Nah, The Democratic Party Doesn’t Have a Anti-Semitism Problem! Strange That It Has A Congressional Candidate Whose Campaign Said…

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

“She’ll turn Karnes ICE Detention Center into a prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers for human trafficking. (lt will also be a castration processing center for pedophiles which will probably be most of the Zionists).”

This is TX-35 Democratic candidate Maureen Galindo. And her very existence unmasks the Democratic Party and the American left revealing the monsters they have become.

She’s not a fringe candidate either. Galindo was the top Democrat in the March primary election, with 29.2% support to her closest competition’s 27%. Since no one got a majority, Galindo advanced to a runoff election to take place next week against sheriff’s deputy Johnny Garcia. An awful lot of progressives and Democrats (I mean “awful lot” both ways) like anti-Semites and hate Jews.

As we are increasingly seeing…we are also seeing the Axis of Unethical Conduct trying to spin away the obvious implications of Democrats producing such a vile candidate with a “Republicans have anti-Semites too!” deflection. This was Bill Maher’s deceitful tactic, as I wrote earlier this week.

Watchdog group StopAntisemitism, which is one of those “independent” groups that always bashes Republicans, said, “The standard that Democrats rightly apply to right-wing anti-Semites must apply equally to left-wing Jew-haters. Democratic leaders must clearly, publicly denounce these bigots infecting their party without hedging. They must decline to appear on platforms with Hasan Piker. They must stop winking at extremist voices and truly stand for the principles they claim to stand for.”

Wait: what “right-wing Jews haters” are leading candidates in a Congressional race? Who is a Republican equivalent of Hasan Piker? Anti-Semites Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson have been emphatically rejected by President Trump, MAGA, and most conservatives. The Axis is now trying to claim that the PAC Lead Left that has spent $428,713 backing Galindo according to the latest data from Federal Election Commission filings is really run by Republicans. The problem with that dodge is that ethical, fair people won’t support anti-Semites no matter how much is spent on their political ads, unless the voters like anti-Semites and hate Jews. Both Piker and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who polls highly among potential 2028 Democratic Presidential candidates, endorsed Galinda. Is AOC a double-secret Republican agent?

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More on the President’s Unethical and Collusive $1.7 Billion IRS ‘Slush Fund’ Settlement 

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Or in other words,

If you can process this whole astounding ethics debacle and come out anything but but disgusted and disillusioned, you apparently are capable of rationalizing anything.

Hint: This is not a good thing.

In this post, I wrote about the gob-smacking, unprecedented settlement of President Donald Trump’s lawsuit over the leaking of his tax returns. My conclusion yesterday: “[T]his deal stinks, and should be challenged ethically if not legally. The whole Justice Department and the Treasury Department too had irresolvable conflicts, and should not have been allowed to make a settlement with their own boss.”

I learned of this revolting development two days ago, when a Trump Deranged relative asked me why my ethicist head wasn’t exploding over “Trump’s corrupt deal with the IRS that gave him a billion dollars to pay his militia, the J-6 rioters.” I had no idea what she was talking about. See, she only watches MSNow for news, and of course they were all over the story, as were all the Axis news platforms. The last few days I have been less than diligent in my bi-partisan news searches, mostly checking websites. However, that potentially exaggerated description of what two Executive cabinet departments and their employees who Trump can fire at will agreed to in settlement of a lawsuit that almost certainly would have been tossed by any judge who could beat Justice Jackson in Scrabble turned out to be shockingly accurate.

Now we are learning that the deal is even worse than it first appeared to be. This account is straight from Politico. I will not make a habit of the lazy Instapundit-Althouse blogging practice of posting a long quote or article and asking readers, “What do you think?”, but the ethics horror here is pretty straightforward, and I would just be rewording the item unnecessarily:

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Unethical Quote of the Week: Rep. Thomas Massie (R.-KY)

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

I would’ve come out sooner, but I had to call my opponent and concede. And it took a while to find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv.”

—Rep Thomas Massie, (R-Ky) after losing his primary against a Trump-endorsed candidate.

I would have more respect for Massie if he just came right out and called his opponent a “Jew-lover.”

Nothing could more emphatically validate President Trump’s decision to oppose Massie, who has cemented undying infamy at Ethics Alarms by insulting a victorious opponent in his concession speech. Such lack of civility, respect and decorum only exacerbates the decline of civic comity in Washington, and there is no excuse for it. Being a poor loser shows poor character, and an inability to meet one of the key markers of virtue in Rudyard Kipling’s “If”: “Meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.”

