Ethics Dunce: President Trump. Again.

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

He’s the President of the United States, and thus, I have determined, must be disqualified as a beneficiary of “The Julie Principle.” (“Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, Trump’s gonna say stupid and self-destructive things by and by…”) What an infuriating, unteachable, incorrigible man he is!

From the New York Times, just reporting facts for once:

“President Trump claimed on Monday that a former president told him privately that ‘I wish I did what you did” in attacking Iran and killing its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

“Speaking to reporters at the White House, Mr. Trump would not identify which of the four living predecessors he was referring to.

“He said, ‘I wish I did what you did,’” Mr. Trump said. “I don’t want to get into ‘who,’ I don’t want to get him into trouble.”

A reporter asked if it was President George W. Bush, the only Republican on the list, but Mr. Trump said no.

What an asshole…but I repeat myself. If it wasn’t Bush, and of course it wasn’t because the Bushes all hate Trump, and we know it wasn’t Obama, whose approach to Iran was to give back billions of dollars and “trust” it the untrustworthy, Machiavellian Islamic nation. We know it wasn’t Biden either. who, if he tried to talk to Trump would only be able to get out “Bvuh?” or something similar.

That only leaves Bill Clinton, who in fact might have shared such a confidence with Trump. Naturally all the speculation on which Ex-POTUS confessed his regrets has fallen on Bubba. Also naturally, Clinton denied that he said anything of the sort.

Of course he did! We know Clinton: he would deny it if he didn’t say it, and he would deny it if he did. He’s like those competing tribes in the old conundrum, where the members of one tribe always lie and the members of the other always tell the truth. If you ask the members of either tribe “Will you lie to me?” both will give the same answer: “No!”

So there are two alternatives, both of which are unflattering to Trump. Either Clinton confessed his regrets in confidence, and Trump betrayed that confidence, or Trump is lying.

Well done, Mr. President.

Jerk.

Ethics Quote of the Month: Ninth Circuit Judge Kenneth K. Lee

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“District courts cannot stand athwart, yelling ‘stop’ just because they genuinely believe they are the last refuge against policies that they deem to be deeply unwise.”

—Judge Kenneth K. Lee of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, writing  separately as a panel overruled a district court and held that the President had the power to suspend the Refugee Admissions Program.

Of course he did. The law and Constitution is clear on that point, but a woke District Court halted the President’s decision anyway. This was unethical as well as illegal, but, as Prof. Josh Blackman writes,

“President Trump is back in office, progressives still challenge virtually every action he takes, and judges in blue states continue to grant relief. No surprise there. But there is a new dynamic. Now, not only are lower court judges resisting the President, but they are also resisting the Supreme Court. In August, Justice Neil Gorsuch rebuked an attempted . Judge Brian Murphy of the District of Massachusetts managed to get reversed twice by the Supreme Court in the same case. “When this Court issues a decision,” Gorsuch wrote, “it constitutes a precedent that commands respect in lower courts.” Gorsuch added that “[t]his Court’s precedents, however, cannot be so easily circumvented.” 

Remember, it is Trump’s opponents who keep accusing him of breaching “democratic norms,” yet the Axis of Unethical Conduct ( the “resistance,” Democrats and the media that carries on their propaganda) is literally defying the greatest democratic norm of all, the Constitution. Blackman calls this attempted usurpation of power by activist, partisan judges “judicial resistance,” in other words, an abuse of judicial power for partisan objectives. It is—this is me and not the professor saying this—grounds for impeachment. President Trump is not exceeding his Presidential authority as the Trump Deranged scream, but rather the judges and courts that are interfering in the Constitutional hierarchy. Unethical, you think? Damn right.

