Month: January 2019

How Does This Help, Mitt?

/ Jack Marshall / 75 Comments

Hey Mitt: I want my vote back.

Utah’s U.S.  Senator-elect Mitt Romney cheered the New Year’s cockles of “the resistance” and Trump-haters everywhere with a Washington Post op-ed condemning the President’s character. In substance, Romeny’s argument is indistinguishable from what regularly appeared on “Ethics Alarms” throughout 2016. For example, Mitt writes,

“…To a great degree, a presidency shapes the public character of the nation. A president should unite us and inspire us to follow “our better angels.” A president should demonstrate the essential qualities of honesty and integrity, and elevate the national discourse with comity and mutual respect. As a nation, we have been blessed with presidents who have called on the greatness of the American spirit. With the nation so divided, resentful and angry, presidential leadership in qualities of character is indispensable. And it is in this province where the incumbent’s shortfall has been most glaring.”

Thank you, Senator Obvious! And this observation and frontal insult helps the situation exactly how?

It doesn’t, of course. I cheered and admired Romney for taking the stand he did against Trump before the GOP Convention, writing,

Romney’s timing was superb. On the day of the GOP debate, he provided all of Trump’s opponents with twenty times the ammunition needed to sink most candidacies, and deftly alerted his audience to look for the personal attacks on Romney sure to come. The news media, which is so shameless in pursuit of a storyline, has been relentless characterizing Romney’s speech as “the establishment’s” declaration of war on The Donald. That unfairly minimizes what Romney did. Romney spoke for all Americans—you know, the responsible ones—who don’t want an unstable buffoon succeeding Washington, Lincoln, FDR and Ronald Reagan. He did it with the skill and power, and presenting anyone trying to rebut his points with a daunting, indeed, impossible task.

That speech in March, 2016 needed to be made, and it also needed to be heeded. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. GOP voters preferred the non-politician to the professional variety, and the debates showed why.  Chris Christie accepted his metaphorical silver for squishing Marco Rubio to help clear the way for Trump; Marco himself behaved like a juvenile amateur; John Kasich set new highs (lows?) in pandering wishy-washy-ness; Ted Cruz was loathsome as usual, and Ben Carson gave us all new doubts about the validity of assumptions that brilliant surgeons are brilliant anyplace but the operating room. Worst of all, none of the candidates had the guts to deliver in the debates the kind of “Have you no decency?” attack that might have cleared the fog from voters’ eyes and brains. Then the Republican Party declined to act responsibly and refuse to nominate someone who should not have been the nominee of a responsible party, and given the equally unpalatable option of voting for Hillary Clinton, the nation’s voters put Romney’s bete noire in the White House. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Open Forum Ethics III,” Migrant Thread

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Mea culpa: I am only now catching up on all of the 144 comments in the December 19 open forum. Once again, the commentariat here covered Ethics Alarms with glory.

The first Comment of the Day from that post comes from a non-U.S. commentator, one of several here, whose perspective is often contrarian but always well-stated.

Here is Andrew Wakeling’s Comment of the Day on the post on the immigration/migrant thread in the post, Open Forum Ethics III:

There is something unsettling about foreigners (or rather those outside our community being accorded ‘rights’) that impose on ‘us’.

Migrants are drowning as they attempt to cross the Mediterranean and obtain a better life in Europe. I don’t blame the migrants for trying and some of them may well be escaping quite dreadful conditions. And as a European (at least until March 2019) I broadly support sustainable collective decency, admittedly being quite unclear how this should be done. I am not therefore unsettled by a European Court ruling that migrants rescued by EU vessels must be taken to a safe port. That seems to me to be a quite reasonable codification of a collective decision which I assume (without great confidence) has some democratic legitimacy. (ie. ‘We’ have decided.)

But I am more than unsettled by the claim, as in an NYT opinion piece today that migrant drownings show that: “European governments are avoiding their legal and moral responsibilities to protect the human rights of people fleeing violence and economic desperation”. Continue reading →

2018 Ethics Retrospective Poll #4: The Ethics Train Wrecks!

/ Jack Marshall / 48 Comments

Nominations for “Ethics Train Wreck Of The Year”

This one is self-explanatory, I think. Don’t automatically default to the obvious choice.

(Still rolling and still being used illicitly to exert gender-based power while undermining civil rights.

(which encompasses “the resistance,” the “Get Trump” campaign by the news media, and the ongoing effort to concoct a justification for impeachment)

(The Parkland shooting aftermath was nothing but a resuscitated and refueled version, with different demagogues, and the same lies)

(Statues are still falling, universities are still purging their histories, and “The Sound of Music” can’t mention Nazis…)

(An offshoot of the Harvey Weinstein express,  and perhaps the canary dying in the mine…)

(So long-running and constant that I forgot to call it one, with the “Think of the Children! caboose.)