Naturally the Washington Post lionizes Massie in defeat, saying his lost primary was because of his “consistent unwillingness to go along to get along,” and that “Massie’s independence earned the enmity of President Donald Trump, who deployed his political machine to crush Massie and recruited primary winner Ed Gallrein. Yet the quixotic congressman, for better or worse, always seemed more driven by ideas than personalities.”

Yeah. One of those keen “ideas” was anti-Semitism. Burying the lede, the Post’s long sigh regarding Massie’s loss culminates in this admission:

“He was the only House Republican to vote against a resolution condemning antisemitism. Reasonable people might oppose U.S. aid to Israel, but Massie too often did so with over-the-top, even conspiratorial, rhetoric.”

Well nobody’s perfect.

Post Script: You want unethical “advocacy journalism”? Read the MSNow spin on Massie’s loss. Trump’s “revenge,” “a huge cost,” the whole event is presented as a platform for more Trump-bashing. No mention of Massie’s anti-Semitism, which all by itself justifies, indeed mandates, his loss. But then the MSNow gang is angry about all those dog-rapes…

Ethics Dunces: The Congressional Black Caucus (As Usual)

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I checked to see if Ethics Alarms has ever had a post about the Congressional Black Caucus, and there have been many, that didn’t indicate an an unethical culture embedded in the group like a tic.

No.

So I suppose the recent example shows that at very least, the CBC is consistent.

For over six years now, the NCAA and other collegiate sports organizations have been asking for Congress to reform college sports, which has been confused and chaotic since schools were told that they had to treat college athletes like mercenaries rather than students. The SCORE ACT is sorta kinda such legislation, and was was supposed to come up for a vote in the House of Representatives this week but was pulled from the floor at the last minute.

A few hours before the vote was again postponed indefinitely, the bill slammed into a roadblock when the Congressional Black Caucus and its 54 voting members in the House announced unanimous opposition to the SCORE Act, not because of anything the bill contained or ignored. The CBC announced that it would oppose the law until the SEC, ACC, and NCAA started protesting state gerrymandering and redistricting that didn’t benefit black Democrats. In other words, the CDC is practicing extortion. It is telling sports organizations that they must endorse the “good discrimination” against whites that the Supreme Court just declared illegal and unconstitutional (because, you know, it is), and if they don’t, well, the CBC will just refuse to vote for laws that have nothing to do with race, redistricting, sports or college. Neener neener!

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A “What’s Going On Here?” Ethics Challenge: Trump’s $1.7 Billion IRS ‘Slush Fund’ Settlement [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Whatever is going on, it’s unethical.

President Trump sued the Internal Revenue Service in January of this year, claiming that the agency had not done enough to prevent the leak of his tax information to ProPublica and the New York Times by Charles Littlejohn, a former I.R.S. contractor who pleaded guilty to the crime in October 2023. The lawsuit, asking $10 billion in damages, was remarkable in many ways, not the least of which was that the President of the United States was suing an executive branch agency of the Treasury Department, which is under his control. Whether he could do that was a key issue, as was whether his law suit came too late: by some calculations, the statute of limitations ran out before the President filed his suit.

Meanwhile, there was also a question regarding whether Justice Department lawyers would be conflicted out of defending the suit. And whether the I.R.S. could be held liable for the conduct of Littlejohn, who was a contractor and not an employee.

I.R.S. officials prepared a 25-page memorandum outlining what they judged as fatal flaws in Trump’s suit and advised the Justice Department to move to dismiss it. The memo was provided to Treasury officials in April, but no one is saying whether it ever got to DOJ before any of its lawyers ever appeared in court to respond to the suit or dispute any of Trump’s claims, came to a bizarre settlement. DOJ agreed to an unusual deal that creates a $1.8 billion fund in exchange for Trump withdrawing his suit. The money is being called an “anti-weaponization” fund to compensate people who say they were wrongly targeted by the federal government. Todd Blanche, the acting Attorney General, will appoint five people to a commission that will oversee the distribution of the money, though the President will be able to fire any of the commission members, or, for that matter, Blanche, who had previously been one of Trump’s lawyers.

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OK, Maybe Bill Maher Is Sincere In His Criticism Of Democrats and Progressives…MAYBE, Part II: Why Bill’s “New Rule” Is Not As Ethical As He Thinks It Is

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

In Part I, I published Bill Maher’s surprising slap at Democrats and progressives for their unethical drift into anti-Semitism. It’s pretty good—for Bill. The 18 paragraphs are numbered so I don’t have to repeat them here, especially since WordPress nearly sent me to the woodchipper when I was trying to compose the first post. I’m sorry that you’ll have to jump back and forth, but so do I, to write this.