Blackman:

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Stay Classy, Megyn! Unethical Quote Of The Week: Megyn Kelly

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

I hearby withdraw my sympathy for Megyn Kelly when Trump, after she ambushed him in the first GOP candidates debate in 2015 by calling him a misogynist, implied that she was addled because she was having her period. That was vulgar and literally below the belt, but Megyn just burrowed under Trump by calling pundit Mark Levin, a smarter, more credentialed lawyer than Kelly, a “micropenis.”

Nice.

Kelly’s excuse was that Levin has savaged her for her obnoxious, ignorant, borderline anti-Semitic claim that the U.S. is fighting for Jews rather than Americans by attacking Iran. “He tweets about me obsessively in the crudest, nastiest terms possible,” Kelly tweeted. “Literally more than some stalkers I’ve had arrested. He doesn’t like it when women like me fight back. Bc of his micropenis.” Kelly went to law school and that is the best she can do in a policy debate? “Oh yeah? Well you have a little dick!”

To her probable horror, Megyn was quickly defended by certifiable Dunning-Krueger victim and vulgarian Margery Taylor Greene, who wrote, “I wholeheartedly support Megyn Kelly telling the world that Mark Levin has a micropenis. It’s the most deserved insult, and I don’t care if it’s vulgar,” Greene wrote in her own post on X. “And Trump’s gigantic defense of Levin only enraged the base more. People are DONE. MAGA destroyed by micropenis Mark Levin.”

I stopped listening to Levin because of his habit of using sophomoric insults and name-calling to appeal to his lower IQ listeners (How many times can anyone find “New York Slimes” funny?), but his expressed contempt for Greene has been, if anything, understated.

After getting support from the likes of Greene, Megyn must be looking back on her life to assess where she took the wrong turn that brought her to such a desperate state.

Unethical Quote Of The Day: MSNOW Talking-Head Antonia Hylton

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“The other piece of this that I found really disturbing in the messaging around the war recently…is some of the language in the description of their opponent. “Sort of the way they seem to create this image of the Iranians and all of their sort of proxies or allies, the sort of imagery that they conjure up,. And I think that it takes a certain amount of arrogance and I’m also going to say it, a bit of racism, to constantly talk about people like they are savages. That is a word that we have heard Hegseth use.” 

—MSNOW hostess Antonia Hylton, during Saturday’s broadcast of “The Weekend: Primetime.”

Apparently all you have to do to justify being made a co-host of a show on MSNOW is to demonstrate enmity to one’s own country’s leaders and support for its enemies. Oh, before I forget, “enemy” is the proper term for a nation your country is currently at war with, not “opponent.”

Furthermore, calling Iran’s leaders “savages” is not racism but a fair and accurate diagnosis. Savage as a noun means one who is vicious and uncivilized. Iran is currently a brutal, murderous and ruthless regime that murdered many thousands of its own citizens for daring to protest their harsh treatment from their government. Since the Islamic takeover in 1979, 258 Americans were killed in a suicide bombing at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, and a truck bombing in the same city in 1983. The Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah killed 19 U.S. Airmen in Saudi Arabia at the Khobar Towers in 1996. It is estimated that Iranian proxies have killed nearly 700 Americans between the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nearly 50 Americans were killed by Iranian-backed Hamas terrorists during the attack on Israel that took place October 7, 2023, and that attack was as savage as one could be even if one ignores American casualties and only focuses on the Israeli civilians killed, raped and taken as hostages

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Didn’t Watch The Oscars, Have Given Up On The Oscars, But Have Ethics Comments On Them Anyway…

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

As many predicted and others dreaded, the Academy Awards last night did it: they anointed the pro-domestic terrorism, anti-American, Hollywood woke fever dream “One Battle After Another” with the Best Movie award. Starring the usual far-left suspects Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn, the film is deliberately offensive to anyone who wasn’t convinced that Kamala Harris was a wonderful Presidential candidate; I made the mistake of starting to watch it and “walked out” (that is, changed channels to a “Chicago Med” re-run) after about 20 excruciating minutes. “The Critical Drinker’s” review above registered as fair and accurate based on what I saw: a well-acted, well-produced piece of political propaganda.

