Month: January 2012

Recent Race Card Rankings: Trying Out The Knight Scale

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I can see Michael Moore from here!

Ethics Alarms recently proposed the Knight Scale, a way to rank attempts to play the race card or otherwise accuse politicians, satirists, writers, pundits and others of racism in order to silence them, ruin their credibility, or score cheap political points in the media. The Knight Scale was made possible by blogger Christopher Knight, who somehow managed to find a cartoonist’s substitution of Michelle Obama for Marie Antoinette ( as a commentary on the First Lady’s ill-timed–some say—taste for lavish parties and social activities) in a famous painting. Despite the fact that the French queen was not, to my knowledge, black, Knight somehow found this to be blatant racism, thereby establishing the tippity-top of the Knight Scale: you just can’t come up with a more far-fetched, unfair, factually indefensible accusation of racism than that. With that outrageous complaint as a 10, the most outrageous, where would other, necessarily lesser bogus racism claims rank?

Let’s look at last week. From here on, we can count on an ever-increasing number of Knight Scale candidates, since an African-American President  presents such an irresistible temptation for unscrupulous race-baiters, and the entire Obama Administration is seemingly conditioned to cry race bias whenever criticism get hot, so consider this a trial run: Continue reading →

Saluting the GOP’s Most Ethical Candidate, Distrusted For Doing the Right Thing

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

We'll miss his daughters, too...

Jon Huntsman is gone, finally quitting the hunt for the Republican Presidential nomination long after the futility of his quest had been established. Huntsman was easily the ethics favorite in the competition, though Ron Paul’s candor and integrity also get high marks. He began his campaign with a call for civility, and seldom missed the high standard he set out for himself. Best of all, he correctly identified the ethics core of our nation’s various problems: the trust deficit. Huntsman began hitting this theme hard in Iowa, but perhaps not hard enough. The collapse of public trust in all our institutions is a very real threat to our democracy, for democracy, more than any government philosophy, requires trust to survive. Whatever it is that Republicans want right now, however, trust isn’t very high on the list, and neither is civility. Continue reading →

“Ask Amy” Tackles A Classic—And Misses

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Advice columnist Amy (of the syndicated column “Ask Amy”), was just asked one of those questions that every advice maven has to have in their files, with the perfect answer ready to go. If Amy had her answer prepared, it was  the wrong one.

The question was the deathless classic, “I just found out my husband has been having an affair with a married co-worker. Should I tell the other spouse?”

Amy gets it half right: she tells the reader that the other spouse has a right to know; that this is not a case of meddling because the reader is directly involved in the betrayal; and that not to make sure the other spouse learns the truth would now be abetting the deception. All true. BUT…

…Amy forgets the Golden Rule as it applies to the reader’s husband’s adulterous lover (yes, the rule still applies to busted wrongdoers) and the whistleblowers obligation to minimize needless harm. She tells the victimized wife to spill the beans to the victimized husband.

Wrong.

The adulterous wife deserves the opportunity to tell her husband herself. That would allow her to reveal the affair to her spouse with the least damage to the marriage, and providing that opportunity to her is kind and fair. Amy should have told her reader to contact her husband’s paramour and say this: “I will be calling your husband and telling him about your relationship with my husband in three days. You should tell him the truth yourself, and then all he needs to say to me when I call is, ‘Yes, she told me.’ But if you haven’t told him, he’ll hear it all from me.”

File it away, Amy, and get it right the next time.

Ethics Hero AND Ethics Dunce: Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar scores a rare twin honor: He is an Ethics Dunce and an Ethics Hero in the same week.

Occupier, or just a vistor, Mr. Secretary?

First the good news, the Ethics Hero part.  Salazar has given the National Park Service  30 days to fix the inaccurate, misleading and truncated quotation on the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial. He did this after giving the inept King Memorial Foundation plenty of time to do its job. It didn’t, and he took the initiative. Harry Johnson, president of the Foundation, told the AP he wasn’t sure what changes could be made. Well, how about using a real quote instead of a made-up one that makes Martin Luthor King sound like a preening Newt Gingrich?

