Category Archives: ethics

“Circle Games” and Losers

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One last thought on this, and then I’ll depart from the foolishness.  Recall the cadets and midshipmen who made the OK sign as part of a so-called circle game and whose academy management teams then were cowed into investigating those cadets and midshipmen.

In the circle game, you try to trick someone into looking at your hand while you make an “OK” sign, usually below the waist. If the mark falls for it, you’re awarded a free punch.

The real losers of the round of the circle game played at the recent Army-Navy college football game are the management teams of the two academies. Their meek surrender to “woke” pressure constitutes their falling for the game’s jape, and so they have earned free punches from each of the cadets and midshipmen who were targets of those managers’ foolish investigations.

“Management teams:” those worthies are unsuited to be leaders of our nation’s military academies, and they are unqualified to be teachers of our future military officers.

Impeachment And Trial

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) is continuing to refuse to deliver her caucus’ Article of Impeachment to the Senate for trial.  Leave aside the premises that by withholding her Articles, she is confessing that her caucus has no case to present for trial or that she is functionally absolving President Donald Trump of any impeachable wrong-doing.  As The Wall Street Journal noted, her move only trivializ[es] a serious constitutional power and process. As the WSJ further noted,

There’s nothing in the Constitution that says impeachment requires a formal transmittal of the articles to the Senate, whether by sedan chair or overnight FedEx, or that the House must appoint impeachment managers.

Here, though, the WSJ misstated the case:

If she never sends the articles and there is no trial, she will have effectively trampled on executive power and Senate prerogatives by maligning a President without the chance for acquittal at trial.

The claim is certainly true in the latter part, if there is no trial; however, Pelosi’s not sending along the Articles does not mean there can be no trial.

The Progressive-Democrat caucus’ Articles of Impeachment are recorded in the House Journal IAW our Constitution’s Article I, Section 5:

Each House shall keep a Journal of its Proceedings, and from time to time publish the same, excepting such Parts as may in their Judgment require Secrecy….

Of course, there’s nothing requiring Secrecy in the publicly done impeachment process.  The Senate can simply collect the Articles from the House’s publicly available Journal and proceed from there. If current Senate Rules don’t have provision for that, it’s a simply enough matter—a majority vote—to adjust its Rules.

Even with the Articles collected on Senate initiative, its current Rules say that a trial can’t be begun until the House appoints its impeachment managers, which Pelosi also is refusing to do. This is another easy adjustment to relevant Senate Rules.

The Progressive-Democrats have impeached our President, and with that, the House’s role in the process is done. All that’s happening now on the House side is a toddler’s temper tantrum, a toddler holding his breath until he turns…blue.

Is Buttigieg For Sale?

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In Thursday’s Progressive-Democratic Party debate, in the context of ridiculing competing Party Presidential Candidate Pete Buttigieg’s fund raiser with rich folks in a “wine cave,”  Party Presidential candidate and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) said,

Billionaires in wine caves should not pick the next president of the United States.

Sure sounds like she’s accusing Buttigieg of raffling himself off to the highest bidder. Wine sellers, though, seem to be jake with Warren, including, if not $900 bottles of wine, at least $1,000/donation bottles of wine.

Her accusation, too, stands in sharp contrast with her decision not to call out two billionaires who are trying to buy their own way, first, into the nomination and then into the White House: Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg.

Judgment and Impeachment

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Congressman Jerry Nadler (D, NY) had some interesting things to say 21 years ago regarding an impeachment proceeding [emphasis added].

The effect of impeachment is to overturn the popular will of the voters as expressed in a national election. We must not overturn an election and remove a president from office except to defend our very system of government or our constitutional liberties against a dire threat. And we must not do so without an overwhelming consensus of the American people and of their representatives in Congress of the absolute necessity.
There must never be a narrowly voted impeachment or an impeachment substantially supported by one of our major political parties and largely opposed by the other.
…
We have no right to overturn the considered judgment of the American people.

One difference between then and now, though, is that today Nadler and his fellow Progressive-Democrats don’t think that us ordinary Americans have any considered judgment—after all, we disagree with him and his.  We must be ill-informed, or stupid. We have, since 1998, sunk to bitter religion- and gun-clinging and to the sorry state of irredeemability and deplorability.

And, because so many millions of us support the wrong politician’s policies, we’re racist to our core.

As such, we’re simply to be ignored by our Betters.

Bold Measures

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UN’s Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, wants the world to rise to the task of protecting refugees across the globe.

At this time of turbulence, the international community must do far more to shoulder this responsibility together. It is a moment to build a more equitable response to refugee crises through a sharing of responsibility.

Absolutely, the international community must, and the time is now.

However.

Taking in refugees ad lib is a fine feel-good measure, but it’s nothing more than virtue-signaling.  All this does is “help” those fortunate enough to escape, while the receiving nations cynically turn their backs on, and abandon, those who cannot escape and remain trapped in what those receiving nations agree—by their acceptance of refugees—are terrible conditions in the originating countries.

No.

If the international community truly wants to help refugees, the constituent nations will attack the problem at the source. They’ll enter refugee-creating nations and help them (or force them) to correct the ills that create such squalid, criminal, and otherwise dangerous conditions that citizens feel constrained to risk their lives trekking across vast deserts with inadequate supplies and security and floating across wide seas in inadequate boats with inadequate supplies to another, any other, nation. They’ll move to eliminate, or vastly mitigate, the need for people to become refugees.

Enter another nation to force changes—what about those nations’ sovereignty? That’s a valid consideration, but we must weigh that against the deprecation of sovereignty caused by accepting—encouraging—the brain drain and the economic drain, such as it is, that is created by encouraging the flight of what’s left of the best of those nations from those nations.

We also must balance those refugee-creating nations’ sovereignty against the sovereignty and human rights of the people themselves left in that squalor and those criminal and otherwise dangerous conditions.