You know, like “Triumph of the Will.”

The fact that it was nominated told me what the annual awards broadcast would be like and that Hollywood is determined to alienate at least half the country. Good plan. If I had been producing the show, I would have told all participants that political grandstanding was strictly forbidden and that anyone who started blathering about Trump, trans activism, I.C.E. or “illegal wars” would have a trap door open under them like they used to have on “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.”

But no, there were the predictable rants by narrow-view artists trying to suck up to future employers in their bubble. Even Conan O’Brien succumbed to the suck-up vibe, though he was obviously chosen as M.C. because he harkens back to the days when late night hosts mocked all parties and not just Republicans, and the producers wanted to trick Americans tired of being called racists and fascists into tuning in. And a trick it was.

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A Brief But Trenchant Baseball Ethics Note…[Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Above you can see the final pitch of the USA-Dominican Republic semi-finals last night in the ongoing World Baseball Classic. That 2-out, 9th inning pitch was called a strike on a 3-2 count, meaning that the Dominican shortstop Perdomo was out, and the U.S. had won a tight 2-1 victory sending it into the championship game against either Venezuela or surprise “Cinderella” squad Italy.

Winning is nice; winning legitimately is better. That pitch was a ball, as you can see. if the umpire had called the pitch correctly, Perdomo would have advanced to first, and the DR’s best player in the tournament, Fernando Tatis, would have come to the plate with the tying run on third base and the winning run on third.

In the 2026 MLB season that starts soon, the new ABS system will be underway. After a botched call like that one, the batter will touch his cap and say “Challenge!” and the image of where the pitch was relative to the strike zone will flash on a screen, showing that the umpire was wrong, reversing the call.

No baseball game, especially an important one, should end on a terrible call like the one that eliminated the Dominican Republic team. If this doesn’t convince the bitter-enders and “traditionalists” who oppose getting ball and strike calls right when the technology exists to do so, nothing will.

UPDATE: ESPN’s Jeff Passan just posted,

“That was a wonderful baseball game. Tension. Drama. Passion. Pride. Everything baseball can be. Everything you want baseball to be. So, for it to end on a called strike three by home plate umpire Cory Blaser on a Mason Miller slider that was clearly below the zone was such a gut punch, not just to the Dominican Republic players, whose country cares more about the WBC than any, but to a game that deserved better. ABS cannot come soon enough because this should be about the quality of the game, which was tremendous, and not the bitter taste left due to human fallibility.”

The UK’s Frightening Warning On Cultural Pollution From Assimilation-Adverse Immigrants

/ Jack Marshall / 45 Comments

There are some cultures and some immigrants, refugees and illegal aliens that a nation has good reason to avoid letting into its territory. Islamic culture and Muslims are a blazing example. Europe and the UK are learning this hard lesson—that cultural diversity is only a boon if a nation’s traditional culture is nurtured and protected—too late. It remains to be seen if the U.S. will.

The flashing neon sign that the Mad Left will pooh-pooh, shrug off, deny or refuse to acknowledge? This:

Nearly 70 dog breeds in the UK could be banned under proposed new legislation on the sham theory that they are “unhealthy.” A new 10-point checklist of “extreme” physical characteristics will decide which dogs will suffer from health problems due to certain physical characteristics. The excuses for banning the breeds include “mottled coloration,” “excessive” skin folds (like English bulldogs), “fat faces” (like pit bulls and mastiffs), “temperament,” bulging outward-turning eyes (pugs), drooping eyelids, being low to the ground (like Queen Elizabeth’s Corgis) and more.

Don’t kid yourself and believe that this assault on freedom and family has anything to do with canine health. This an assault on dogs by Muslims, who believe that dogs are “unclean,” as Nerdeen Kiswani, a Palestinian Muslim New Yorker and activist, said in a recent social media post. This led Representative Randy Fine (R-Fla.) to reply, “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.” In response to that, Congressional Democrats are demanding that Fine be censured, because, after all, tearing down American culture is part of the current party’s mission.

