Month: January 2012

Post-South Carolina Confession

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Sunday morning, I am duty bound to play roulette with the talking head shows on the networks, watch “Reliable Sources,” Howard Kurtz’s weekly journalism ethics critique on CNN, and scour the Washington Post, all in search of contentious or interesting ethics topics.

But rather than listen to endless rehashes of the South Carolina Republican primary, endure Newt Gingrich’s gloating, and again hear so-called experts repetitively apply their imaginary expertise to musings about what will happen in the next primary, Florida—-last week’s consensus: Romney had South Carolina wrapped up– I am watching “MVP: Most Valuable Primate” on Encore Family. It’s about a hockey-playing chimp (named Jack, appropriately enough).

It’s not bad.

Screw it. A man can only take so much.

The Marianne Gingrich Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Ugh. What a mess.

The ethics miscreants:

Marianne Gingrich: Seething with hate for Newt, she decided to try to metaphorically stick a shiv in his back by airing dirty laundry from their marriage right before the South Carolina primary, a do-or-die for him. Her interview with ABC was unfair and an act of pure revenge. You couldn’t call it whistle-blowing, since anyone who doesn’t already know what a likely sociopath Gingrich is has been watching too many re-runs of “NCIS.” Gingrich’s character, or lack of it, was established and in the books by 1998. Marianne should have not had to say a word, but everything she did say, she had said before, in an interview in 2010 in Esquire. Continue reading →

Stephen Colbert’s Comedy Terrorism

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

This was a lesson for me. I fell into the trap of looking past unique unethical conduct because it resembled harmless conduct I had seen many times before, a close cousin of using “everybody does it” to excuse and invalidate the inexcusable. Thank goodness Washington Post columnist Colbert King was paying attention.

In King’s column today, he catalogues the activities of Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert’s faux presidential run. I had already commented on Colbert’s gag earlier this week, but the target of my criticism was George Stephanopoulos, who devoted a ridiculous amount of time to a pointless interview with the comedian at the expense of real news. I assumed Colbert was just another in a long line of comedians who have used a presidential election year as a prop, and thus harmless….and I stopped paying attention to his antics. But as King ( his first name is pronounced KOHL-bert; the comedian’s name is Kohl-BARE) points out, Colbert has moved beyond satire into something akin to comedy terrorism, actively attempting to warp and influence the presidential selection process for laughs, and casualties be damned. King writes: Continue reading →

Lindsay Lohan Dethroned As “All-Time Most Outrageous Excuse” Champion!

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Linday Lohan, the former title-holder, and the new champion, Michael West

Back in 2007, I awarded Lindsay Lohan the championship for most brazen and manifestly ridiculous excuse ever. She had just been arrested for driving intoxicated and possession of cocaine, which had been found in the pocket of her jeans; Lindsay’s profession of innocence was that 1) she wasn’t driving her own car and 2) the pants belonged to somebody else. I noted at the time that she hadn’t yet claimed that the body she was in at the time wasn’t hers, but absent that, the “these aren’t my pants (TAMP)” excuse might well stand for all time.

In retrospect, that was rash. For one thing, many celebrities then as now already employed the Pazuzu Excuse, just a hair less ridiculous than TAMP, in which an offensive and career jeopardizing utterance is explained by the utterer as being inexplicable, that for some presumably supernatural reason—like being possessed by the demon who used Linda Blair as his ventriloquist dummy in “The Exorcist”—the individual has said something he or she not only didn’t believe, but never had even thought. The most recent purveyor of the Pazuzu Excuse noted here was Kobe Bryant; other infamous possessed have included Mel Gibson, Helen Thomas, and Michael Richards. That’s uncomfortably close to “it wasn’t my body.”  A few months ago, Newt Gingrich attributed his serial adultery and his habit of dumping his beloved wives when they got sick to his extreme patriotism; still short of TAMP, but getting close. Then, just this week, a strong contender nearly grabbed the title from Lindsay when  the chicken-hearted drunk who piloted the Costa Concordia cruise ship onto the rocks claimed left the capsizing vessel before his passengers because the he “fell into a life boat.” Uh-oh. Clearly, Lindsay’s title was teetering.

