See? Rosie O’Donnell Does Have Her Uses After All!

Bitter, ignorant, blindly-progressive has-been actress/comic/talk show hostess Rosie O’Donnell at this point is a D list celebrity not even worthy of Ethics Dunce status. Donald Trump has kept O’Donnell’s relevance on life support by not being able to resist insulting her periodically, one more example of his impulse-control malady. (Is a national leader with impulse control issues a serious problem? Of course it is. If the Democrats had based their campaign against him on that rather than the “existential threat to democracy” lie, I would have less contempt for them.)

But Rosie has her uses, like the book Lucy wrote in a memorable episode of “I Love Lucy”: a publisher wanted to use it as an example of how not to write a novel. Rosie O’Donnell just demonstrated the real perils of Stage 5 Trump Derangement. You see, it makes you look like a vicious, biased idiot.

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Melania and Vanity Fair

One of the nauseating Axis catch-phrases is that Trump’s is not a “normal” Presidency. That is true, but it is the people saying that who have made it so. A particularly petty example, which I rank near the organized effort to stop Trump in his first term from participating in the Kennedy Center Honors program (that worked out well!) is the catty, mean girls decision to keep Melania Trump, obviously one of the most attractive and glamorous of all First Ladies (she makes Jackie Kennedy look like a Muppet) of all the women’s magazines, when covers featuring the First Lady had previously been routine. Puppet President enabler Jill Biden was judges worthy of several covers, but not Melania Trump. Nah, there’s no ladies magazine media bias!

The snotty boycott reached its apotheosis earlier this month, when sources reported that staffers at Conde Nast’s “Vanity Fair” threatened a walk-out over the possibility of a Melania Trump cover. A “mid-level editor” supposedly said that she’d “walk out the motherfucking door, and half my staff will follow me” if the magazine tried to “normalize this despot and his wife.” “Normalize.” “Despot.”

Nice. How fair and rational. Also reportedly, Melania told the magazine to get lost when it proposed a cover after snubbing her (because her husband is eeeevil) all this time. Good.

Just because the Trump-Haters have been trying to tear the nation apart doesn’t obligate the victims of their vendetta to prostate themselves to make peace.

A Little Compassion, Please, for Jill Ciminillo…

A young woman and Chicago resident named Jill Ciminillo has become the target of coast-to-coast mockery and ridicule after she reacted to President Trump’s stated intention of making Chicago next on his list of urban hellscapes to make safe with federal intervention.

The conservative media (including Fox News) and blogosphere gleefully pounced, digging up her old social media posts…

and pronouncing Jill the poster girl for irrational Trump Derangement. “Dear leader trying to protect me,” one social media wag wrote in a tart “translation,” “I admit there is a serious problem here with crime and violence, but because of my hatred of you, we would rather suffer in our own self inflicted suffering. Signed – A Liberal white woman.” Ciminillo quickly deleted all of her social media accounts, surely hoping against hope that her 15 minutes of infamy won’t last any longer than that.

I feel sorry for Jill, and while it is appropriate for the absurdity of her post to be discussed and debunked, she is a victim, not a villain. She is infected with the Trump Derangement Virus because she has been the target of relentless, irresponsible, dishonest fear-mongering by the Axis of Unethical Conduct, including some once-admirable Americans who have allowed themselves to be pulled into the conspiracy.

Here, for example, was Ralph Nader, in many ways an American hero (who, like so many narrow-focus activists, got way out in front of his metaphorical skis), in March of this year. This is long, but it is the kind of unhinged hysteria from a once respectable liberal voice that convinces people like Jill (and my once astute Facebook Friend who just posted it) that “resistance” is the only moral, ethical and patriotic course. Here’s Ralph… Continue reading

Psst! Progressives! It’s What You Mean That’s The Problem, Not How You Say It…

This is pretty funny, as Ethics Duncery goes. Third Way calls itself “a national think tank and advocacy organization that champions moderate policy and political ideas,” acting as “a critical bulwark against political extremism.” Right. It’s latest project is an attempt to train their fellow travelers not to “use an awful lot of words and phrases no ordinary person would ever dream of saying.” The feature “Was it Something I Said” continues, “The intent of this language is to include, broaden, empathize, accept, and embrace. The effect of this language is to sound like the extreme, divisive, elitist, and obfuscatory, enforcers of wokeness. To please the few, we have alienated the many—especially on culture issues, where our language sounds superior, haughty and arrogant.”

