Author: Jack Marshall

Joe’s “It Isn’t What It Is” Farewell” Part II: The Disgrace

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

[Read the Introduction here]

I really don’t feel like going through this; it’s reminds me of that old gross-out camp song about “great green gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts, mutilated monkey meat” and “concentrated chicken feet.” It degrades the office. It degrades everyone who listened to it. It degrades me to have to describe it.

Over at PJ Media, Ed Morrisey had an equivalent reaction, calling it “the worst case of valedictory projection ever” and writing in part,

Beware the oligarchy, warned the president who … just gave George Soros a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Beware the oligarchy, warned the president who … cajoled and pressured tech billionaires to comply with his attempts to censor speech and suppress dissent through his State Department’s Global Engagement Center. 

Beware the oligarchy, warned the president whose party gets massively funded through Arabella, a network of leftist billionaires using dark money to fund candidates and activist campaigns. 

But this offal from the Oval Ofiice demands a thorough fisking, much as I’d rather pound nails into my scrotum, so here we go. (The gift-linked Times transcript is here.)

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The Country’s In the Very Best of Hands! Reps. Mace and Crockett Disgrace Themselves, Congress, and Nation

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

During the debate over the House bill to stop males “transitioning” to glorious womanhood from injuring female athletes while cheating their way to taking their scholarships, records, championships and safety, two of the worst female members of Congress—and that’s quite an achievement, given the competition— showed (again) why the public no longer trusts its republic. The two women showed themselves to be ethics dunces, incompetent elected officials, disastrous role models and, to get technical about it, assholes.

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Joe’s “It Isn’t What It Is” Farewell” Part I: Introduction

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

We long ago reached the point where anyone paying attention swallowed comforting myth that any modern President delivers a farewell address that he really composed himself, but President Joe Biden’s scripted cavalcade of lies and hypocrisy is in a whole different category.

It stretched credulity to believe that the same man who mumbled this on national TV in June during the debate that effectively put him out of office just a half-year ago—

“He had the largest national debt of any president four-year period, number one. Number two, he got $2 trillion tax cut, benefited the very wealthy.What I’m going to do is fix the taxes. For example, we have a thousand trillionaires in America – I mean, billionaires in America. And what’s happening? They’re in a situation where they, in fact, pay 8.2 percent in taxes. If they just paid 24 percent or 25 percent, either one of those numbers, they’d raised $500 million – billion dollars, I should say, in a 10-year period. We’d be able to right – wipe out his debt. We’d be able to help make sure that – all those things we need to do, childcare, elder care, making sure that we continue to strengthen our healthcare system, making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the COVID – excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with. Look, if – we finally beat Medicare.”

….could compose, much less think, what he repeated off a teleprompter last night after resting all day.

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Oh-Oh. We Have Descended into Some Diabolical Hellscape Where Chris Cuomo Is Making Valid Ethics Observations….

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Cuomo, aka. “Fredo” on the Hegseth hearing…

The country’s in the very best of hands….

Meanwhile, while Cuomo is spot-on, here’s a quote from alleged conservative intellectual David Brooks, who today leveled similar criticism, but discredited himself with this:

“The hearings got better as they went along and more junior senators got to speak. Senator Mazie Hirono was excellent, asking substantive questions: If the president ordered you, would you order troops to shoot protesters in the legs? Would you follow an order to use the military for mass deportations?”

I can’t even tell if Brooks was being sarcastic; he has written so many outrageous things since his brain was surgically removed by the New York Times and replaced with a bag of Cheetohs. Sarcasm is not typically his metier. If Brooks was attempting sarcasm, he’s lousy at it: no columnist who wants to be taken seriously should ever, ever utter the words “Senator Mazie Hirono was excellent” in jest, irony, or God forbid, sincerity.

A Jumbo For Democrat Bitter-Enders and the Trump-Deranged

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

This made me laugh out loud, and I have to do a quick post. I heard successive guests and hosts on MSNBC desperately try to give puppet President Joe Biden credit for today’s cease fire and negotiated release of the Hamas hostages, including the Americans. They denied that Donald Trump had anything to do with it. Trump, you may recall, promised that “all Hell would break loose” if the hostages were not released by the time he became President. Inaugeration Day is January 20. The cease-fire deal goes into effect on January 19.

That’s just a coincidence, you see. Sure it is. “Elephant? What elephant?”

Would it really be so difficult for even the worst Trump-phobics to give him credit for what to any non-deranged observer is so clearly the result of his thinly-veiled threat and the belief abroad that, unlike some “red line”- drawing Presidents of the recent past, it is risky to call this one’s bluff?

Apparently it is too difficult. They would rather lie when the lie is obvious and indefensible than show the integrity to admit that the man they hate so much did something that worked. How unprofessional. How petty. How self-indicting. How stupid.

But funny!

Ethics Quiz: The Hegseth Hearing, Part II

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Sorry: This started out as a quiz, but changed my mind…

I was going to post another one of the despicable Democratic Senators’ grilling of Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth as a genuine quiz with the question, “Was Sen. X’s questioning of Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee to be Secretary of Defense, competent, fair, respectful and professional?” but after viewing the disgusting performance of Hawaii’s Senator Hirono, easily the dumbest Senator in the chamber and maybe the dumbest U.S. Senator in history, I realized it would be an unethical exercise.