And quickly it fell. The Smoking Gun reports that in Wisconsin on Sunday, police responded to a domestic abuse call to find Mrs. Michael West bleeding from her face and saying that her husband Michael beat and tried to strangle her. Confronted by the officers, Mr. West explained that he was innocent.

A ghost did it.

Well, Lindsay’s one remaining accomplishment since “Mean Girls” is history. The new champion for “All-Time Most Outrageous Excuse” is Michael West.

This time, I’m not making any predictions. It’s crazy out there.

________________________________

Epilogue: As I re-read my Ethics Scoreboard post from 2007 about Lindsay Lohan’s ridiculous episode, I found myself becoming depressed. In 2007 she was just 21 years old and looked it; she had a career, she was obviously talented, and despite the arrest, had plenty of time to turn things around and get what had once looked like a charmed life back on track. She never did. In the intervening years leading up to 2012, she has had multiple stays in rehab and two stints in jail. She had to stand trial for grand theft, and is still on probation. This month she is featured posing nude in Playboy, usually the last ditch recovery vehicle for fading actresses who are too unstable or unpopular to get on “Dancing With the Stars,”  have too much pride to sign on to “Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew, and are not fat enough for “Celebrity Boot Camp.”  As she sheds her dignity in Hugh Hefner’s anachronistic soft-porn glossy, looking far older than her years, Lohan’s over-shadowed cast-mates from “Mean Girls,” Amanda Seyfried, Rachel McAdam and Tina Fey, have all become respected, bankable and still rising stars.  Her supposed teen rival from years ago, Hillary Duff, has a singing and acting career, a husband and a baby on the way. Lohan is still only 26; many people have sunk far lower than she has with fewer assets to draw on and pulled their lives out of  tailspins to be happy, successful, and productive. I hope she can too. Right now, however, her life is a cautionary tale about how a badly-parented young woman who was never taught responsibility, accountability, respect for authority or self-control can find life unmanageable despite possessing all the gifts that American society foolishly admires more—youth, beauty, riches, talent and fame.

And it makes me sad.

Now THIS Is Professional Misconduct!

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

 

"Ed, you have to stop blaming yourself...you did nothing wrong!"

Dr. Thomas Wilson is accused of breaching professional ethical standards by having sexual relations with a patient while the doctor was still a student in Oklahoma. Normally a student’s misconduct would not result in sanctions almost two years later, after graduation and certification, but, you see, Wilson is a veterinarian, and his patient at the time of their illicit relationship was a horse.

The good doctor, who now practices at an animal hospital in Pennsylvania, is charged in Oklahoma with a “crime against nature,” but the ethical aspects of what he did go far beyond that. It is a breach of the trust with a patient incapable of  informed consent.  It is an abuse of power. It is animal cruelty. It is really, really, icky.

Are there such things as registered animal-sex offenders? I certainly hope so. Dr. Wilson should not be allowed within 100 yards of a race track, a rodeo, a farm, the Central Park carriages, or the set of AMC’s “Hell on Wheels.” The idea that he will be able to just pay a fine, go to some therapy sessions, and then blithely return to his equine practice without having to tell Mr. Ed’s owner that be has a record of horse-rape is unthinkable. Please tell me, Pennsylvania, that some kind of law protects your horses against sexual predators in sheep’s clothing?

[Thanks, I think, to Drew Curtis’s Fark for the link]

Dear Banks: This Is Why Nobody Trusts You

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

I know I’ve been hard on the Occupy movement, but I don’t want to let the protesters think that I’m pals with all of their targets. Take the banks, for example.

The “waiting for the check to clear” scam engaged in by banks has always been annoying, but I now realize, thanks to bitter personal experience, that we have been fools to tolerate it. Once upon a time, before electronic transfers and computers, it really did take a check at least “five business days” to go from one bank to another, but the banks have held on to the fiction that nothing has changed, presumably to give them free use of our money while we patiently wait for the completion of transactions that have already been completed. Running a small business with perpetual cash-flow problems, the Marshalls constantly hectored our bank (then Wachovia, which bought it from American Security Trust, and there may have been another one in there somewhere) about speeding up the process, and in fact they did: our checks from clients often had money available to us within a day or two. That’s right—the bank let us use our own money while telling less long-standing, savvy, or persistent customers that the checks they deposited were taking almost a week to clear. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Ethics Dunce: Monica Bova

