Month: July 2024

Stop Making Me Half-Defend Kamala Harris…Well, Maybe 1/3. Or 1/8?

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

The old Ethics Alarms Mailbag—okay, my email account—yielded an intriguing question from esteemed commenter JutGory, who wrote, “Should Harris be criticized for leaving up a tweet that she knows is not true, which she acknowledged in a follow up tweet? I know you have criticized people who have removed bad tweets as covering something up.  Then, is it unfair to criticize Harris?”

You remember the despicable Jussie Smollett, right? Ethics Alarms did several posts on this Fick. In 2019, Smollett, an African-American actor, claimed he was just minding his own business in Chicago on a cold winter night when he was attacked by two MAGA crazies in ski masks who doused him with bleach and slipped a rope around his neck while calling him racist and homophobic slurs. Smollett’s tale made little sense and immediately attracted suspicions that it was a hoax, which, in fact, it was. But Kamala Harris immediately posted the tweet above…because she’s a race-baiter and bigot, as well as an asshole. Never mind “believe all women,” Harris advocates “believe anyone who accuses MAGA supporters of being racists, no matter how far-fetched the accusation is.” Unity! Harris foments hate and division, because it’s good for Democrats, or so they think.

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Most Competent Campaigner of the Year: Donald Trump

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Say what you like about Donald Trump, and if it isn’t one of the Big Lies, I may well agree. But this….

…holding another rally in Butler is pure political genius, and gutsy too. Imagine if Booth had missed, and Abe had announced, “I’m going back to Ford’s Theater to see how that play turned out!”

John Wayne would have loved it…BOTH John Waynes, the real life political conservative, and the icon he played in movies. It’s the equivalent of Rooster Cogburn taking the reins in his teeth and charging at Lucky Ned Pepper and his gang. The message is “You don’t scare me, assholes, and here I come!”

It is political genius, and a great display of classic American defiance.

Bravo.

Busted! The “Completely Independent” Government Transparency Website” Proves It Is Just Another Democratic Party Propaganda Agent [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The effort across the news media and elsewhere in the Axis to distort Kamala Harris’s past record and documented positions sufficiently to render the public totally misinformed regarding the candidate whom Democrats are offering for President in November is rapidly reaching comic proportions. It reached Orwellian proportions some time ago.

GovTrack promotes itself as being independent, unbiased,and trustworthy. For five years, it included an entry on that esteemed site that ranked Harris as the most liberal U.S. Senator in 2019—more liberal than, for example, Bernie Sanders, who is a proto-Communist, and Elizabeth Warren, who advocates a confiscatory wealth tax, wants to cancel most student loan debt, proposes to break up Big Tech companies, and wants a $20 trillion “Medicare for all” program paid for by taxing the living daylights out of businesses. Kamala’s more radical leftist profile is not, one may assume, a policy agenda the majority of Americans favor, so our unethical journalists and related villains are trying mightily to convince voters that Harris “isn’t what she is.”

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Friday Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

Talk it up!

Wow! I hadn’t seen that number for a while. In 2024 it’s like watching dinosaurs roam the Earth.

Ethics Quiz: Bury My Medal At Wounded Knee [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Once again, I thought a headline was a joke when I first read it:“Pentagon to review Medals of Honor awarded to soldiers for 1890 Wounded Knee actions.” The headline was at Stars and Stripes, though, not The Babylon Bee.

The reassessment was requested by Congress in 2022 on a day when it was feeling particularly woke and I guess had nothing better to worry about. Now Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has ordered a “five-person panel of experts”—experts on what it was like to be in the cavalry in 1890, I guess?—to review the legitimacy of the Medals of Honor awarded to twenty U.S. soldiers for their actions during the 1890 Battle of Wounded Knee in South Dakota, eventually regarded as a massacre of Native Americans after Dee Brown’s best-selling account of the battle won acclaim and its own awards.

“The scope of the [panel’s] review is limited to reviewing each [Wounded Knee Creek Medal of Honor] awardee’s individual actions during this specific engagement on or about Dec. 29, 1890,” Austin wrote in a memo made public this week. The panel “may consider the context of the overall engagement as appropriate, including as necessary to understand each … recipient’s individual actions.”

The now infamous battle saw the U.S. Army’s 7th Cavalry kill or wound over 350 members of the Lakota tribe, with about half of those killed being women and children. 25 U.S. soldiers also died in the incident, which was not planned as a massacre or even a confrontation.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is it fair to revoke a soldier’s medal of valor under these circumstances?

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Does It Matter If Biden’s “Live” Oval Office Speech Wasn’t Really Live? [Significantly Updated and Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Does it matter? Are you kidding? Of course it matters! It matters a great deal. It also matters that the news media seems remarkably uninterested in determining the truth. This is because they can’t handle the truth, or rather are afraid that their letting the pubic know the truth will undermine “democracy.”