And away we go…

1. Everyone has a right to be anti-Semitic, just as everyone has a right to lie, or commit adultery. Advocating anti-Semitism, promoting it, and acting on it is still unethical. These ethical nuances, rights vs. law vs. ethics, are beyond Maher’s comprehension.

2. See? Bill immediately defaults to a Rationalization #22 defense of Israel. It isn’t the worst country! Wow. Talk about a back-handed compliment!

3. Not quite as bad as China, Russia, Sudan, Iran, Myanmar, Haiti, the Congo, and North Korea, eh? Way to make anti-Semites feel ashamed, Bill….

4. Ezra Klein is nothing to be proud of. He has been a leader of Axis bias for a decade.

5. A “They’re just as bad” (Rationalization #2) cheat by Maher, and he’s cherry-picking. Carlson has been excoriated by conservatives for his anti-Israel stance. He is not representative of the Right at all, and I, for one, never thought he was.

6. Bill managed not to mention the Times’ “dog rape” libel.

9. Maher likes the #22 rationalization so much he comes back to it. This is because Bill doesn’t get ethics. He also evokes “Everybody does it!” here, the hoariest rationalization of all. Jeez Bill…read a book.

10. The “new rule” is about Democratic Party anti-Semitism, but the candidate he writes the most about is an obscure anti-Semitic Republican. Huh.

11. Israel overwhelmingly has the “right-wingers” on its side, and it has the President of the United States on its side in particular. Maher never mentions President Trump at all. He’s only willing to infuriate his audience so much, apparently.

12. Trying to continue his false equivalence argument regarding anti-Semitism on”both sides,” Maher pairs two typical leftist academics with…Candace Owens? She is persona non grata among conservatives, a true embarrassment, and she is the opposite of an academic, as she is illiterate.

13. Again with the rogue Republican joke in a statement about Leftist anti-Semitism, and again, Bill is cherry-picking. There is a reason that Margery Taylor Greene isn’t in Congress any more. Representing her idiocy as mainstream Republicanism is despicable. Rep. Fine’s sharp quip after one of Mayor Mamdani’s Muslim minions derided dogs was, in my opinion, undiplomatic but defensible. No dogs in the U.S. have engaged in any mass shootings or terrorism.

14-18. Bill finishes very strong, almost making up for his rationalizations and weasel words on the way to his conclusion

You Know That Ridiculous “100 Best Vocalists” List? The Guardian says “Hold My Beer….”

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

Well yes, John, I’d say that’s a fair and accurate assessment.

Read the Guardian’s explanation of how they got this list. It’s even worse than the list itself, but it does explain the bias creating this mess with this single phrase: “Atwood’s horribly prescient The Handmaid’s Tale.” Prescient? I guess I missed the U.S. turning women into involuntary full-time baby machines.

This is a DEI list, and not a very smart or informed one. No Mark Twain, because “Huckleberry Finn” has been cancelled. Jack London was too much of a toxic masculine writer for these weenies, I guess. “Treasure Island” is too full of men and boys too. “The Three Musketeers” is nowhere to be found; nor is “The Count of Monte Christo.” The women in “Ivanhoe” are too girly. But knee jerk political correctness kicked three of the very best novels, all written by women, off the list: “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Gone With The Wind,” and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” almost certainly the most influential and important American novel ever written. Humor is pretty much verboten, unless it’s anti-war humor (“Catch 22”). P.G. Wodehouse wrote the funniest novels of all time: the problem with including him would be picking which were the best. Yes, ancient odd-ball novel “Tristram Shandy” is on the list: I challenge anyone to claim it has even half the outright belly laughs of Wodehouse at his best.

Not including Tolkien is inexplicable (and I don’t even like his writing); similarly, the greatest novels that engage children while reaching adults as well were cut: “Wind in the Willows,” Watership Down,” and especially the two Lewis Carroll classics, “Alice in Wonderland” and “Alice Through the Looking Glass,” both among the cleverest, most original, most quoted and influential novels in the English Language.

Meanwhile, one entry on the list, “The Turn of the Screw,” isn’t even a novel. I thought the vocalist list was absurd because it was lazy and ignorant, but “The Hundred Best Novels of All Time” is even worse, because it is overtly political. “Never has such a list been more needed,” The Guardian says. Why would incompetent, biased, misleading lists ever be “needed?” Amusingly, the explanation of this thing starts with the correct assessment in its very first sentence: “[C]ompiling a list of the greatest novels of all time is an impossible task.”