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Monica Bova and supervisor, 2013

There are obviously a lot of funny, witty people among the Ethics Alarms regulars, and on all sides of the political spectrum. It often shows, despite the fact that the discussion here tends to be about serious issues, and hence on the intense side. Still, humor is always welcome, and Scott Granger just contributed a comment that uses it deftly to lend perspective to the jaw-dropping statements of Monica Bova, a Costa Cruises executive who thought it would be a grand time to extol the “heroism” of the crew of the company’s recently wrecked ship, and insult the surviving passengers, while more than twenty presumably dead tourists were still the object of a desperate rescue mission and the ship’s craven captain was under arrest.

Here is Scott’s Comment of the Day on yesterday’s post, “Ethics Dunce: Monica Bova”:

“In a statement that may possibly be issued by Costa Cruises 48 hours from now, the company will congratulate Ms Bova on her new role as a street corner burger vendor in Scranton PA:

‘Monica’s unrivalled experience of mass audience catering and customer relations will be greatly missed. But our loss is very much  Scranton’s gain.’ Continue reading →

Occupy Brain Pans

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Allow me to translate: "Duh!"

The latest, dumbest and most telling of the endless Occupy group protests occurs today, as 111 Occupy Wall Street spin-offs across the country engage in “Occupy the Courts,” a protest to mark two years since the 2010 landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which held that the government cannot ban organizational spending on political campaigns. Move to Amend, the group that is sponsoring the protests, says that the goal is to build support for a constitutional amendment that would abolish corporate constitutional rights, such as the right to free speech, and declaring that political campaign spending is not a form of speech protected by the First Amendment.

If I were optimistic and naive, I would assume that this nonsense would finally shame the imprudent members of the media, Democratic Party and Obama administration who cynically hitched their wagons to the Occupy Wall Street anvil, hoping that eventually the groups would do or say something that justified all the attention and expense lavished on them. Instead, the Occupy movement has featured rapes, robberies, beatings, riots, obscenity, anti-Semites, homeless hangers-on, demonstrators defecating on cars, a woman placing her baby on railroad tracks, another child being abandoned to shiver in a tent, a pseudo-bomb being thrown at the White House, a demonstrator shooting a rifle at the White House, violated permits, squalor, disease and rats….all while the news media showed its stripes by maintaining with a straight face that this display was no different or worse than the comparatively dignified, focused and streamlined Tea Party demonstrations. Nonetheless, the facilitators of this embarrassment in the annals of civil protest seem determined to keep the faith until it blows up into a genuine tragedy or slinks away. If Occupy the Courts won’t convince the pols and journalists that they made an epic mistake, nothing will. But at least it settles the matter. These people have no idea, none, what they are doing. Continue reading →

Republican Nomination Ethics Points, 1/18/2012

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I’m sitting here watching the GOP Final Four debate. Here are some brief ethics observation on a lively day in the race:

  • At the opening gun, Newt Gingrich gave a bravura performance of indignation personified when moderator John King asked him about the looming ABC interview of his ex-wife, Marianne, in which she impugns Newt’s character and claims that he asked her to agree to an “open marriage.” He told King it was a despicable question and said that the issue was not worthy of mention. Good act, but of course the question of character is relevant, and of course Gingrich, who has none, wouldn’t think so. Continue reading →

Soon To Be Justly Unemployed Ethics Dunce: Costa Cruises Exec Monica Bova

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Among her next job options, public relations is probably not an option.

You are a cruise ship company executive. Your half-billion dollar cruise ship hit a a rock because the captain was fooling around, tipped over, and while it was sinking, the captain lied to the Coast Guard about conditions and fled in a lifeboat before the passengers were safe. More than 20 are missing, and eleven bodies have been found. What do you do?

If you are Costa Cruises Assistant director Monica Bova, you accuse the surviving passengers of “sensationalism” over the disaster.

“I have read, seen and heard so much nonsense from these survivors, who tended as usual to choose sensationalism rather than information,” she wrote in a post on an Italian website. “I realize that there may be conflicting opinions and I do not have the expertise to determine guilt and causes of the tragedy, but in a real emergency anything can happen.” Bova went on to call her colleagues the “true heroes”, adding that without them, none of the guests would have been able to evacuate. Continue reading →