I know. It doesn’t make sense. But this is what the corruption of our institutions has done to the nation.

Sharp-eyed viewers, perhaps already inclined toward conspiracy theories after realizing that they have been lied to for three years about the President’s mental condition, claimed that the time displayed on Biden’s watch during the speech last night about his decision to abandon his re-election campaign (after telling George Stephanopolos that he would only quit if God himself ordered him to) was different from that time the “live” speech was broadcast.

This would be easy to settle if the White House didn’t lie routinely, and if the hack news media were diligent about exposing such cheats. Determining what is really happening, happened, or will happen with this administration, however, is well-nigh impossible, and our betters in power like it that way. Let’s see: what is the more likely explanation for the time discrepancy? We have…

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Still More Mandated Rhetoric From the Axis of Unethical Conduct

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Ann Althouse put that montage together, highlighting the sudden use of “selfless” among the agents of the Axis of Unethical Conduct (“the resistance,” Democrats, and the mainstream media as they work to rig this election the way they tried to rig the last—let’s see, at least four, to favor the Democratic Party’s candidate. I wrote about the same phenomenon yesterday here, and it looks like this will be an ongoing theme until November. The sooner the public realizes how Orwellian this is, and how fond the Left is of the tactic, the safer we will all be.

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Ugh. Could Someone PLEASE Explain the First Amendment to Donald Trump? Quickly?

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

This morning, I was simultaneously listening in on CNN (hyping Harris absurdly), MSNBC (well, you know) and Fox News, where the morning trio of hyper-partisan clowns were hosting Trump in a 30 minute phone monologue. First, I got a laugh when a CNN reporter commented on Harris having to navigate the complexities of Israel’s war with Gaza (Hamas). He actually said, first, “This is a major issue for Harris” and five seconds later that “Republicans are trying to make an issue out of this.” Yes, Harris was one of the first Democrats to call for a cease fire in Gaza, essentially making sure Hamas’s adverse consequences for slaughtering and raping Israel civilians on October 7 were minimal, but because she was only a VP at the time, and, after all, Kamala Harris, Idiot, nobody paid much attention to how irresponsible that position was. It is an issue, of course, but CNN will try “Republicans pounce!” even when everyone should pounce.

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Confronting My Biases, Episode 12: Actors Hosting TV Game Shows

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

I guess I should begin by saying that it is a sign of the collapse of civilization that game shows, once almost solely the slightly embarrassing denizens of morning and daytime TV, are now all over the networks in prime time. They are cheap to make, they appeal to morons, and it reduces the need for, you know, comedies and dramas, actual entertainment with lessons to teach and emotions to convey. Quiz shows were big in prime time during the mid-Fifties, then the rigged questions scandal killed them. They crawled back to daytime TV.

The source of my bias, however is that even in the daytime game shows, the role of game show host has been almost completely taken over by actors, or, in some cases, comics. The profession of game show host, as once practiced by worthies like Art James, Art Fleming, Alan Ludden, John Daly, Bud Collyer, Jack Barry, Monty Hall, Bob Barker and my personal favorite, the immortal Wink Martindale, has almost totally vanished, like the Tasmanian tiger.

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Harris Is a D.E.I. Vice-President, and Ethics Alarms Hereby Pledges To Reiterate That Fact Every Time Some Liar, Hack or Gaslighter Says Otherwise…[Link Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

I’m drawing a line in the sand on this one. I am sick of the flagrant attempts by shameless partisans, Axis of Unethical Conduct liars and desperate Trump-Deranged propagandists to deny the past and the present, their own misdeeds, and their cascading humiliating botches. I am also disgusted with the ongoing efforts of these same aspiring dictators to win arguments and election by strangling the language and issuing rhetorical taboos so it becomes difficult to reveal what they have done, or allows the public to be confused and misled permanently.

Readers here are aware of some of my unyielding pledges. I have vowed to blow a blast on a metaphorical Sousaphone every time someone quotes the phony “76 cents on the dollar” statistic “proving” that the workplace discriminates against women. (The last time I scored a politician for doing that? It was Kamala Harris. Of course it was.) I have sworn to embarrass any movie, TV program or ad that shows someone playing chess with the board set up incorrectly. I am determined never to let an ethics dunce argue that cheater Barry Bonds belongs in the Hall of Fame because “other players did it” or because “he was good enough that he would have had a HOF career if he hadn’t cheated.” (That one makes me furious just writing it.)

I am never going to countenance anyone calling the stupid January 6 riot an “insurrection,” saying that Trump’s allegations that the 2020 election was “rigged” is “baseless,” or who repeats any of the multiplying Big Lies about what Trump has said in the past, the most recent example being flagged in a post today. I will not let any demagogue get away with saying that baker Jack Phillips discriminated against gay people when he said he would not be compelled to express approval of a gay wedding on one of his cakes because he believed this infringed his First Amendment rights.

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