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Ethics Dunce: Trump’s Justice Department

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The Trump administration last week proposed a rule that would shield Department of Justice lawyers from independent ethics investigations and bar discipline from the states and the District of Columbia. My legal ethics lawyer association’s listserv virtually melted down over it. Almost all of the association’s members are Trump Deranged, but in this case they had just cause to flip out.

The proposed rule would violate a federal law known as the McDade Amendment, which holds government lawyers are still subject to the ethics rules of the states in which they practice, “to the same extent and in the same manner” as every other lawyer licensed in the state. In addition to that, the proposed rule makes no sense: the state bars giveth licenses to practice law, and they obviously can taketh them away.

The Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) came into being as a compromise measure long ago when politically motivated state bar ethics boards were applying different standards to government lawyers based on partisan interpretations of the ethics rules. OPR has never been as zealous in enforcing ethical standards as local bar associations, and the bars aren’t particularly zealous either. The D.C. bar has had several high-profile spats with OPR over the years, insisting, and rightly so, that it shouldn’t be required to ratify an OPR hall pass for unethical conduct.

I assume, and hope, that the clearly impractical rule change is DOA, and like so many other proposals and floated options from the Trump Administration, it is more of a negotiating ploy than a serious proposal. The truth is that virtually all of the bar associations are dominated by progressives and Democrats, and consider a lawyer being willing to work for the Trump Administration as strong evidence of inherently unethical character. It is also true, as I have discovered to my horror over the past year, that many of the bar associations are untrustworthy and corrupt. This was revealed to me in part when the D.C. bar, whose legal ethics CLE I had been prominently and successfully teaching for three decades, fired me after I tried to open a legal ethics can of worms—the bar’s unique non-lawyer partner option—that would reveal a gross and wriggling failure on the bar’s part to police its members, resulting in nation-wide fraud and harm to tort victims.

A New York Times op-ed about the unethical proposed rule deceptively (and risibly) asserts,

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Unethical Website of the Month: “Caffeinated Politics (Opinions And Musings By Gregory Humphrey)”

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Veteran EA commenter Steve Witherspoon reads this steaming pile of cripplingly-biased progressive delusions so I don’t have to, but the most recent example of Humphrey’s smug doltery was too much to bear. As a result of Steve bringing it to my attention (again), the site put me in mind of yesterday’s post about how professionals—strictly speaking, those who eschew worldly pleasures in order to do good for the public, civilization and the human race—ought to have a baseline, minimal level of intelligence to qualify for roles that must be filled by trustworthy people. Stupid, ignorant people are not trustworthy. That’s the concept in a metaphorical nutshell.

It’s possible, even likely, that Gregory Humphrey hasn’t always been stupid, but his self-description makes it clear that he has been the victim of Left-infused bias for a very long time, so it would be remarkable if his brain hadn’t atrophied as a result. He describes himself as “a book author…podcaster… political blogger…historian…former radio broadcaster…and former Admin. Asst. WI State Assembly, Gay American.” No field has jumped the political shark any worse than historians, gays of Humphrey’s generation are almost all alienated from the Right because of its stubborn refusal to reject the ancient justification for regarding them as “sinful,” and well, you know, Wisconsin. To be fair, I should probably give Greg a pass for being made stupid by bias, except that in his full-throated advocacy of woke insanity, he is making other people stupid. I can’t forgive that.

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Unethical Quote of the Month and Axis Media “Methinks They Doth Protest Too Much” Tweet of the Century”: CNN

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

Ethics Alarms had flagged CNN’s incompetence and bias too often already this week: it was getting boring. Then the network, damn them, forced me to write about its crummy ethics again, by posting that ludicrous protest above.

Here is the “journalism” CNN stands behind:

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