Tag Archives: ignorance

May 21, 2013 · 12:22 pm

A Side Benefit of the I.R.S. Scandal: Self-Identification By Dishonest Partisan Hacks

You know better, Gov.

You know better, Governor.

I mentioned this once already, but it bears repeating: any spinner, excuser, minimizer or defender of the I.R.S. scandal who uses the “it was a Bush appointee” talking point has insulted your intelligence or impugned his own, as well as marked himself or herself as an untrustworthy hack. I’m taking names and making lists myself now, and it’s growing by the hour.

Yesterday I added Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, whom I once believed had some integrity, and Donna Brazile. Today Richard Cohen, among others, joined the list. It really is shocking, and it’s increasingly more difficult to shock me. It is also ominous. Things we haven’t yet learned must really be ugly for such a transparently desperate excuse to be trotted out so early by people who almost certainly know what garbage it is.

Yesterday I heard Rendell literally drive Joe DiGenova, the former Attorney General, to apoplexy—Joe’s eyes were popping out of his head and I though he was going to fall over to the floor foaming at the mouth— by stating repeatedly that the I.R.S. fiasco “couldn’t be a conspiracy because a Bush appointee was in charge.” This is either unbelievably ignorant or despicably dishonest, and I suspect the latter. As I wrote in a previous post, Continue reading →

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April 26, 2013 · 10:19 am

The Stigmatized Science Fair Project: School Indoctrination, Power Abuse and Passive Parents

indoctrinationFrom Lenore Skanzy’s useful and fascinating blog Free Range Kids comes a report from a mother whose Middle Schooler’s science fair project was summarily disqualified after he devoted months of work on it because it involved Airsoft guns, the realistic-looking gun replicas that shoot plastic pellets—toys, though expensive ones, much favored by pre-teen and teen-aged boys. The Airsoft was not physically featured in the project display; apparently the boy was punished for having the bad taste to use anything that looked and behaved like a gun in any activity related to school. According to the mother, his experiment, involving the spin on propelled objects, received a high enough score to send him and his experiment to the regionals, had he not been slapped down for daring to use a toy gun at his own home.

What is going on here? What is going on is a concerted, widespread nation-wide, ideologically-motivated and unethical effort by teachers, administrators and school districts to create a pervasive anti-gun, anti-gun ownership, anti-Second Amendment and pro-gun confiscation culture in the schools, ensuring, through cultural reinforcement, that future generations emerge from public education thoroughly phobic about guns no matter what their purpose. This abuse of power, a particularly stupid, sinister and ignorant abuse of power, is being encouraged by elected officials and the news media, and it is the tip of a very ugly iceberg.

This isn’t about guns, though they are the target this time. It is about school personnel and schools using their influence to implant ideology and political policy views in children, which is neither their job nor the appropriate role of public education. Continue reading →

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April 24, 2013 · 10:48 am

More Reasons Not To Vote For Mark Sanford

Mark Sanford evokes that stirring Civil War battle, the Alamo.

Mark Sanford evokes that stirring Civil War battle, the Alamo.

The unethical and increasingly ridiculous Mark Sanford, now in the process of losing what should have been a sage House seat for Republicans in South Carolina, has added the public crime of “making Americans dumber” to his list of disqualifications for public office.

Sanford was the rising star South Carolina governor—married, with children— who went AWOL on the job to have a  clandestine liaison with his South American mistress, using public funds in the process, and lying through his staff to cover his tracks. He didn’t have the courage or the decency to resign, nor did he have the common sense and decency to quietly disappear so he would stop embarrassing his wife, his state, Republicans, men, and Homo sapiens everywhere. Instead he returned to run in a primary for a House seat, and since Republican primary voters will apparently vote for anyone or anything, won. Now he’s running behind in the polls to a Democratic candidate whose key qualification is that her brother is a popular TV comic.

