An ethics professor just wrote to announce that he was ceasing to follow the blog because
“you have become a one note Hillary basher and compromised your disinterest.”
1. I do not bash Hillary Clinton. I accurately point out her serial unethical conduct and statements. I am an expert in non-profit ethics, and her foundation is unethical. I an an expert in government ethics, and her conduct in relation to both her foundation and her State Department e-mails was unethical. I am an ethicist, and she could not get through her first substantial interview without multiple deceits, misrepresentations and lies. Pointing these out, especially when the news media is not doing its job, is my duty and mission. Apparently a lot of people don’t know this woman is unethical. I am obligated to enlighten them if I can.
2. My main area of scholarship and my personal passion, is leadership and the American Presidency. The Democratic Party, to its shame, is trying to make this unqualified and corrupt woman President of the United States. Naturally this is of deep concern to me, as it ought to be for every American.
3. Even considering this, the blog has hardly been all-Hillary. I just checked: there have been exactly three Hillary-themed posts in the last 50. FIFTY. Five-O. Gee, sorry, Professor, that the ethical corruption of the presumptive President of the United States occupies my ethics blog’s attention 6% of the time.
4. The Clintons’ master strategy for escaping all of their schemes and deceptions is to deny, obfuscate and throw up smokescreens until the public gets sick of the controversy, and tunes out. It’s a good, if cynical strategy, but it won’t work with me.
5. I will cease writing timely blogs about Hillary’s Clinton’s unethical conduct when
- She stops lying.
- The new scandals, schemes, and cover-ups stop materializing.
- The news media starts doing its job.
- The public shows sufficient comprehension of how corrupt she is.
- She is no longer running for President.
And not before.
Ethics Alarms 
The professor has fallen into a classic Clinton trap. They screw up ceaselessly and then when they get called on it almost as often, they claim they’re being victimized by obsessed bigots. The professor has become a Clinton enabler. Not very impressive but probably par for the course at most US universities, so called.
Keep after the Clintons. Not many other are. And your critiques are always exhaustive and accurate.
What he said. I stress, KEEP AFTER THE CLINTONS.
I think the problem is, even in posts that don’t have anything to do with Hillary, you somehow find a way to work in an anti-Hillary dig in there anyway. See the Camille Cosby post for the latest example.
Fair point, although the parallel needed to be made.
And the more I ponder it: raising Hillary in a post about a wife of a powerful man, who facilitates and covers up for her husband’s infidelities? What was I THINKING???
She is the most famous and most popular true pathological liar most people know of. So of course her name is going to come up on an ethics blog. She’s super-relevant. Imagine a blog about African-American issues where Obama’s name didn’t constantly come up.
Ditto
And ditto to my reply to deary. If one condemns Camille, then one has to admit that Hillary is exactly as complicit and corrupt. If one believes that Hillary is acceptable to be elevated to the White House, then you can’t condemn Camille. Wanna guess how many people extol Hillary for covering for Bill Clinton and condemn Camille for covering for Bill Cosby?
Jack — go back through your posts and see how often you mention Hillary Clinton. You do it all … the … time. It’s like you are in college and your professor’s assignment is “Write an essay on the following 100 ethics breaches, and try and use Hillary Clinton as the example for each one.” It gets old and it often seems stretched. The criticism is fair in my mind — and I’m not even a fan of Hillary! If you mentioned her less, it would make your readers pay greater attention to when you do.
I’m betting I could find a way to get Hillary into every post, and legitimately, too. Is it excessive to ask that she be required to explain her claim change certitude in relation to the new computer models showing that it’s going to get colder, for example? Sure it is. If I don’t urge that, who will? How about the Post Fact-checker, who rates Hillary’s deceit regarding her e-mail practices as only 3 Pinocchio rather than four, because the literal meaning of her words were close to factual, though they were explicitly designed that way to deceive careless listeners. Does that really make it a better lie? (it makes it a more effective lie, and therefor a worse one.) Should I not mention that?