Smoking guns abound in this thing, beginning with the use of “we” in that sentence above. “Was it Something I Said” begins, “To: All Who Wish to Stop Donald Trump and MAGA.” Not stop a particular policy or project, mind you, just the elected President of the United States and all those who support him, “The Third Way” is in fact the same old way: the Axis has a dearth of rational policy ideas and principles, so hating Trump, treating Republicans as plotting Nazis, and adopting “It Isn’t What It Is” as their primary operating principle (also known as “Sure. we can fool all the people all the time” remains the plan.

The objective here is to employ more soothing, vague and seductive language to accomplish it. Amazing: every time the Left encounters the perils of imposing reality, its reflex solution is to hide the problem by cooking the rhetoric. The public doesn’t like racial and gender discrimination? Hey, let’s call it “diversity, equity and inclusion!” Normal people think amputating the penises of boys who have been confused about their gender by pro-trans indoctrination? No problem! Call it “gender-affirming care”! Most citizens find the idea of open borders repugnant, not to mention stupid? Ah, but if we all call illegal immigrants immigrants or migrants, then we can confuse them completely! I assume you can continue this theme without my assistance.

“In reality, most Democrats do not run or govern on wildly out-of-touch social positions,” claims Third Way. “But voters would be excused to believe we do because of the words that come out of our mouths—words which sound like we are hiding behind unfamiliar phrases to mask extreme intent.”

Yes, this moderate, centrist, Democrat “think tank” doesn’t think promoting illegal immigration, using radical surgery and hormone blockers on children and institutionalizing anti-male, anti-white discrimination qualify as “wildly out of touch.” “[I]f we don’t think more carefully about our language, many in America will be banking on help from Donald Trump and Republicans, because Democratic levers of power will be few and far between,” the introduction to the NewSpeak guide says. Oh, no! Americans might end up trusting a President who has clearly opposed the Axis’s ridiculous, divisive damaging obsessions, which is, after all, why he was elected over the Democrats’ DEI candidate. Translation: “Let’s be smart about this, and hide what we really mean and what we really want to do. You know, like saying Joe Biden was “sharp as a tack,” and calling videos of him wandering vacantly like a zombie “deep fakes.”

You may want to wade into the whole thing, but here are some examples of what you’re facing:

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On Stephen Colbert and His Fans

You see, there could certainly be a valid commercial argument for a major news network to try a regular entertainment show that was dedicated to attacking and undermining the President of the United States five nights a week, every week. If enough people watched it, and the show was popular, it would have a Machiavellian defense for its existence. Now I, as an ethicist, am confident that my position is superior, which is that corporations should not actively try to cause division, distrust and hate in their own country, which are all destructive to democracy and a civil, functioning society.

I particularly object to entertainment shows that are not merely political and partisan propaganda, but that overwhelmingly express only one point of view to the extreme extent that Americans holding the adverse points of view are treated as “the Other.” Beginning in 2016, TV’s late night and public issues comedy shows became all hate for the American President, all the time. Hate is not too strong a word. Hate is also not particularly funny.

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On the Damning Birthday Doodle….

I just woke up and feel like I’m going to barf. Almost certainly this is because I knew when I finally hit the sack last night that I was going to have to write about this new low in Axis “Get Trump!” shenanigans—oh, I’m sure there will be even lower ones to come—this morning.

You see, it seems that a long time ago, eventually-to-be-President Donald Trump wrote a bawdy birthday card to Jeffrey Epstein as part of Ghislaine Maxwell’s project to create a leather notebook filled with such cards from his friends. It seems that Trump cooperated with the project, which means that he had criminal sex with under-age girls. Or it means that he would have liked to have sex with under-aged girls. Or that he’s evil and needs to be destroyed by any means necessary, of which this smoking doodle evidence is one….but the Trump Deranged lunatics who are fulminating over this “scandal” already know that, or think they do, so again we find ourselves asking, “What’s going on here?

