Author: Jack Marshall

How Can These People (Democrats, Journalists) Look Themselves in the Mirror Without Retching?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

You shouldn’t need that montage to know these people can’t be trusted. I know I don’t.

Jake Tapper will never darken my TV screen again, and the fact that CNN will keep presenting this epic hypocrite as a legitimate broadcast journalist achieves a dead heat in the “Most Disgraceful Excuse for a News Network” competition with MSNBC. Joe Concha writes in The Washington Examiner,

An unearthed five-year-old interview is rightly making the rounds this week. It stars CNN’s Jake Tapper and Lara Trump, the daughter-in-law of President Donald Trump. In the 2020 interview, weeks before Election Day, Lara Trump made the case that former President Joe Biden appeared to show signs of cognitive decline. She wasn’t wrong — even one year earlier, Democrats were saying the same thing. Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) said in September 2019: “There’s a lot of people who are concerned about Joe Biden’s ability to carry the ball all the way across the end line without fumbling. There are definitely moments when you listen to Joe Biden and you just wonder.”…

But when Lara Trump broached Biden’s decline in that interview with Tapper, the CNN “anchor” went into full defense mode on behalf of his preferred candidate in the race by citing Biden’s stutter as the reason he was having memory trouble and communication troubles in general. “How do you think it makes little kids with stutters feel when they see you make a comment like that?” Tapper asked her…..“I would think that somebody in the family would be more sensitive to people who do not have medical licenses diagnosing politicians from afar…

“I’m saying Joe Biden is struggling at times onstage, and it’s concerning to a lot of people that this could be the leader of the free world,” she retorted. “That is all I’m saying. I genuinely feel sorry for Joe Biden.”

“I’m sure [your comments] were from a place of concern. We all believe that,” Tapper snarked in return.

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Ethics Dunce: James Comey and Anyone Who Defends Him

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

James Comey, the partisan, dishonest, unethical former FBI Director whom Trump was right to fire (but he should have fired him earlier) posted on Instagram, with approval, a message that consisted of the numbers 8647, meaning “rub out the 47th President,” Donald Trump, delineated with sea shells. …

 Nice! It didn’t take long for Comey to realize that this was, to say the least, a tactical error, and he took down the post. In doing so, Comey proved what a mendacious creep he is again by claiming that it never occurred to him that 8647 might be interpreted as a call to have the President of the United States eradicated, offed, murdered, killed…you know assassinated. Never mind that there have been two near misses by the “Kill Trump” club already, that some Democrats and “the resistance” have openly advocated violence, and that for a former head of the FBI to join their ranks is, to put it mildly, unseemly. Comey said he was sorry.

Not good enough. Not nearly good enough. A former high law enforcement official calling for the assassination of the sitting President is a big deal, attention should be paid, and Comey should suffer more than the indignity of having to channel Emily Litella (“Never mind!”)

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wrote on X on Friday evening that the Secret Service had “interviewed disgraced former FBI Director Comey regarding a social media post calling for the assassination of President Trump.” Good. There is no valid justification for taking criminal action against Comey (who wrote coyly under his shells photo, “Cool shell formation”), but there also is no good reason not to thoroughly humiliate this Ethics Villain either.

Naturally, because they are the enemy of the people, most journalists reporting on the incident adopted the reflex “Republican pounce” approach rather than the well-earned “Can you believe that Trump was attacked for firing this guy in his first term?” framing.

Unabomber Memorial Ethics Explosions, 5/15-18/25 (PS: I’m Not Dead, but Thanks Neil, Ryan, Jon et al. for Worrying About Me…)

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Yes, it is I.

My internet went out right before midnight on the 14th, which means my office and home phones also haven’t worked since then until just a little while ago. Neither did my streaming services. Verizon, which I switched back to in November because Comcast was unreliable and cost too much, put me through the usual customer service Hell before I reached what I thought was a competent human being. It took me almost a half an hour of arguing with Verizon’s “automated assistant” to get to said CHB, who immediately contradicted hiscyber-colleague by confirming that yes, there had been an “incident” in my area (the bot had denied it) and a crew was working on the outage. That was the supposedly the good news; the bad news was that I might be trapped in the Stone Age (okay, I’m exaggerating: that statement would go into the Washington Post’s Trump Lie Database if the President said it) until as late as 4:45 pm on the 15th.

But you didn’t read this post on the 15th, did you? That would be because 4:45 pm. came and went, and still I couldn’t communicate with the outside world. Meanwhile, clients were screaming, Ethics Alarms was languishing, “fish is jumpin’” and I was reduced to singing “Summertime” from “Porgy and Bess” for some reason. In a 52 minute phone call with Verizon in which I listened to a very polite, pleasant, customer service representative who spoke relatively clear pidgin English in a high-pitched voice (I couldn’t place the accent), I discovered that the company couldn’t send a technician to my house until Friday afternoon. Next, my phone stopped receiving signals too, so I couldn’t even keep up with comments.