Sanford has run a full page ad in some newspapers, painting himself in heroic terms and comparing himself to the martyrs of the Alamo: Continue reading →

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April 18, 2013 · 11:20 am

Why The Gun Bill Deserved To Lose, and Why We Should All Be Glad It Did

A bad day for Machiavelli is a good day for America.

A bad day for Machiavelli is a good day for America.

Consequentialism rules supreme in Washington, D.C.; that is the tragedy of our political system. If unethical conduct is perceived as having a positive outcome, few in D.C. will continue to condemn the means whereby those beneficial and lauded were achieved. Worse, the results will be seen as validating the tactics, moving them from the category of ethically objectionable into standard practice, and for both political parties

Thus we should all reluctantly cheer the likely demise of the Senate’s gun control bill yesterday. The compromise background check provision that failed wasn’t perfect, but it would have been an improvement over the current system. Nevertheless, the post-Sandy Hook tactics of gun control advocates, including the President and most of the media, have been so misleading, cynical, manipulative and offensive that their tactics needed to be discouraged by the only thing that has real influence in the nation’s Capital: embarrassing failure.

The tainted enterprise begins with the fact that it should not have been a priority at this time at all. Newtown did not signal a crisis; it was one event, and that particular bloody horse had left the barn. The supposedly urgent need to “prevent more Sandy Hooks” was imaginary, but it apparently served the President’s purpose of distracting attention from more genuinely pressing matters, notably the stalled employment situation and the need to find common ground with Republican on deficit and debt reduction. Meanwhile, the conditions in Syria have been deteriorating and North Korea is threatening nuclear war: why, at this time, was the President of the United states acting as if gun control was at the top of his agenda? It was irresponsible, placing political grandstanding above governing. In this context, Obama’s angry words yesterday about the bill’s defeat being caused by “politics” were stunningly hypocritical. The whole effort by his party was about nothing other than politics. Continue reading →

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April 3, 2013 · 6:05 pm

Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colorado)

"MMM! Guns bad! Congresswoman lazy!

“MMM! Guns bad! Congresswoman lazy!

Asked how a ban on magazines holding more than 15 rounds would be effective in reducing gun violence, Rep. Diana DeGette, the sponsor of Federal legislation to prohibit the sale or transfer of ammunition magazines holding more than 10 rounds, replied with ignorant semi-gibberish worthy of recent Miss Universe competitors. She said, and I’m not making this up:

“I will tell you these are ammunition, they’re bullets, so the people who have those now they’re going to shoot them, so if you ban them in the future, the number of these high capacity magazines is going to decrease dramatically over time because the bullets will have been shot and there won’t be any more available.”

Uh, no, Congresswoman, that’s not how it works, or the theoretical reason for your own legislation. Magazines can be refilled, like Pez dispensers. It’s not as if they have to be thrown away once they are empty. Your reason for the legislation—now read your talking points  from the anti-gun lobby!—is that shooters in the process of massacring school children will have to stop to reload after only ten bullets.

Is it too much to expect that elected officials actually understand the things they set out to regulate and prohibit? That they—OK, their staffs, then, assuming the elected representative involved can read—do a modicum of research before sponsoring legislation? That they actually know what they are talking about and answer the most basic of questions—-why will this legislation help?—-accurately and articulately?

Yes, in this case apparently it is. Like  gun control or oppose gun control, all Americans have an equal stake in competent legislators who pass laws based on knowledge, not ideological cant at the lizard-brain level of “Guns bad!!! Ban bad guns and you know, gun things!” Too much of gun regulation reform advocacy has been carried on at this level in the public and the media; for a U.S. Congresswoman to do likewise is a disgrace.

______________________________

Pointer: Tim Levier

Facts: Denver Post

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March 26, 2013 · 9:16 pm

Ethics Dunce: National Journal Writer Matthew Cooper (And Boy, Am I Sick Of It!)

Matt Cooper apparently thinks Clarence represented murderers because he LIKED murderers. That's not how it works, Matt.

Matt Cooper apparently thinks Clarence represented murderers because he LIKED murderers. That’s not how it works, Matt.