Why don’t people get her out of the god-damned Presidential race, so I don’t have to keep explaining why she corrupts the process, the office, and all of us by her presence?
Talk about blaming the messenger..I more sick of writing about her than anybody. It deeply insults me, as an ethicist, as a lover of the Presidency, as a citizen, that someone this obviously unqualified by character and deed is being presented as a fait accompli.
Anyone who isn’t insulted doesn’t take the welfare of the government and the nation, as well as its values, seriously enough.
“Why don’t people get her out of the god-damned Presidential race?” What people? I assume you are talking about the powers-that-be in the Democratic Party, since at the moment there’s no one else really in a position to take her out of the race. It’s simple, she is viewed as their best possible hope to hold onto the White House for 4 or even 8 more years. Martin O’Malley is a relative unknown, Bernie Sanders is so far left he fell off, and Jim Webb is looking to lead the Democratic Party back to yesterday. She alone of the current field is well-known enough to be a national standard-bearer.
I also think the Democratic Party powers-that-be are a little overconfident for next year for the same reason I am pessimistic, they look at the electoral map and assume 240+ electoral votes are pretty much in the bag as long as they don’t screw up. All they have to do is campaign hard in Florida and Ohio and not quite as hard in Virginia, maybe play up “war on women” enough to turn on the estrogen tap, and they get another 4 years, with a very good possibility of it becoming 8, in which time maybe they can create a durable enough majority for a permanent lock on the White House. As such, they can afford to hang back, play defense, and keep Hillary out of the spotlight to avoid embarrassing gaffes and uncomfortable questions.
This overconfidence stems from the belief, not entirely without support, that the electorate in certain vote-rich areas of the country will… not… vote… Republican in a national election even if the Dems run a cardboard cutout. It’s true to some degree – even some VERY weak candidates have carried NY and CA (i.e. Michael Dukakis, John Kerry) and those two states have only gone GOP when the whole election has TANKED for the Dems, notably 1952, 1956, 1972, 1980 and 1984. I think it’s a Democratic article of faith that nothing like that can ever happen again, they’ve carried those two all-important states seven times running, nothing can take them away and every presidential election is theirs to start from a position of strength.
But perhaps, as has been suggested elsewhere, they know how fragile that strength can be, and are praying inwardly that nothing happens to rock the proverbial boat in the next 17 months. According to Jack there are 10 things that could upset the proverbial applecart, although he hasn’t revealed the full list. The obvious ones are an ISIS attack in the US and an economic collapse. Neither appears likely as I sit here, but then again, how many people got up September 11th thinking it was going to be just another Tuesday? The idea has also been floated that the sanctuary city question may become increasingly a drag on the Democratic platform, particularly if there are more murders or worse.
Putting complete disasters that she can’t control aside, the day IS going to come when Hillary can’t keep avoiding the questions, and that day is going to come long before she must face whoever emerges from the crowded Republican field in the three debates. I have recently thought back to last year and her campaigning for various Democratic candidates, not even for herself, and the fact is her performance was…uneven. The thought is that she will just sail right past the other Democrats to be rested and ready when she faces a tired GOP nominee who has just emerged bruised and bloody from a messy primary, however, there are any number of chances she will say something before then that will lead to a collective “uh oh” from the Democrats. They are praying or hoping that it doesn’t come to that.
As an optimistic turn, many of my female friends are starting to distrust her…
The willful ignorance of Clinton enablers (what else could it be?) is frightening to me. I have been following this blog for a couple of months now but never commented. I am so glad someone is pointing out the truth, especially when the media is absent. And no, my interest is not all political.
Thanks. A lot. Much appreciated.
It would be comforting to believe you could get to be President whilst always passing your high standards for ethical behaviour – but in my view naive. Why should we think Hillary Clinton as President would be any less ethical than her predecessors? The best you might hope for is that she’d be more competent than the alternatives. Do you have any model President, of the US or anywhere else, who has been successful and whose behaviour would always (or even mostly) have passed your tests?
