Author: Jack Marshall

Ethics Dunce: Actor Martin Sheen, and Anyone Who Gives Him a Platform or Who Pays Attention To Anything He Says….

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

In Michael Crichton’s terrific 2004 novel “State of Fear,” never made into a movie because it makes a strong case that the purveyors of climate change hysteria are just ignorant hooey-mongers, a character modeled on Martin Sheen travels to a tropical island suing the United States for alleged climate change damages and is eaten by cannibals. I was reminded of this episode when I read excerpts from his “blistering anti-Trump speech” on MSNBC yesterday.

Sheen epitomizes the “Shut up and act!” Hollywood activists, except that he is more afflicted with the Dunning-Kruger than most. He is neither particularly bright or well-educated, and is one of those fascinating actors who is successful playing characters smarter than he is, whereupon he gets confused and thinks that he is the smart one.

This is how desperate MSNBC was yesterday to find someone able to thrill its Trump Deranged audience: they stooped to allowing Sheen to rant interview with MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace. What possible enlightenment does Sheen offer anyone on any topic not related to acting (which has been his full occupation since he was a teenager) , and what possible credentials does he have (more than, say, someone you hit with a rock thrown randomly into a crowd) to opine on the Trump Presidency? Does Sheen know he just played a President? Does Wallace? Does MSNBC?

Here is what that sad, sick network thought was worth broadcasting:

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Let’s Begin With The Comment of the Day, Shall We? In Response to “On The Axis Hypocrisy Re Letitia James, Tit-For-Tat, and Trump’s ‘Revenge'”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Either the Comment of the Day by CEES VAN BARNEVELDT on yesterday’s post on “tit for tat” needs to introduction, or I’m not awake enough to write one. I was just made nauseous by catching Letitia James’ shrill, shouted address declaring her self a victim of a politicized Justice Department. How does anyone that hard to listen to get any votes at all? I would rather listen to Kamala Harris until they hauled me off to padded room before I’d endure a whole James speech even once.

Ah! This reminds me of how most women in politics desperately need to seek vocal and public speaking training if they are going to successfully compete with (competent) men in elections without depending solely on pro-female voter bias. Don’t giggle, ladies, and don’t shout in a strident high-pitched tone! That’s the short version: give me two hours of coaching, and I might make one of you President.

But I digress. Here is CEES’s Comment of the Day on the post, Let’s Begin With The Comment of the Day, Shall We? In Response to “On The Axis Hypocrisy Re Letitia James, Tit-For-Tat, and Trump’s ‘Revenge'”(that’s clip #24 from the Ethics Alarms Hollywood Clip Archive above.)

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Warning to Democrats: Beware the Cognitive Dissonance Scale! [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

It’s fun watching CNN talking heads cover the events in the Middle East looking as if they are dying of some kind of painful abdominal parasite because they have to say positive things about President Trump. The only time I have seen them look more miserable was on election night last November. Every time these hacks play the moving footage of Israeli families reacting to seeing their loved ones again after being released from Hamas’s tunnels, their expressions look more appropriate for someone who has just watched a beheading than a joyous reunion.

None of them are mentioning the effect today will have on the Democratic Party’s desperate (and stupid) shutdown gambit, but they should. For President Trump is rising into positive territory on the Cognitive Dissonance scale. When that happens, it will necessarily push those things that he opposes down the scale, for that’s how cognitive dissonance works. Except for the hopelessly Trump Deranged, the members of the public who are inclined to be sympathetic to the Democrats in the shutdown will be less so the more the President rises, even though the Hamas-Israel deal he brokered is completely unrelated to it.

The politics of the shutdown are ultimately a PR battle, and the more popular Trump is, the worse the Democrats’ prospects of winning it becomes. The Trump-Hate/ Israel Hate town meeting CNN is about to host featuring AOC and Bernie Sanders could not be timed more horribly for Democrats, foes of Trump, and anti-Israel activists.

True, foreign policy triumphs usually create only temporary bumps in Presidential popularity. Remember that the first Iraq war pushed George H.W. Bush into the 90s for a while. President Trump’s approval will start to fall again, but Democrats were already losing the PR battle over the shutdown. Trump’s big day can only make the situation worse. They ignore the cognitive dissonance scale at their peril.

Addendum: WordPress tells me that this post should have a “Joe Biden” tag. That’s smoking gun evidence that WordPress is tainted with Axis bias: the Left’s current myth-making, along with “Antifa? What Antifa?” is that Biden deserves any credit for the Gaza breakthrough at all.