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Sad News: Ethics Alarms’ Esteemed AWOL Columnist Just Posted This Trump-Deranged Meme on Facebook…

Pray for Curmie.

Trump Derangement Saturday Note…

Yes, that’s the Fourth of July tweet from poor, deluded Kamala Harris. Since I’ve posted on several examples of Trump Derangement today (the ridiculous Indian bridge is the one exception, but I try to avoid politics, I really do), I feel like Harris’ statement deserves a little attention. Like Ken White, she just assumes everyone sees through the same jaundiced eyes and knows why “things” are really, really terrible, but she doesn’t give any specifics. That strategy is so much safer than saying, “It’s really terrible that we crunched Iran’s nuclear weapon capabilities, it’s so horrible that criminal illegal aliens are being deported, it’s just outrageous the news outlets that try to rig our elections and that the universities that discriminate against men, whites, and Jews* are being held to account.’

Unemployment is down, the stock market is up, inflation has slowed, DEI is fading away, sanctuary cities are finally being confronted, and Congress passed a budget. The male swimmer who cheated female swimmers out of records and titles has even been rebuked. What’s “hard,” Kamala? Hard for whom?

And what ideals is she talking about? To repurpose her own infamous indignant quote her, “How dare she?” She represented an administration and led a party that ran roughshod over “American ideals” like no other. A fake President. Criminalizing politics. An appointed Presidential candidate who never faced a primary challenger. Refusal to enforce the nation’s laws. An administration built on demographic bias instead of merit.

The amazing thing is that anyone would care what Kamala Harris says, thinks, or wants at this point. She really seems to think she has a career in politics. She’s like the Black Knight in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” still issuing challenges and bravado despite having lost his arms and legs.

Just not as funny.

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*Note: Harvard’s alumni magazine this month congratulates the Class of 2025 on its back page, featuring a photo of a white, maybe mixed-race female grad, a Hispanic female grad, and an Asian male, all smiling away.

If Trump Derangement (And Groupthink) Can Make Intelligent and Informed People Post Junk Like This…

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…what hope is there for sanity and rational discourse in the near future?

I am distraught. The meme above was posted with approval by a elite college history professor I have known for 50 years. I know he’s smarter than this, wildly so, and that he would flunk any student exercising such poor critical thinking skills in an essay or thesis. So how did he come to post such obvious crap, and how can he be helped? Continue reading

And the First “Terry Moran ‘Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!’ Award” Goes To…

Jim Acosta!

Hardly an upset, but wow, what an asshole. But then, you knew that, didn’t you?

Acosta was riffing on a “No Kings” Day episode of “The Contrarian” podcast hosted by fellow-Stage 5 Trump Derangement sufferer Jennifer Rubin, and attacked President Trump for having ICE enforce our immigration laws. Then he made the bizarre argument that the President is a hypocrite because two of his three wives were immigrants. They weren’t illegal immigrants, mind you, but progressive Democrats like Acosta pretend that they don’t understand the distinction.

“Where are the ICE raids at the Trump properties? Could somebody call ICE on the Trump golf course in Virginia? You’re telling me there’s nobody in there that is undocumented or has some kind of squirreliness going on with their paperwork?” he asked. “Give me a break. How many immigrants has he married? He’s got one [that would be first wife Ivana, who died in 2022] buried at his golf course in New Jersey! Isn’t she buried by the first hole or the second tee or something like that?” he asked. Rubin’s guest April Ryan, another unethical reporter, cackled along with Rubin at Acosta’s wit. “Immigrants always doing the jobs that Americans don’t want to do!” he joked.

This guy was CNN’s primary reporter on the first Trump administration. His bias was palpable, and Acosta is now revealing what kind of vicious hate-monger CNN allowed to distort the news in pursuit of his–and its— own partisan agenda.

Someone can try to amuse like-minded resistance fanatics with absurd anti-Trump bile, and one can be a tough journalist speaking “truth to power.” But a reporter who indulges in the first has no credibility trying be the latter. What are the chances that Acosta’s disqualifying contempt for Donald trump wasn’t common knowledge at CNN while he was posing as a journalist? My guess? None.

Commenting on his outburst, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “Jim Acosta is a disgraceful human being.” Why yes, Karoline, I believe you are correct.