Most of them. It would be hard to find even a few whose public and private life showed less integrity, less honesty, fewer legitimate accomplishments or genuine executive experience. Even some of the most flawed, like Andrew Johnson, laps Hillary in integrity. Jefferson, Wilson, Kennedy and Nixon were authentically bad people, but no worse than Hillary, and Nixon was a skillful executive, who was, unfortunately, emotionally unbalanced.
You can’t possibly think that men of conspicuous and lifetime character such as Washington, Adams, Madison, Monroe,J Q Adams, WH Harrison, Buchanan, Lincoln, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Cleveland, McKinley, TR, Taft, Coolidge, Hoover, Truman, Ike, Ford, Carter, Reagan and George HW Bush don’t soar over Hillary by any assessment of character. Yeah, FDR was a sociopath, but also a natural leader, courageous, and dedicated to public service. Frankly, I have to wonder how you could even ask the question…But all of those guys would pass most ethics tests.
I hesitate to call Jefferson authentically bad, but I might see him through the somewhat skewed lens of his being a Founding Father. The rest, bang on the nose, although I’d drop Harrison and Garfield out of the analysis because of their very brief tenures. If we’re talking character only, though, I really think the only presidents who dip below Hilary are Wilson, who you already noted (openly racist and arrogant), and the original dark horse candidate Harding. Van Buren “the Little Wizard” also had a gift for playing somewhat dirty politics, but was nowhere near as ethics-free as Hillary. I also wouldn’t put LBJ below her, who was a bully, no question of it, but who at least had a soul and made a case for his ethical vision of America.
Model president? The closest thing to a model we could ever have was Washington, who set a lot of the precedents for all those who followed. There is no other gold standard to hold anyone to except the Constitution. As for presidents of anywhere else being models, that’s somewhat disingenuous. The American experience, with integrating waves of newcomers, holding together a very heterogeneous population, civilizing a wilderness, and in two cases bailing out the rest of the world, isn’t really like any other. To compare say, the liberal Norwegian politicians who built a national health system for a much smaller and homogeneous population, or the president of Costa Rica, who abolished a military that really couldn’t defend its tiny state to begin with, favorably to the US president is apples and oranges.
Having read about both WHH and especially Garfield, though, and especially the latter, they really were exemplary. The fact that they died early doesn’t reduce their virtue, and the question was about their becoming President.
‘How could I ask the question …?’ You prodded me to thing again about Reagan and the Contras. Reagan claimed he ‘didn’t know that White House aides were secretly helping arm and advise the Nicaraguan Contras at a time when Congress had banned such aid.” He thus abandoned North and Poindexter to jail. The stench of a major ethics failure slams home for me in the realisation that George HW Bush pardoned these guys early in his presidency because they were ‘patriots’. Reagan abandoned his own guys. Clinton hasn’t done that …. yet.
“5. I will cease writing timely blogs about Hillary’s Clinton’s unethical conduct when
She stops lying.
The new scandals, schemes, and cover-ups stop materializing.
The news media starts doing its job.
The public shows sufficient comprehension of how corrupt she is.
She is no longer running for President.
And not before.”
So…yay more Hillary posts in the future.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for any of #5 starts to happen Jack.
So, I would like to see the rationale of being an ethics professor and a Hillary Clinton supporter. “I am required to teach ethics, but I don’t think they are very important” is the most likely (and honest) explanation I can think of. I would think if you taught ethics, these posts would be a gold mine of examples for class. In fact, I think you could probably teach an entire college ethics class just based on the Clintons. Just think about what a rich topic Whitewater is. It had possible real estate fraud, accounting and tax fraud, ditching supoenas, undue influence over the IRS, a mysterious death, etc. That is just one scandal!
I think there’s a lot of Anakin Skywalker there. I don’t think she was always like this. But by 1980, yes, she’d gone over to the Dark Side, becoming the monster she’d started out fighting against.
She was well into the Dark Side before 1980. Remember, she was fired off the Watergate investigation staff for multiple ethics violations. Ironic that she did this while investigating a president who, if unethical himself on this event, was still head and shoulders above her in any of her future attempts at public service and foreign relations.