On The Axis Hypocrisy Re Letitia James, Tit-For-Tat, and Trump’s “Revenge”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

It is stunning how the Axis-biased legal analysts attacking the recent indictment of NY Atty General Letitia James for mortgage fraud manage to forget, or ignore, or intentionally omit how James campaigned as AG on a promise to somehow, some way, “stop” Donald Trump, meaning to lock him up or cripple him financially so he couldn’t run for President.

The day after she was elected in 2018, Letitia James was asked by a community activist if she was gonna sue President Trump. She said, “Oh, we’re definitely gonna sue him. We’re gonna be a real pain in the ass. He’s gonna know my name personally.” James didn’t hide the fact that she would be emulating Stalin’s henchman Beria, who infamously said, “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.” She wasn’t the only Democrat looking for ways to use political lawfare against Trump: it was basically the primary strategy of the Biden Administration and the Democratic Party as the 2024 election loomed. (Back up strategy: Claim Trump is Hitler.)

James ultimately settled on charging Trump with loan fraud, alleging that he inflated the value of his properties to get bank loans. It was classic selective prosecution (at the trial, the banks agreed that indeed “everybody does it”) and the evidence showed that there were literally no damages: Trump’s organization paid back the loans with interest, the banks made money, and nobody was harmed. Never mind: thanks to a flagrantly partisan judge, Trump was hit with more than a half-billion in damages, which was ridiculous. As every objective commentator predicted, they were thrown out as “excessive.“

Meanwhile, as James was doing her party’s bidding, she was tweeting statements like this: “Roses are red. Violets are blue. No one is above the law. Even when you think the rules don’t apply to you. Happy Valentine’s Day!” How professional. Then there was this:

Boy, talk about putting a “Kick me!” sign on your own back!

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Ethics Alarms Encore: “Unethical (And Stupid) Columbus Day Quote of the Decade: Kamala Harris”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

[ This was last year’s Columbus Day post, and I decided that I couldn’t improve on it, so up it goes again. It is, after all, the proverbial two-bird stone: a straight reminder of how much we, and the world, owe to Chris, and how narrowly we avoided electing a pandering idiot as President. Another Columbus Day Ethics Alarms post worth visiting is this one, because it has the link to Stan Freeberg’s immortal Columbus riff on his “Stan Freeberg Presents the United States of America,” one of the most inspired pieces of musical satire ever.

But back to Columbus Day: its cancellation in some woke-lobotomized states (Indigenous Peoples Day) was part of the “America is evil and we should all be ashamed” cultural poison that the Mad Left has been trying to choke our society with for a long time. President Trump has more pressing challenges as he takes on the herculean task—it compares to Herc cleaning out the Augean Stables, the last and most disgusting of his Twelve Labors—of repairing our culture, but clarifying the significance of Columbus finding the New World is part of it. Let’s be clear: by any utilitarian analysis the European migration to North America was a very good thing indeed, probably inevitable, and beneficial to the entire world. Thank-you, than-you, thank you, Columbus. ]

“European explorers ushered in a wave of devastation, violence, stealing land, and widespread disease.”

—Kamala Harris in 2021, pandering to the “America is a blight on the Earth and the world would have been better without it” bloc in the Democratic Party  in a Columbus Day address.

Boy, what an idiot. Continue reading →

Riddle Me This: “Why Is The Guthrie Theater Like Stephen Colbert?”

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

In “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” Louis Carroll’s Mad Hatter asks Alice the riddle, “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” One would think that the question in the headline above is equally obscure (the Guthrie, in Minneapolis, is one of the most respected and celebrated regional theaters in the country) but it has an answer. Like the Colbert late night show, which has since its inception sought to exclude anyone who isn’t woke, obsessed with progressive politics or, since 2015, Trump Deranged, the Guthrie now aims at entertaining only that same audience, except in its case only the wealthy, white, upper-middle class demographic within that audience, or others willing to sit still for relentless leftist propaganda and cant.

A recent audience member for The Guthrie’s production of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Dolls House” wrote about his experience. “A Doll’s House” is about as moldy a feminist tract as there is (I once called the play the drama equivalent of Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman” but much longer, and even more over-exposed (it was written in 1879, so its analogies with the real state of womanhood, especially in the U.S., have been increasingly forced as time goes by. (No, her husband did not stop Nora from having an abortion: she would never have dreamed of killing an unborn child.)

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Sears Cartoon Addendum: The Ethics Alarms Race-Baiting Scale

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Waay back in 2012, Ethics Alarms presented “The Knight Scale,” described as a “ten point scale for rating the outrageousness of race-card sightings.” I named the scale after a race-baiting L.A. blogger who insisted that the cartoon above, suggesting that First Lady Michelle Obama was taking on imperial airs as the Obama departed for yet another lavish family vacation, was “racist.”