Matthew Cooper, like so many before him who should know otherwise, confounds the role of an attorney with the views of the individual serving as an attorney. This is a disturbing chunk of ignorance for a prominent journalist to pass on to the public, and as I have before, I am honor bound to point it out, and also to say: Understand what you’re writing about, journalists!  That’s one of your ethical duties.

In a National Journal piece about Ted Olson, who argued against Proposition 8 and for same-sex marriage before the U.S. Supreme Court, Cooper writes,

“While most folks were surprised by his support of gay marriage, I wasn’t. Yes, he was a conservative. But he had also defended the press as the longtime lawyer for the Los Angeles Times and in other First Amendment cases. He’d agreed to represent Tim Phelps, a Newsday reporter, in the Anita Hill case even if Phelps’s work was damaging to the conservative Clarence Thomas. He was conservative, but not reflexively so.”

Why is this old, basic and simple principle so difficult to grasp: a lawyer does not adopt his or her client’s views by virtue of representing them or advocating for them in court or the public square! The lawyer’s views are presumed to be irrelevant to the position he or she takes for a client. As the ABA’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct state (and legal ethics has held for centuries),

“A lawyer’s representation of a client, including representation by appointment, does not constitute an endorsement of the client’s political, economic, social or moral views or activities.” Continue reading →

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March 15, 2013 · 11:37 am

No Hero He: Sen. Portman Demonstrates How To Make Doing The Right Thing Look Terrible

PortmanQuayleTracy

Guess Who’s A Hypocrite?

Sen. Rob Portman’s sudden reversal of his long-held and vocally expressed revulsion toward everything gay—including marriage—is being hailed by some as a virtuous, generous, open-minded and courageous act. It is nothing of the sort.

Portman’s change was precipitated by the fact that his own son….that is, a real person he  cares about…revealed that he was gay, requiring Portman to choose between following through, in ways that would, for the first time, have unpleasant personal consequences, on his supposedly deeply held, faith-based opposition to gay rights in America, or to abandon those core moral beliefs in the time it takes to throw out an ill-fitting pair of pants. What Portman has gone through is a classic “foxhole conversion,” in the manner of the atheist who suddenly finds God when death is near and it seems wise to hedge his bets.

There is nothing courageous or admirable about this at all. To the contrary, it proves that Portman’s earlier position condemning people like his son was based on political expediency, ignorance, recklessness, cold disregard for anyone not like him, or dishonesty, and I really don’t care which.

We have seen such conduct from the Right before, memorably in Dan Quayle’s admission that despite his absolute conviction, or so he had said, that abortion was morally wrong and ought to be illegal even in cases of rape or incest, he would, hypothetically, support his teen-aged daughter’s decision to have an abortion because he loved her. We have seen it from the Left, too, as in the situation memorably dramatized in the film “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner?” Individuals who advocate political, economic, moral and policy positions that they would oppose in the jerk of a knee if they had real, personal consequences are undercover hypocrites. They have not applied the Golden Rule;  how they would feel if the were in the position of those whose lives they so cavalierly would affect has never entered their consciousness. What this flip-flop tells us about Sen. Rob Portman is that nobody should respect or take notice of what he thinks or says he thinks, and that having such a man casting one of a hundred votes in the U.S. Senate means that the body is, at best, only 99% responsible, competent or trustworthy. Continue reading →

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March 12, 2013 · 3:08 pm

Unethical Quote of the Week: Rush Limbaugh

“Speaking of global warming…which has now been proven to be a hoax”…”

—-Rush Limbaugh, riffing today on his radio show regarding the evils of liberals from Obama to Bloomberg.

No, actually, Newsweek is now a hoax.

Actually, Newsweek was the hoax.

This an outright ethics foul, even if Rush believes it. If he doesn’t believe it, it’s a lie. If he does believe it, it is still a reckless, incompetent and irresponsible thing to say to millions of listeners who trust him to tell them the truth.