The Big Tech Social Media Ethics Train Wreck, which has pulled out of the station, will have to wait a few months before we can assess it…

The poll:

 

New Year’s Day Ethics Warm-Up, 2019: Outrageous Virtue Signaling And Other Misdemeanors

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Yes, happy 2019.

Thanks to all the readers, many commenting for the first time, who send reassuring and kind words in response to my musings last night. I wasn’t fishing for them, I swear.

1. Maybe this is why I’m in a bad mood…Here is the beginning of the 70 page (!) appellate brief I’m having to waste today answering, the work of the angry Ethics Alarms commenter whom I banned more than a year ago, and who apparently has nothing better to do than to file frivolous lawsuits:

Jack Marshall, the Defendant, is a craven, venal LIAR. What he did to Plaintiff …in this case was intentional/focused/targeted/defamatory lying, through-and-through. “Toxic mendacity” is a fair/appropriate characterization (“Orwellian psychosis” may possibly overstate the case). There was nothing legitimately/honestly “opinionated” about any of Marshall’s cynical noxious LIES, in any sensible sense (despite what the Judge pretended), as (re-)proven herein. Amongst the 575 defamatory acts pled/ alleged in our Comp (and supported in Opp, and at Oral Argument, and now repeated/proved yet again here in tabular
format in TblDefam), Marshall outright factually LIED ~29 times; while another ~32 times he uttered/wrote “materially false” pseudo-“opinions” based upon (hence implying) his earlier lies. Yet, the lower Judge’s grant of Rule 12(b)(6) Motion-to-Dismiss (“failure to state a claim”) falsely/blindly pretended Marshall’s publications were “pure opinions, innocent as the driven snow, grounded solely upon true facts.”6 That was a blatantly false/wrongful breach of good-faith judging….

2.  The nauseating virtue-signaling championship goes to…Barack Obama. How gullible and starry-eyed does someone have to be not to find this transparent and manipulative? The ex-President published his favorite movies, novels and songs of the year on Instagram. To my surprise, they reveal him to be woke! Intellectual! Devoted to the right social causes! Cool! And Black!

And if, say, one of his actual favorite movies this year was porn, or a slasher flick, do you really think he would include it? How about a Mickey Spillane novel, or a book by Bill Cosby? Call me cynical, but I assume that the list was devised by his PR staff, with his input. The list essentially tells us that Obama thinks most Americans are stupid saps, and the news media’s reaction to it—Isn’t he wonderful???—-shows that he’s probably right. Continue reading →

The Democrats’ “Insurance Policy”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

No, this isn’t the real Steele Dossier. But then, there’s not much real about the Steele Dossier…

I wonder how many Ethics Alarms readers know about this, thanks to the responsible reporting on the news media?

Jonathan Turley, who is only called a conservative because he refuses to bow to the extreme Left like most of his law prof colleagues, provided an interesting a crucial update to the Steele Dossier scandal. You should read the whole thing, but he reveals,

  • British spy Christopher Steele was recently called for a deposition in London in a defamation action filed by three Russian bankers for allegedly false claims in the dossier. He siad that the Clinton campaign paid him and research firm Fusion GPS to compile his controversial dossier on Donald Trump as “insurance” against his being elected.
  • Though the Clinton campaign denied any involvement in the creation of the dossier that was later used to secure a secret surveillance warrant against Trump associates during the Obama administration,   the  campaign hid the payments to Fusion as a “legal fees” among the $5.6 million paid to the U.S. law firm of Perkins Coie. Times reporter  Maggie Haberman  wrote: “Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year.”
  • When Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta was questioned by Congress on the matter, he denied any contractual agreement with Fusion GPS. Sitting beside him was Elias, who helped devise contract. Later, confronted with the evidence, Clinton and her campaign finally admitted that the dossier was a campaign-funded document that was pushed by Steele and others to the media. Continue reading →

2018 Ethics Retrospective Poll #2 and #3: “Unethical Profession Of The Year” And “Incompetent Elected Official”

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

The effort to prompt some input into the 2018 Ethics Alarms Awards will obviously continue for another day or two, as my promise to “be posting these periodically during the day and evening” was foiled by intervening priorities yesterday.  There are two polls this time (here was the first, still open), and again, please don’t hesitate to expand on your votes.

Nominations for “Unethical Profession Of The Year”

Once, there was never any question about the “winner” of this  category: it was inevitably educators or, more often, journalists. One of the horrible consequences the 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck, however, is that almost all the professions dived into the muck, sought headlines by making the kind of biased and irresponsible statements that society depends on professionals to eschew, and they have continued their self-debasement ever since. While journalists and educators—in this I include all academics as well as teachers and administrators, have still disgraced themselves beyond debate—they have real competition now. Each profession nominated will be linked to a representative Ethics Alarms post. The nominees are… Continue reading →