A very nice technician showed up at 1:30 pm and was fooling around with things for an hour. He replaced “the box” and then told me that he had been informed that the problem couldn’t be resolved by him, and that his supervisor told him to tell me that the outage wouldn’t be corrected until 6:45 am yesterday, Saturday the 17th. It wasn’t. Verizon promised to have another technician come by between 11am and 3pm on Sunday. That actually came to pass, and it turned out the previous technician had inserted the wrong thingy in the wrong plug, or something.

Ol’ Crazy Ted, the Harvard grad terrorist, has again been proven right: it’s ridiculous what I (you, we) can’t do without key technology, and one of them is maintaining an ethics blog.

Well, I still could prepare a post on Word and have it ready to go up when civilization reappears, so that’s what I started to do Friday morning and am revising now, as I try to forget that I have God only knows (I switched to singing the Beach Boys because I can’t remember all the words to “Summertime” right now) how many emails to answer that I haven’t seen yet. I don’t have email on my cell phone, you see, because I tell my ethics classes that the less confidential, client-related stuff you have on your phone, the better.

Meanwhile,

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Ethics Dunce: Bruce Springsteen

/ Jack Marshall / 69 Comments

Here’s how rocker Bruce Springsteen began a show in Manchester, England tonight:

“The mighty E Street Band is here tonight to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock ‘n roll in dangerous times. In my home, the America I love, the America I’ve written about, that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous administration. Tonight we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experiment to rise with us, raise your voices against authoritarianism and let freedom ring!”

What an asshole.

Going to a foreign country and attacking the U.S. government and the President isn’t just poor citizenship, it’s stupid. A concert audience didn’t pay exorbitant sums to hear political statements from a musician regarding their own country, much less another one. Meanwhile, Springsteen has shown no indications of knowing what he’s talking about; he’s just repeating the anti-Trump talking points that he hears or reads second-hand.

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Unethical Quote of the Week: Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“Legal residents of the United States sent to foreign prisons without due process. Students detained after voicing their opinions. Federal judges threatened with impeachment for ruling against the administration’s priorities…”

—–Marci Shore,Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley in the NYT Op-Ed, “We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the U.S.”

I’m trying to decide whether the appropriate response to this pathetic appeal to dubious authority is best answered with my traditional, “Good!” or a more vulgar response, like, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.” That first paragraph in the Times piece certainly shows their expertise: Goebbels could hardly have done any better at misinformation and deceit.

Exactly ONE “legal resident” has been sent to a “foreign prison,” the “Maryland father” who was an illegal immigrant and who had received a lot of “due process.” The “foreign prison” he was sent to was not foreign to him, since it is the only country of which he’s a legal citizen. No students have been “detained” for “expressing their opinions.” No Federal judges have been “threatened with impeachment” either, as any of the judges exceeding their authority to issue dubious injunctions against legitimate Presidential actions should be able to explain. Anyone, even the President, saying “those judges should be impeached” or even “I’d like to impeach those justices” is simply expressing an opinion, not making a “true threat.” Judges can’t be impeached for incompetence or even misjudging their own power. The “threat” might as well have been “I would turn them into toads if I could!” Oooh. Scary.

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Addendum to “The Democrats, the Trump Deranged and the Axis Media Deserve Schadenfreude”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I had intended to include this jaw-dropping column in the previous post but decided that it would make it too long. But I can’t let such lunacy go unflagged…

Sally Quinn, the aging liberal Democrat royalty from the Watergate era—you know, back when people naively thought journalists at the Washington Post told the truth and weren’t political operatives?—filed this hilarious lament with the New York Times, saying in part,

It’s spring in Washington, D.C., the most beautiful time of the year. Dogwood, forsythia, cherry trees, tulips and daffodils decorate every sidewalk, wisterias weep from porch overhangs, and redbuds pop up at every corner. …Spring is normally the happiest time of year here.

But not this spring.

This spring Washington is a city in crisis. Physically, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually. It’s as if the fragrant air were permeated with an invisible poison, as if we were silently choking on carbon monoxide. The emotion all around — palpable in the streets, the shops, the restaurants, in business offices, at dinner tables — is fear. People have gone from greeting each other with a grimace of anguish as they spout about the outrage of the day to a laugh to despair. It’s all so unbelievable that it’s hard to process, and it doesn’t stop.

Nobody feels safe. Nobody feels protected….today in Washington, those who hold — or once held — the most power are often the most scared. It is not something they are used to feeling….Nobody knows how this will end and what will happen to the country. What might happen to each of us.