Global warming, or climate change, is not a hoax. Its exact extent may not be known, or as conclusively known as some scientists and commentators claim. It may be difficult to measure, and the historical data it is being measured against may be flawed. Its researchers may have biases, and have strayed too far over the line into advocacy. They may also have been too willing to stifle dissenting voices in the scientific community. How serious global warming will be, when its effects will be fully felt and how long it will last are all matters of projection and speculation, subject to error. Projections have been, and will continue to be, unreliable, and arguably, too unreliable to justify costly public policy measures. Remedies are speculative, and cost-benefit ratios are in doubt.

It is also true that many of the most vocal and visible supporters of the most dire projections by climate change researchers, as well as the most vociferous attacker of climate change skeptics, literally don’t know what they are talking about. Their fervor is driven by ideology and faith rather than actual expertise and scholarship, and anything they say on the subject should be given no weight whatsoever. This groups includes journalists, columnists, bloggers, celebrities, academics not in the sciences, public officials and leaders, including, depressingly, Barack Obama, whose State of the Union speech comments on climate change were outrageous and irresponsible: Continue reading →

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February 19, 2013 · 11:46 pm

Manatee Reflections: How Can We Tell Right From Wrong When We Can’t Think Straight At All?

Interestingly, not the slowest participant in this situation...

Interestingly, not the slowest participant in this situation…

I think the greatest impediment to building an ethical culture is the relentless dumbing down of the culture, a process now driven as much by political factors as educational ones and Honey Boo-Boo. The last election showed that ours politicians fhave decisied that they only benefit from misleading and frightening the ignorant and logically impaired among us—all the better to persuade them to elect leaders not much smarter than they are, but probably more ruthless and dishonest. In so many corners of our society, there are no consequences for demonstrated intellectual incompetence.

The news media is a prime example. CNN’s Deborah Feyeric actually asked, on the air, whether the approaching asteroid last week was “the effect of, perhaps, global warming.” She is too ignorant to be on television: this is signature significance. I know science isn’t her usual beat, but nobody this incapable of basic logic should be interpreting news on the airwaves about anything. If she had announced the moon was made of cheese, or asked if anyone had ever found that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, it could not have been any worse. CNN doesn’t care: she still has a job. Being jaw-droppingly stupid—the worse kind of stupid, so stupid you don’t even know how stupid you are—is no longer a bar to permanent employment in national media, in teaching, in business, in government.  Probably Feyeric’s bosses thought she asked a reasonable question. Continue reading →

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February 17, 2013 · 2:40 am

Ethics Dunces: Everybody Connected With This Ridiculous Story

 

"Just remove that offensive bumper sticker, sir, and they'll be no trouble."

“Just remove that offensive bumper sticker, sir, and they’ll be no trouble.”

USA Today, NBC, Yahoo! and other news outlets are snickering as they report the story of an elderly couple pulled over by two police cars in Tennessee because a Buckeye leaf decal on their car, signifying their fealty to the Ohio State football team, was mistaken for a marijuana leaf by the men in blue. “What are you doing with a marijuana sticker on your bumper?” one of the cops asked the Jonas-Boggionis, the occupants of the vehicle. It was all a big misunderstanding! Boy, are those Tennessee cops dumb, not to be able to tell a Buckeye leaf from pot!

In classic “what’s wrong with this story?” fashion, not one of the news media reports, in their hilarity over the cops stopping the couple out of official botanical and sports ignorance, noted  that the police would have been just as wrong if the decal DID portray a marijuana leaf. It’s called the First Amendment, guys—perhaps you’ve heard of it? It’s the same Constitutional amendment that allows you media reporters to do the rotten, incompetent job you do covering the news without  being declared by law to be the menace to a free and informed society you are. You know, it might be helpful, when the police engage in a blatant First Amendment violation and abuse of state power, for reporters to recognize and explain it to the public as such, rather than make the news story about how the police stopped the Jonas-Boggionis for the “wrong reason.” Even if they had stopped it for what the stories say is the right reason, it would be the wrong reason. Continue reading →

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