Author: Jack Marshall

Ethics Hero: Karoline Leavitt

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Res ipsa loquitur…

The link is here. (WordPress wouldn’t let me embed it.)

I had never heard Leavitt before; she was an assistant press secretary at the end of Trump’s term, ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2022, and is now Trump’s 2024 National Press Secretary. Compare her to the pathetic Karine Jean-Pierre. Trump should use Leavitt as an example of the different standards of competence in Democratic and Republican administrations (not that Trump didn’t employ more than his share of incompetents as well, some of whom are now telling the news media that he likes Hitler).

In a sane and ethical world, a candidate staffer showing herself to be prepared, competent, articulate and devastatingly accurate when faced with mainstream media propaganda should not warrant Ethics Hero status. Unfortunately, displays like Leavitt’s almost never happen. She reduced the ABC Axis propagandist to nearly literal “huminahumina” babbling.

If only the candidate himself could communicate this well.

(Heck, if only I could communicate this well, I might have made my final appearance on NPR, when I was ambushed and mocked for correctly explaining how sexual harassment law can be abused to target public figures like Donald Trump, a more memorable last stand.)

Today’s Desperation “Beat Trump By Any Means Necessary” Rhetoric Twist…[Extended]

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

What Trump said (in his interview with Tucker Carlson) about the odious Elizabeth Cheney:

“Look, she’s a deranged person. The reason she doesn’t like me is that she wanted to stay in Iraq, she wants to — tough, tough person, you know, people get killed all over, she’s real tough, right? … But the reason she couldn’t stand me is that she always wanted to go to war with people. I don’t want to go to war. She wanted to go — she wanted to stay in Syria. I took them out. She wanted to stay in Iraq. I took them out. I mean, if it were up to her, we’d be in 50 different countries. No. 1, it’s very dangerous, No. 2, a lot of people get killed, and No. 3, it’s very, very expensive. … She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face. You know they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, ‘Oh, gee, well, let’s send, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.’ But she’s a stupid person. And I used to have — I’d have meetings with a lot of people, and she always wanted to go to war with people.“

How the Axis news media reported it:

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Ethics Quote of the Week: “Anonymous TV Executive”

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I have some tweaks to make for this, but in general it’s spot on.

1. It is a stupid quote on its face, of course. Trump served as President for four years and the results were mostly positive despite deliberate and unethical efforts by the Axis of Unethical Conduct to undermine him. The Presidency is a unique job; by definition anyone who had been President (and not suffered a major cognitive decline subsequently, but that’s just a wild hypothetical) is more qualified than anyone who hasn’t been President.

2. What the anonymous (how courageous!) exec means is “if Trump wins despite eight years of 90% of the news media doing everything it it power to poison the public against him while covering up the vile conduct of Democrats” American journalism has no credibility any more and not enough power to manipulate our politics and public policy as its practitioners long to do.

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Ethics Dunce: The National Park Service

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Yeah, about violating “norms”….

The National Mall is supposed to contain unifying and patriotic memorials and monuments and to be a place of pride for all Americans. It is certainly not a venue for partisan grandstanding and electioneering, or, at least wasn’t designed to be. Never mind, though: as part of the Biden Administration’s effort to try to snatch victory from the maw of the most utterly deserved defeats in American Presidential election history, the National Park Service provided a permit for an ugly, satirical, attack on Donald Trump and his supporters (they are garbage, after all) on the Mall, neatly timed to coincide with the last ditch “anything goes” assault on traditional election campaign civility and fairness because, well, “saving democracy” justifies anything.

The bronze sculpture features a pile of Dairy Queen-arranged shit on the desk of ex-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, complete with nameplate. The elegant plaque reads,

“This memorial honors the brave men and women who broke into the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 to loot, urinate and defecate throughout those hallowed halls in order to overturn an election. President Trump celebrates these heroes of January 6th as ‘unbelievable patriots’ and ‘warriors.’ This monument stands as a testament to their daring sacrifice and lasting legacy.”

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4 Ethics Takeaways From USA Today’s 5 Takeaways From Joe Rogan’s Interview With JD Vance

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The target is this USA Today story.

1. The quote everyone seems to be repeating is “It’s just strange that everyone’s accepting that this person who is the least popular vice president ever is now the solution to the problem and that the media machine in just a few days did this 180 and just sold her as the solution. And as long as they keep her from having these conversations where she’s allowed to talk, they’re able to pull this off. And the, the fact that it’s happening with no primary should be really concerning to people… because that’s never happened before…. they could have had a primary….”

It should tell voters everything they need to know to vote against Harris that even with the race so close, she refused to do an interview with Rogan for his massive audience of mostly young men unless he did it under her staff’s control and limited the interview to an hour rather than his usual three. This shows that she’s hiding her real nature, unsure of her abilities, a coward, a weenie, and a prop candidate. Why would anyone vote for someone like that to be President? There are no ethical reasons: the reasons that exist are all linked to unethical conduct and characteristics or non-ethical considerations like fear and hate.