Even those who work for President Trump are scared. The capricious and shambolic way he governed in his first 100 days has them all insecure in their jobs. Mike Waltz is out. Bets are on as to how long Marco Rubio will remain in all his roles and Pete Hegseth in his….Those most afraid are the Republicans on Capitol Hill. They are afraid of not just being primaried but also facing retribution. Lisa Murkowski said it out loud. “We are all afraid,” she said. “Retaliation is real. And that’s not right.”….The Trump socializing style is a striking departure from what went on in Washington for decades. Salons, where we got to know one another and exchanged ideas, are out….Mr. Trump’s billionaire friends and cabinet are snapping up luxury real estate all over town, especially Georgetown (Robert Kennedy Jr.), which many of them appeared to avoid the first time around because it was considered too liberal…. The Trump women can’t be missed in a room. They give off a Palm Beach, L.A. vibe. The restaurants of choice have changed….With Mr. Trump in the White House, anyone who socializes with Democrats can come under suspicion….

 

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The Democrats, the Trump Deranged and the Axis Media Deserve Schadenfreude

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Nelson had a good day yesterday; so did Oscar Wilde, who famously said, commenting on the sentimental death of the waif in Dickens’ “The Old Curiosity Shop,” “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.” The Democrats have made fools of themselves and continue to do so; the Trump Deranged are reduced to “stewing in their own juices” as my father liked to say, and the Axis news media is so desperate to help out its pals that it’s removing any tiny doubt that might have remained that our journalists are untrustworthy, unethical hacks.

Good times, good times.

Let’s see…

1. To the horror of all but America’s consumers, April showed the lowest rate of inflation rate in about four years.

2. The stock market essentially returned to where it was before Trump was sworn in.

3. The recession that the Axis was hoping for looked, suddenly, far, far away.

4. CNN’s disappointment over the good inflation news was palpable, bring on a grim faced analyst to try to reassure everyone that he was certain tariffs were going to crash the economy eventually. It is so, so apparent that he Democratic Party desperately wants the President of the United States to fail, the exact sentiment that it condemned then-GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell for expressing (they claimed) when Obama was President.

5. Both CNN and MSNBC were reduced to complaining about the President admitting a small number of South African refugees because they are white, and still complaining about Qatar’s gift of a jet to the U.S., not to Trump.

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Baseball Ethics: On MLB’s Reinstatement of Pete Rose and the 8 Dirty 1919 White Sox

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Today Pete Rose and other players “banned for life” by Major League Baseball were reinstated. This doesn’t mean they have been brought back to life, and it won’t get them into baseball’s Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. All it means is that a banning for life doesn’t extend past a banned player’s death.

I have to say, I thought this would bother me more than it does.

The decision by Commissioner Robert D. Manfred, whom I would regard as the Worst Commissioner Ever were it not for the fact that his predecessor, the revolting Bud Selig, should have that distinction forevermore, was clearly prompted by the death of baseball scumbag Pete Rose, President Trump’s meaningless promise to “pardon” him, whatever that means, and the Rose family’s renewed efforts to get baseball’s all-time hit leader into the Hall of Fame. From a lawyer’s perspective, I can’t quibble with Manfred’s logic that a lifetime ban, however deserved, should expire upon death, as most things do.

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A Teacher Gives Up: Ethics Observations

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

This is a TikTok video that is now unavailable on that platform for some reason—maybe the Chinese don’t want the truth getting out there. The video is long, and the distraught teacher is obviously not a video pro, but her message is heartfelt as well as astute. Attention should be paid.

I stumbled on Hannah’s lament as I was preparing to write another post that it quickly subsumed. That one was a response to this [Gift link!] in which a Hollywood screenwriter blames the public for the fact that Hollywood movies stink now. “The true problem lies with you, the audience,” he writes. “[I]t’s hard to argue that Hollywood is doing anything other than giving you, the moviegoing public, what you want.” I was going to call my response, “It’s the Culture, Stupid!” and point out that Hollywood is as much responsible for the culture as it is now a victim of it.

Hollywood helped create the attention deficit-afflicted, literature starved, culturally illiterate generations that drive politics and commerce now. As Hannah’s video makes clear, there are a lot of factors that have created an American public that is unable to absorb complex issues or enjoy stories that will teach them something valuable about life and humanity. Hollywood and the entertainment industry are as culpable as any of them.

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Confronting My Biases, Episode 20: The Chessboard Tell

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

It’s been three years since I last mentioned this ethics pet peeve. I was triggered just yesterday by the commercial above, which I was inclined to favor because it includes my late father’s favorite dog breed (also one of mine), the majestic Irish Wolfhound. I have nothing new to say about the issue, but as I wrote in 2022, “If this post stops just one human being from making that stupid mistake, my life will not have been in vain after all.”

In the ad above, we twice catch glimpses of a garden chessboard, like those royalty once would use with human beings as the chess pieces. (Mel Brooks spoofs this recreation in his “History of the World, Part 1.”). I saw the ad several times before I realized the board was set up wrong. I would never buy a Range Rover Sport anyway, but if I were in the market for one, that inexcusable gaffe would ensure that I bought something else. Or took the bus.

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