Here is the stupid list. Go crazy…

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OK, Maybe Bill Maher Is Sincere In His Criticism Of Democrats and Progressives…MAYBE, Part I: Maher’s Ethics Quote of the Month

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Ethics Alarms has been skeptical of HBO’s clown nose on/clown nose off host of “Real Time,” Bill Maher, who has recently been critical of his favored side of the political divide and even, mirabile dictu, defending Donald Trump from time to time. Bill is a pompous left-biased jerk, not half as clever as he thinks he is but not stupid, and I have detected a strategic move rightward to distinguish himself from the all-progressive-all-the-time hoard on late night TV. I have also stated that I doubt his sincerity, as I doubt the sincerity of many professional pundits and comics who style themselves as truth-tellers.

Maher recently gave a long, not particularly funny speech in his show’s “New Rules” segment harshly criticizing Democrats and progressives for their increasingly anti-Semitic and anti-Israel rhetoric. It’s long: I’m going to number the paragraphs so I can comment in Part 2. Here was Bill’s speech:

1. And finally, new rules since yesterday was Israel’s birthday. Having become a nation on May 14th, 78 years ago, everyone must either wish her a happy birthday or admit they’re anti-Semitic. Now, it’s everyone’s right in a free country to be anti-Semitic, but enough with hiding behind Israel or Zionism or Netanyahu.

2. If you think, as so many do now, that when it comes to human rights, Israel is the monster country of all time, you either don’t read or you don’t care about your own hypocrisy. Because there are so many worse places. But that’s where we are these days.

3. No Jews, no news. Ha ha. But China, Russia, Sudan, Iran, Myanmar, Haiti, the Congo, North Korea, all way worse. And that’s how you know it’s anti-Semitism. It’s the inconsistency. People talk about Jews these days like something out of Stormfront, except it’s not Stormfront.

4. It’s an editor from the American Prospect, which is a venerable liberal publication that launched the careers of journalists like Ezra Klein. And yet no one blinks when one of their editors says, Israel is a brainwashed, psychopathic death cult that might need to be nuked to save the human race. Uh-huh.

5. People say the left and the right can’t agree on anything these days. Well, there is this one thing they agree on. Right-winger Tucker Carlson has Nick Fuentes and Holocaust deniers on his podcast and wonders along with them, who really was the bad guy in World War II?

6. And the New York Times has on their podcast super leftist Hasan Piker, who they call a progressive mind, and who says Zionists should be treated the same as Nazis, which I assume means hung at Nuremberg. That’s what progressive is now? I guess so.

7. The kids are sure into it. They went nuts last year at Coachella for Kneecap. That’s the name of an Irish rap group, as if Ireland hasn’t suffered enough.

8. Their stage set is a sign that says, fuck Israel. And then they send a beach ball around the crowd. Again, ha-ha.

9. Because again, Israel is the only country in the world doing anything bad. I see why the Meathead Manosphere and the Code Pink people are on the same page. Because they both went to high school in America and they don’t know anything.So we… So we really could someday soon have the tiki torch Jews will not replace us crowd and the queers for Palestine people working together to elect the next Hitler. There’s a North Carolina teenager who’s been charged with plotting to drive through a synagogue to fulfill her life goal of killing as many Jews as possible.

10. Because a kid’s got to have a dream. I’m just asking why in the world would this be the dream of some kid in North Carolina? Why is it the dream of Dan Bilzerian, who’s running as a Republican to win a House seat in Florida? Who’s Dan Bilzerian? Well, he’s a professional douchebag who’s attracted 30 million followers by doing this all day and posting it. Yes, he’ll fit in fine with the current Congress. And Dan is fairly typical of the guys in the Manosphere when he says “the only real battle in the world today that I see worth fighting is fucking exterminating Israel. I mean, I would sign up tomorrow to go fucking put boots on the ground and go fucking kill Israelis.” Why is this asshole’s life about two things? Getting more Viagra and exterminating the Jews?

11. Israel was founded on the idea that anti-Semitism made a Jewish state unnecessary because Jews would never be safe without one.Can you honestly listen to this rhetoric and not see why that turned out to be true? If you don’t have the right-wingers on your side, if you don’t have the progressives, what do you have? What’s more progressive than college, where professors now say things that would make Kanye wince?

12. Osman Umarji calls Zionists bloodthirsty animals. Who’s he, the leader of ISIS? No, he’s a professor right here in California at UC Irvine. And Candace Owens agrees with his assessment of Jews as animals because she says wherever they go, they bring their filth with them. Another professor, Hamid Dabashi, says of Israels, they have a vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture. These are the kind of statements Goebbels would have read and said, no notes.

