to do. He could have and should have done this and been honest about the reason.
  • Everyone should have known not going to be anything illegal in the returns, because the IRS accepted them. Sure enough, when they were released this week, there wasn’t.
  • The Washington Post headline, “House panel releases Trump tax returns in another setback for former president,” is incompetent, biased, and insulting to anyone who isn’t Trump Deranged or ignorant. The returns are a triumph for Trump. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he was counting on their being released. Democrats had essentially promised that there would be evidence of dark doings: as with the Mueller Report, it is a dud. Now the question is why Democrats were allowed to breach the guaranteed confidentiality of a citizen’s returns when there was no evidence of a crime.
  • The returns show that Trump lost money while he was President. Of course he did…yet the Big Lie spread by the Axis of Unethical Conduct is that he became President to enrich himself. A Trump-Deranged troll on another thread repeated that talking point yesterday. Becoming President made the Obamas rich; it made the Clintons rich. Trump was rich already: his Presidency made him poorer, and he almost certainly knew it would.
  • Now come the tit-for-tat arguments demanding that members of Congress explain how they have become wealthier during their tenures in office. Well, good. Liz Cheney’s net worth reportedly increased from $6M to to $36 in six years. How did that happen? The House blood-lust just handed Trump a potent weapon to expose his enemies.
  • David Cay Johnston wrote a Trump Derangement classic for the Daily Beast headlined,  “Trump’s Taxes Are the Best Case Yet for Putting Him in Prison.” It’s a funny headline, because the “best case” is in fact lousy: if the Justice Department is foolish enough to indict Trump based on the weak investigative tea brewed by the January 6 Commission witch hunt, it might be a tie. It reminded me why I no longer waste time with the Daily Beast, which is like an online MSNBC now. Seth Barrett Tillman wrote an easy and unduly respectful rebuttal of Johnston’s desperation post, and concludes,

“At this juncture, can you point to even one specific entry in any of Trump’s tax filings which you know to be fraudulent or, even, merely in error? That being the situation, your article’s title mentioning “prison” seems overly ambitious given what is now known about Trump’s past tax filings.”

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David Brooks, A Trump Derangement And “Bias Makes You Stupid” Case Study

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

New York Times opinion columnist David Brooks should have that famous epitaph tattooed on his forehead.

He was once an independent, erudite, interesting essayist of conservative leanings. Then he accepted big bucks to be the New York Times’ token conservative pundit. Soon, after forced contact with Charles Blow, Thomas Friedman and Paul Krugman, the Times version on the Stockholm Syndrome took over shortly before the election of Donald Trump, whom, to be fair, the tweedy and classist Brooks surely would have regarded as icky even before his re-education by the Times. Today’s model of David Brooks is incapable of objective analysis, He serves a neon-bright cautionary tale of what happens when bias eats away at one’s analytical abilities and credibility.

Take his latest column…please.

It is called “The Sad Tales of George Santos,” but it quickly devolves into one more gratuitous attack on Donald Trump. What it most reveals, however, is how far David Brooks has fallen.

Halfway through this mess, Brooks writes, after stating the obvious about Rep.-elect George Santos,

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Once Again, I Have To Defend Donald Trump…

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Trump’s unique ability to make smart people stupid and to inspire normally rational individuals to blind, unreasoning hate may be unmatched in American history. I had a post I was looking forward to finishing, and then a Facebook post by a Trump-estranged friend of long-standing interfered. Now I have to, once again, defend Donald Trump.

My freind is an Andrew Sullivan conservative with all that implies, and he loathes Trump, probably because of too much exposure to others in his peer group who regard Trump Derangement as a badge of honor. Today he posted on Facebook, Continue reading →

What Do You Call Those Who Deliberately Encourage Hate And Division?

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

A much-esteemed member of the Ethics Alarms commentariate alerted me yesterday that he would be eschewing the blog indefinitely because it was making him anxious and depressed. I’m glad he won’t be reading this post. It made me anxious and depressed.

Fresh off of yesterday’s note about the woman who asked “The Ethicist” whether she was ethically obligated to “out” a friend at work who harbored horrible conservative opinions—you know, like not believing that there is a Constitutional right to kill human fetuses—and news of another study showing that Democrats increasingly don’t want to associate with anyone not buying into their progressive, crypt-totalitarian world view (I can’t locate the recent one right now; a similar study from last December found that “5% of Republicans said they wouldn’t be friends with someone from the opposite party, compared to 37% of Democrats,” and “71% of Democrats wouldn’t go on a date with someone with opposing views, versus 31% of Republicans.”), comes more evidence that hate-mongering and Big Lies are working for the Left. They will destroy the democracy in order to save it, and promoting incurable divisiveness and distrust is just the way to do it.

The tough conservative blogger who writes The New Neo reported on a Washington Post opinion piece from last week headlined, “No, Trump voters aren’t incapable of changing their minds about him.” I confess: I saw the article and jettisoned it after this section in the third paragraph:

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