I only raise ethics quizzes when I have genuine doubts about the answer, even if I personally have come to a conclusion. But in the case of Hirono’s scummy excuse for legitimate vetting, there is no argument. She was unprofessional, rude, disrespectful, dishonest and hateful. She didn’t allow Hegseth a fair opportunity to respond to her varied slanders. Much of her questioning was of the “When did you stop beating your wife?” variety. It was redolent of the worst of the Kavenaugh hearings, and that’s about as bad as it gets. Unsourced anonymous allegations are technically known as “rumors,” and especially in today’s snake-pit version of Washington, D.C., they should be ignored: to Hirono—wow, she’s an idiot—they qualify as evidence.

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Return to “Ozark”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

In 2018, I included a brief note about the Netflix streaming series “Ozark” in a morning “warm-up.” I wrote,

“Call me an old ethics fogey, but I don’t think these kinds of TV series are culturally healthy. I’ve been watching the Netflix series “Ozark,” and hating myself for it. The show is well acted and even has its ethics dilemmas, but like “Breaking Bad,” which was obviously its inspiration, there are no admirable characters, and the “heroes” are criminals. In the Golden Age of TV, there were unwritten (and sometimes written) rules that shows could not rationalize, trivialize or romanticize illegal, immoral or unethical behavior, and needed to reaffirm positive values. In “Ozark,” “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul,” the latter’s spin-off, as well as “House of Cards,” and “Shameless,” among others, there are virtually no admirable characters at all. I have been watching “Ozark” in part because I like the actors, in part because there’s nothing I want to watch anywhere else except baseball, and, yes, in part because of voyeurism. Still, it makes me want to take a shower, and I felt that the increasing tendency of Hollywood to portray everything and everyone as corrupt makes a “the ends justify the means” rationalization seem like a matter of survival.”

Well, that was a shallow and unfair analysis, I am now compelled to say. Living alone with non-work time being a constant challenge between baseball seasons and disappointed by so many other series, I have returned to some old ones that I recalled as at least consistently excellent in scripting and performances, including consensus classics like “The Sopranos,” “Six Feet Under,” “Ray Donovan” and the best of them all, “Lonesome Dove.”

My reaction to “Ozark” the second time through has been completely different from the first time. For one thing, there is so much of it I don’t remember that I have to believe that I didn’t give the show my complete attention on the first viewing. Secondly, I realize now that “Ozark” is an ethics series as much as “The Walking Dead” is an ethics series, and for a similar reason. A normal family is thrust by a confluence of events beyond its control into a set of extreme circumstances beyond their experience and comprehension. They find themselves in a true Bizarro World ethical environment where what is considered ethical in a normal culture will not work, requiring the acceptance of new values and the mastering of new skills, with the alternative being death.

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Ethics Alarms Will Now Be Kind To Kamala…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I always feel for the losers in Presidential elections. It has to be one of the most crushing career failures that any human being has to endure, certainly in politics.

In “Inherit the Wind,” Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee’s famous play based on the Scopes Trial, the wife of “William Harrison Brady,” the character who is a thinly veiled version of William Jennings Bryan, has a moving speech about how no one can imagine the pain her husband has suffered losing three Presidential races, as Bryan did (a record). In modern times, losing just once usually ends a candidate’s political career, no matter how young they may be or how close the election.

I think that it is highly unlikely that Kamala Harris, the DEI Vice-President who had no business running even once, will break the recent pattern. She will sign a book deal, cash in, and fade into obscurity, a bad memory for Democrats, a living joke to everyone else. Unfortunately for her, Harris is still our Vice-President, and cannot start fading away yet.

Yesterday she was again the object of derision and mirth on social media and on the conservative websites for her very Harris-like performance during an unscripted Oval Office briefing on the Palisades fire crisis. It was this section, a trademarked Harris “word salad,” that attracted the ridicule:

“It’s critically important that, to the extent you can find anything that gives you an ability to be patient in this extremely dangerous and unprecedented crisis, that you do.”

I can’t say anything nice about the idiotic content of that statement, for telling people whose houses are burning to be “patient” is about as tone-deaf as a political figure can be. However, I finally have figured out why she keeps issuing those “word salads.” It isn’t because she is a dullard, although she is. The reason for her malady should have occurred to me earlier when I considered giving her a permanent Julie Principle pass on them.

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Ethics Quiz: The Hegseth Hearing, Part I

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:

Was Sen. Tim Kaine’s questioning of Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee to be Secretary of Defense, competent, fair, respectful and professional?

“Lying, Losing and Cheating Is No Way To Go Through Democracy, Democrats!”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Do Democrats really cheat more often than Republicans? It sure seems like it over the last year at least, when the party faked out the nation as long as possible pretending that Joe Biden was really President, then made Kamala Harris their substitute nominee without her winning a single primary vote. In addition, its plan for winning the Presidential election was t put Donald Trump in jail, or at least set him up to be labeled a “convicted felon.”

From Minnesota comes a particularly ugly example of ethics rot on the struggling left. There are 134 Minnesota House districts. When the votes were counted after the last election, Republicans had gained enough seats to deadlock the state’s House, 67-67. Ah, but one of the Democrats’ candidates had cheated! In House District 40B, Democrat Curtis Johnson falsely claimed to reside in the district and he didn’t, making him ineligible to run or serve under the Minnesota Constitution. The GOP filed an election challenge and it was successful, so a district court issued an injunction barring Johnson from taking that seat. A special election will be held to fill the seat at some time in the future—don’t ask me why Johnson’s cheated opponent didn’t automatically get declared the winner: I don’t understand Minnesota (Al Franken, Jesse Ventura, Tim Walz…) at all, and less with each passing year.

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