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“Hello Doomsday!”Month Open Forum

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

No matter what happens Tuesday, this is going to be a really bad month. I cannot imagine a scenario where it won’t be.

I wish I could say that I felt confident about my Presidential election prognosticating skills, but my record in recent years has been no better than that of a coin-flipper: I thought Romney would defeat Obama, who had shown himself to be a weak and feckless POTUS (and Mitt would have, if hee were not such a weenie); I was pretty certain we were going to be stuck with Hillary in 2016 too. I assumed that Biden would win in 2020 between Democratic cheating and the pandemic destruction of, well, just about everything, but I also expected Trump to end up as Herbert Hoover: the closeness of the election surprised me.

Pollsters, at this point, should just admit they have no idea what they are doing and give up. My faith in the American public and American political culture tells me that Trump should win, and would win handily if so many impressionable people hadn’t been brainwashed into believing he is Dracula while so many women are apparently more interested in killing unborn babies at will than the Bill of Rights and trivia like that. I still believe, or want to believe, that a Presidential campaign offering someone as obviously incompetent and dishonest as Kamala Harris cannot possibly prevail offering nothing but hatred and fear of the opposing candidate, especially after the debacle of Biden’s term. But maybe Abe Lincoln was wrong after all. If so, we are in very, very serious trouble.

In other more upbeat news, a poll of baseball fans in The Athletic showed that my view in this post is that of the majority as well:

Enough from me: now you’re on. I’ll be checking in periodically to spam the unauthorized comments of Denver Dave, A Friend, and any other banned commenters, so don’t take the bait if they show up.

NO, Frank Bruni, Joe Biden Is NOT a “Good Man” and the Fact That You Would Say That Makes Me Wonder If You Know What Good Is

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“…And that’s the millionth reason I’m fervently hoping and desperately praying that Harris prevails. I believe Biden to be a good man who has done much good for us…”

—Long-time progressive NYT pundit Frank Bruni in one of the “Harris must win, Trump is terrible” stories and columns in the Times today.

I counted 11 of the latter. Twelve. Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! Whatever would make you think that?

Bruni has been a member of the Times staff and editorial board for 25 years. Res ipsa loquitur. The Times has at least one (they have, in truth, many) columnist who had a regular platform to spread his biases and misconceptions, and he thinks (or says he thinks) Joe Biden is a good man. Right. There are few politicians of such longevity who have ever left such an unambiguous record of not being a good man, woman, or public servant. Since I’m not writing a book, I’ll just list the bits of Joe’s biography that stick out for me at the moment:

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Baseball Ethics Assholes of the Decade: Austin Capobianco and John Hansen

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

(Naturally, they were New York Yankees fans….)

The baseball season ended last night with the Los Angeles Dodgers overcoming a 5 run deficit to win the World Series over the New York Yankees four games to one. Good. It is especially good because the night before, in the only game that the Pinstripes managed to win in the short series, two jerks in Yankee jerseys interfered with the game, the Series and Dodgers star Mookie Betts as he tried to catch a foul fly ball at the Yankee Stadium wall.

In the bottom of the first inning in Game 4 with the Yankees losing 2-0, NY lead-off hitter Gleyber Torres hit a high pop-up into right field foul territory. Dodgers right fielder Betts caught the ball with his glove, but Capobianco, with the assistance of his pal John Hansen, grabbed Betts’ glove with both hands, opened it, reached inside with his right hand and knocked the ball back onto the field. This was on national television for all to see. The umpires ruled fan interference and Torres was called out.

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Most Biased, Unprofessional Journalist of the Month: Norah O’Donnell

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

It was a competitive field to be sure, but O’Donnell, who once aspired to be a respected and trustworthy journalist, displayed how far she has fallen with her despicable performance on today’s “CBS Evening News.” You want bias? You want disinformation? You want unprofessional and unethical conduct? You want Trump Derangement? Norah had it for you. CBS should suspend her, or at least send her to a spa to calm the hell down. CBS, however, is a hack organization now employing hack journalists in complete lock-step with the Axis of Unethical Conduct. No, neither Norah nor CBS are quite as corrupt as MSNBC, but that is faint praise indeed.

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Ethics Quiz: Dead Influencers

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

How unethical is Nelson Muntz here?

Oscar Wilde, mocking Charles’ Dicken’s “The Old Curiosity Shop,”quipped that “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.” This was my immediate thought when I read about the drowning deaths of Aline Tamara Moreira de Amorim and Beatriz Tavares da Silva Faria, both Brazilian social media “influencers.”

Sailing in a small vessel in dangerous waters off the coast of San Paulo, the two women, guests at a yacht party, refused to put on life jackets as directed because, the captain said, “They were taking selfies.” Indeed it has been confirmed that at least one of the women shared photos of herself on social media while out at sea. At least one of the women also didn’t know how to swim. “They said that life jackets would get in the way of their tanning,” the captain added.

On the their way back to land from the yacht in a smaller vessel, a large wave washed over the boat. All of the seven passengers survived except the well-tanned influencers.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

At what point, if ever, does one’s reckless and stupid conduct forfeit the privilege of sympathy when it kills you?

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