I revised the Knight Scale in 2017, writing in my introduction that…

” Race-baiting has been one of the primary features of public discourse embedded in our culture by having a black President, was well as one with so many unscrupulous race-obsessed supporters and so much evidence of incompetence and dishonesty to try to defend. Its widespread use, tacitly approved if not orchestrated by the White House, has also contributed to the vastly deteriorating race-relations in the U.S., along with the racial distrust and anger fueling it. I have stated, and strongly believe, that this will be, above all else, Barack Obama’s legacy. The tragedy this represents cannot be over-stated. I am offering now and belatedly a revised Race-Baiting Scale, running from 1, the least offensive and significant form of race baiting, to 11, the worst and most unethical.  Two notes: 1) All entries are based on the assumption that no actual racist or bigoted conduct has occurred, and 2) It is stipulated that all actual racist conduct or bias is unethical and should be called out and condemned.”

Here is the current version of Ethics Alarms Race-Baiting Scale (I’m retiring “Knight”). The race-baiting flagged in the previous post is a classic #11.

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Ethics Observations on That “Racist” Winsome Earle-Sears Cartoon

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Observation #1: it’s not racist.

Conservatives and Republican pundits in Virginia and elsewhere are “pouncing”on an online political cartoon re-posted by the Powhatan County Democrats, who were transparently trying to change the subject after their party’s candidate for Virginia Governor looked like a coward and sounded like a fool in her recent debate with the Republican candidate, Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears.

“The Democrat party of Virginia everyone. Open racism, open hatred, and endorsed violent fantasies. Where is the bottom of their depravity? This is disgusting,” quoth one social media wag in a tweet widely quoted by critics. Twitchy, the conservative website that focuses almost entirely on goings on at “X,” called the cartoon “blatantly racist.”

Much as it gives me pleasure to see Democrats and progressives “hoist by their own petard,” the petard in this case being reflex race-baiting, it’s still an unethical tactic. Here is the real Sears…

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Ethics Heroes: The Academy of Classical Christian Studies High School Girls Basketball Team (Oklahoma City)

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

It’s time for an encouraging ethics tale, and this is one.

(That’s Pandora above, viewing the last, and only benign, occupant of her famous box. Hope!)

The Academy of Classical Christian Studies high school girls basketball team in Oklahoma City won last season’s division championship game. A last second buzzer-beating basket against Apache High School did the job. But something didn’t feel right to Academy head coach Brendan King …perhaps the faint ping of an ethics alarm. He went home that night and watched the game tape.

“As soon as I walked out of the locker room, my stomach kind of turned into knots. And I said, ‘I’m going to need to know if we really won this game or not,'” King told reporters. Sure enough, when he checked the tape and tallied up the baskets, he discovered his team had actually lost. The true score should have been 43-42, with Apache High the victors and the winners of the Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association girls basketball championship. Somehow 2 points had been mistakenly given to King’s team, making it the 43-42 winners.

League rules state that once a game is completed, it is in the books and the records can’t be changed.  King decided to tell his team the bad news anyway. The girls unanimously agreed what the right course was, and it was to appeal their own victory. In an unprecedented reversal, the league agreed, and King surrendered the championship plaque to Apache High.

Apache girls basketball head coach Amy Merriweather said that more than the championship, she and her team were grateful for the ethics lesson. “It showed us, you know, there are still good people in this world,” Merriweather said. “It’s something we’ll always remember.”

Indeed.

There is hope.

_____________________

Pointer: Jon

Dan Rather May Be The Most Ethically Estopped Critic In Human History

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Saying it is a “dark day in the halls of CBS News,” Dan Rather, the disgraced CBS anchor who was fired after trying to use a forged document to kneecap President George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004, went straight into Fantasyland as he condemned the selection of Bari Weiss to oversee CBS News.

“The former opinion writer for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times is not a reporter. She has never worked in television news and she has never led a staff larger than a few dozen,” Rather ranted on his substack. “That all changed this week when David Ellison, whose Skydance Media recently acquired CBS, installed Weiss in a position created for her. She will not report to the president of CBS News — as one might expect — but to David Ellison directly.” Rather finds it horrific that Weiss would even consider criticizing Democrats and Republicans with equal intensity, since everyone knows that Trump and the Republicans are evil. “While one must keep an open mind, it is hard to do so when such a statement portends a push for ‘bothsidesism’ and arguments reliant on false equivalences. There can be no equivalences drawn between the two political extremes in this country, especially when one extreme is led by a man who rarely speaks without lying.” Got it. “Bothsideism” is nothing but a deliberately pejorative term for “objectivity.” If you have decided that one side is always right and the other side is by definition wrong, you end up like Dan Rather, a biased, untrustworthy hack.

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