Chiseled into the monument’s left flank because there wasn’t room for the actual quote is “I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.” What King really said in a 1968  speech was: “If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter.” When Maya Angelou and others complained that the pompous-sounding non-quote make King sound like a boasting egotist (and one speaking from the grave!), the Foundation shrugged and erected the monument unchanged. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “The Darkness of the Right, Pissing Away American Values”

/ Jack Marshall / 41 Comments

Is that you, Rod?

This is a treat. I was hoping that my post about the most ethically-challenged of the Right’s uber-patriots cheering corpse desecration would flush out a full-throated cheerleader, and here he is!

In his indignant reply to Bill ( a Marine himself), first time commenter Haddit (who, I gather, has “haddit” with all this ethics talk) gives a bravura performance of exactly what ethics-free thinking will get you in this and other war-related issues. It turns people into clones of the ridiculous general (played by the late, great Rod Steiger) in Tim Burton’s “Mars Attacks,” whose nuanced response to every dilemma is “Kill! Kill! KILL!” ( I know, I know…in the movie it turns out that the general was right after all. It is a satire.)

Here is Rod’s, er, Haddit’s Comment of the Day (to Bill) on my post about the infamous pissing Marines, The Darkness of the Right, Pissing Away American Values. You’re welcome for the editing, Haddit. I’ll have some final comments after the featured rant:

“Are you kidding me? They should be punished?????? We train these guys and gals to be heart-breakers and life-takers, but “oh no don’t piss on the enemy”? I say we put all the bodies of our enemies in a giant blender and dump their remains on the cities where they lived and let’s see how long they screw with us. Desecrating bodies……….What does a bullet or a bomb do, man? War is being insane, doing insane things. Sane folks don’t KILL other folks. So, we teach em to be insane but with rules? THERE ARE NO STINKING RULES. KILL, KILL, KILL come the cries of our military men and women while in training. “WHAT MAKES THE GRASS GROW”???? “We don’t go to war to die for our country, we make the other poor bastard die for his country.” Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: George Stephanopoulos

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

ABC News presents: "This Week with Bud Abbott"

Today George Stephanopoulos began “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” his Sunday ABC current events show, with 15 minutes of a pointless, irrelevant, unfunny interview with Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert, who, in the proud tradition of Pat Paulsen, is again running a fake presidential campaign.Such stunts have always been about cheap publicity, ratings and entertainment, and have as much pertinence to public affairs and national politics as Taylor Swift’s recipe for chili. For ABC News to devote a full 25% of its weekly overview to this nonsense is disrespectful to viewers, who do not tune in to George, Paul Krugman, Peggy Noonan and the rest for yuks. I know how to find Colbert, who is a talented satirist and an engaging performer, when I’m in the mood for him. For Stephanopoulos to waste my time with his failed audition as the next Bud Abbott—his attempt to riff with Colbert was painful to watch, and essentially killed the comic’s act—was  a breach of journalistic integrity and responsibility, not to mention comedy malpractice.Does the New York Times, just for the heck of it and for funsies, spontaneously devote a quarter of its front page to knock-knock jokes, because it’s their paper, and what the hell? No, because it has a job to do, and people depend on the Times to do it. Continue reading →

Another Confession

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Heh, heh, heh...

I am Boston born and bred, and was a fan of the Patriots since their AFL beginnings, when Babe Parilli called the signals. If there is any NFL team I want to see win, it’s the Pats, though my fervor is significantly dimmed by the fact that the team’s coach is a cheat.

Nevertheless, I realize today that seeing Tim Tebow upset the New England Patriots would make me happy. Not because it would reinforce the nutty belief of the (polls say) almost half of the public who apparently think God is a Denver fan, which is only a reminder that half the nation is below average intelligence, but because it would undoubtedly make all the fanatic Tebow-haters miserable. And since their misery will be entirely the result of these mean-spirited individuals’ own lack of graciousness, tolerance, respect and fairness, they will richly deserve their fate.

Maybe they’ll learn something. I doubt it, but you never know. Yes, that silly half of the country will be insufferable, but I’ll deal with them later.

GO DENVER!

__________________

Update: Never mind!