13. I mean, where are the Jewish space lasers when you need them? Now, there are absolutely horrible things said about Muslims, too. That should also be, of course, roundly condemned, like Republican Congressman Randy Fine saying, if they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one. That’s awful. But it’s not the same as they need to be nuked and let’s exterminate them. This is why Jewish people here and in Europe now say they sometimes hide their identity, afraid that the Star of David will get them attacked, as has happened in almost too many places to mention lately.

14. Leave your Star of David at home. But the keffiyeh? You can wear that anywhere. You can wear it to Fiddler on the Roof and you’ll get applause. Jew hatred isn’t just acceptable now, it’s cool. Celebrities love it and make it trendy. It’s the new Che Guevara T-shirt. The Islamophobia is just as bad argument is simply a false equivalency. Can you name a Jewish professor who talks about Muslims the way they get talked about?

15. No. Anti-Jewish crimes, hate crimes, now outpace anti-Muslim hate crimes 9 to 1. It’s not a contest, and I’m certainly not saying do more of the other.I’m just saying these are the numbers, the facts, the reality. There is a frothing anxiousness for the literal extermination of this one group. And Democrats, where are you?

16. If any other minority group was being talked about this way, you’d break out the kente cloth and have ten benefit concerts. But because you see that so many of your brainwashed-by-TikTok constituents now have an unfavorable view of Israel, you indulge them when you should be correcting them. You don’t tell your woke idiots Israel isn’t a colonizer or an apartheid state or committing genocide, and that if you brats had to spend a week anywhere in the Middle East other than Israel, you would understand what liberalism is not.

17. All the people likely running for president now on the Democratic side want it known they don’t take money from AIPAC, the Israeli lobby, a stanch which gives permission to actual anti-Semites to say, see, we’re right about Israel. That’s dirty money from a dirty country. Oh, please, you take money from crypto and factory farmers and big tech from Diddy and Weinstein and Epstein, but AIPAC is too far?

18. Let me just say this to all who ask me. Why are you harder on the Democrats than you used to be? Until you fix this whole issue, stop asking me.

I analyze this Ethics Quote of the Month in Part II, which you can read here.

___________________

Source: RealClearPolitics

“The Great Stupid” Keeps Rolling Along, and I Finally Realized That I’ve Seen This Before

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

I really should have watched “Mad Men” when it first came out on AMC (2007-2015). It is first and foremost an ethics show, and it covers—pretty accurately, I have decided—the two decades I believe are the most important in U.S. cultural history, the Nineteen Fifties and Sixties. But the series’ episodes on the Crazy Years, 1967 through 1971, are weirding me out, man.

I had forgotten how many friends and acquaintances I had regarded as smart, stable, well-educated and raised with strong values and common sense suddenly showed up one day with wild hair, in tie-dyed T-shirts and tinted granny glasses, flipping peace signs, getting stoned constantly, talking about “pigs” and “doing your own thing.” It was like a horror movie. On “Mad Men,” one previously sane young woman leaves her husband and child to be permanently drugged out at a commune. Another once normal wife spends too much time in California and starts sleeping around in threesomes. The responsible adult daughter of a single mother turns up one day pregnant by a wandering musician, “out of bread” and dressed like a character in “Hair.” Everyone is chain smoking one substance or another and spouting hippie lingo like an idiot. In real life, I ran into my old high school girl friend three years after graduation and she was hooked up with a pompous Amherst grad Communist, quoting Jane Fonda, and she told me she was pregnant and moving to a cabin in the woods to make rustic furniture. And she did. I hardly recognized her.

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The Warped State of Mind of Today’s College Grads In One Funny/Horrifying Letter

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and author of, among other works, “The Coddling of the American Mind.” he has been vocal on criticizing attacks on campus free speech for more than a decade, warning that the American education system is handicapping generations of students by allowing them to avoid ideas, opinions, and even facts that they find unpalatable. Last week he gave the guest commencement speech at NYU, but not before students, including the Executive Committee of the NYU Student Government Assembly, angrily protested his selection…because they found his ideas and opinions opposed to their “values.”

As Mr Rogers would say, “Can you say ‘irony’? Sure you can!” Below is the hilarious letter they sent to the school’s administration. Frankly, I don’t know how any student with the sense to come in out of a lightning storm could read this and not think, “Wait a minute…doesn’t this letter prove that this Haidt guy may be on to something?”

But no. Read this thing without your head exploding or dissolving into giggles. I’ll try to keep my comments brief at the end:

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