The Ethical Firing That Never Happened: Penn State’s Blindness Continues

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

...and you still don't get it.

Penn State didn’t think that allowing a probable sexual predator to continue to abuse kids was a firing offense, and still doesn’t.

Incredibly, Joe Paterno is still receiving his full salary. He was not fired, as all newsmedia reported, and the University, having released a deceitful and carefully worded misleading announcement in November, allowed that falsehood to be circulated and believed, even as students were rioting on campus against Joe Pa’s “dismissal.”

“The Board of Trustees and Graham Spanier have decided that, effective immediately, Dr. Spanier is no longer president of the University,” the announcement had stated. “Additionally, the board determined that it is in the best interest of the University for Joe Paterno to no longer serve as head football coach, effective immediately.”

But it never said that Paterno was fired. Now, finally, the University’s sick subterfuge is coming to light. Continue reading →

The Darkness of the Right, Pissing Away American Values

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Doesn't it make you proud to be an American?

I don’t know why I didn’t see this coming, but indeed I did not. After all, when photographs surfaced showed American servicemen and women abusing, tormenting and torturing helpless (and untried) Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the hard right, led by conservative radio talkshow hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Mark Levin, attempted to minimize America’s disgrace and the catastrophic failure of the military chain of command by wielding the worst of rationalizations.

“They do worse things to us!”

“We’re the good guys, they’re the bad guys!”

“They had it coming!”

“At least the soldiers didn’t saw their heads off, like the Arabs did to Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg!”

The fact that the atrocities in the prison violated the core values of the Declaration of Independence and the very foundation of America’s reason for existence—human dignity and inalienable human rights—never occurred to these warped culture warriors, who did not have the decency to be ashamed that the United States military would present itself to the world as bullies, thugs and sadists.

Now we, and the world, have seen a video taken by one U.S. Marine in Afghanistan of four of his colleagues gleefully urinating on the bodies of dead Taliban combatants. The Obama administration, hopefully having learned its lesson from the Bush Administration’s botching of its response to Abu Ghraib, immediately and unequivocally condemned the conduct of the marines and vowed that it will not go unpunished. (Whether there will be proper consequences for the brass responsible for such a catastrophic collapse of military discipline remains to be seen.) Of course this is the correct response, and the only responsible response,

Yet last night I heard talk show rant-master Mark Levin, dubbed “The Great One” by his talk show host colleagues (Jackie Gleason’s estate should sue for defamation), furiously denounce the Obama administration and praise the Marines. Continue reading →

A Ban on Threatening “Spiritual Injury”: Unconstitutional But Ethical?

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

There you go, Bill, letting people be unethical again...

Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment  provocateur, notes that Minn. Stat. Ann. § 211B.07 makes it a gross misdemeanor to

“….directly or indirectly use or threaten force, coercion, violence, restraint, damage, harm, loss, including loss of employment or economic reprisal, undue influence, or temporal or spiritual injury against an individual to compel the individual to vote for or against a candidate or ballot question.“

The professor opines that the spiritual injury part, at least, is unconstitutional. Interesting.

Prohibiting the interference and manipulation of a human being’s rights of autonomy and self-determination by using threats to compel his voting choices is a legitimate area for the law, because ethics is notoriously inadequate at preventing electoral abuses. It is also an area where the law is an especially blunt instrument, and many conceivable violations of § 211B.07 would seem to risk colliding with free speech. “If you don’t vote for Ron Paul, I’ll never speak to you again!” comes to mind. The threat of “spiritual harm”—“Vote for Mitt Romney, my flock, or I condemn you to Hell!” adds the  free exercise of religion to the mix, particularly when the threat is linked to a position of a candidate that violates religious doctrine.

I have no difficulty concluding that any and all threats to force a citizen to vote according to another citizen’s desires are wrongful and damaging to democracy, and should be condemned and discouraged to the maximum extent possible. Ethical though such prohibitions may be, some, like the use of threatened spiritual injury, are impossible under the Bill of Rights.

So threatening to send someone to Hell if they vote for Newt Gingrich—a reasonable result, when you think about it—is unethical, but a law punishing that threat is unconstitutional.

Sorry, Ethics…looks like it’s all up to you!