“bias makes you stupid”

Unethical Quote Of The Month: Liz Cheney [Supplemented]

/ Jack Marshall / 42 Comments

“I will do whatever it takes to make sure Donald Trump is never again anywhere near the Oval Office.”

—Rep. Liz Cheney (NeverTrump-MT) in her head-exploding, self-glorifying, beyond satire concessions speech after being crushed in the GOP state primary.

And there you have it: candor and saying the secret part out loud, though the anti-democratic motives of  the “the resistance”/Democrats/ mainstream media cabal (the “Axis of Unethical Conduct”)is hardly a secret at this point, and was stated on Ethics Alarms, beginning, oh, nearly six years ago.

This is a woman (a Republican official who is aping Democratic Party talking points) who claims to be trying to save democracy by interfering with democratic processes and institutions. Does “anything it takes” set off an ethics alarm? If you’re Trump Deranged, it probably doesn’t. Cheney’s mad logic is that Donald Trump is an exception to the laws, rules and principles of democracy: he doesn’t get the benefit of them because he’s bad….mostly because he’s not in lock-step with the entrenched elite political class like the Bidens, Cheneys, Bushes and Clintons, and also a bit because he’s an unmannerly boor. Another crazed Trump hater, the Washington Post’s self-parodying Jennifer Rubin, writes in today’s Post that “Taking the Fifth should disqualify a politician from taking office.” Continue reading →

The Worst President Ever? Part 3.

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

In May, Ethics Alarms began a review of the U.S. Presidents to separate the chaff from the wheat, keeping the chaff, and assembling the finalists for the Worst U.S. President Ever competition. The issue has gained more significance of late: President Biden’s polls are now the worst of any President at a similar stage in his first term, and his own party and its propaganda minions—you know, the mainstream media and its pundits—appear to be sharpening the metaphorical long knives.  No potential finalists were found in the first ten Presidents, examined in Part 1. Among POTUSes 11-20, which EA covered in Part 2,  there were three finalists, strong candidates all: depressed and drunken Franklin Pierce, lonely and inert James Buchanan, and poor Andrew Johnson.

Let’s assess Presidents #21-28, technically eight, but really only seven, because one of them really needs a lot of exposition. The photo above is a clue…

President Chester A. Arthur, 1881-1885, who inherited the office after President Garfield’s doctors killed him, can’t be one of the worst Presidents, because he’s among the most over-achieving ones, as I’ve written about here and elsewhere.  He rose to the challenge and surprised even himself. He also, unlike some Presidents I could name, refused to be a puppet of his party’s power-brokers, and did what he thought was in the best interests of the people. This ended with him being respected by the public and shunned by his party: he wasn’t allowed to run for a second term. If Biden is blocked from the nomination, it will be the first time since Arthur that a President who hadn’t removed himself from consideration after a single term was rejected by his party.

Arthur, however, was much more popular than Joe Biden.

Disqualified. Continue reading →

Observations On Larry Tribe’s Latest Trump-Deranged Tweet…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I can only find out about EA post-worthy tweets second-hand, as I killed my Twitter account after the platform censored the Hunter Biden laptop story. I actually followed Tribe’s tweets before that, because his public descent into demented hackery after such a distinguished legal and academic career had the tragic fascination of gruesome car wreck as well as conveying a useful lesson in mortality: I have asked my wife to bash in my head with a brick from behind should I ever jump the cognitive shark as obviously as Tribe has.

This time, Ann Althouse was my tweet source, though her post’s subject was another, slightly less whacked-out tweet re-tweeting Tribe by author Joyce Carol Oates. Tribe’s tweet, in turn, only quoted a typical piece of furious Trump-Deranged venom from Times columnist Maureen Dowd. Before his brain started to melt, the idea of Prof. Tribe appealing to the authority of the likes of Dowd would be like imagining Henry Kissinger quoting “Mark Trail.”

All clear now? Observations: Continue reading →

Case Study In Minneapolis: The Compensatory Racial Discrimination Slippery Slope

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Or perhaps they just don’t believe in the Constitution in Minneapolis—you know, like in California. The Minneapolis Federation of Teachers struck a deal last March 25 with the Minneapolis Public Schools ending a teacher strike, and among the provisions was “educators of color protections.” If a non-white teacher is first on the list to be let go for budget reasons, the school system must fire a white teacher with the “next least” seniority instead.

Got that?

The agreement reads in part,

“Starting with the Spring 2023 Budget Tie-Out Cycle, if excessing a teacher who is a member of a population underrepresented among licensed teachers in the site, the District shall excess the next least senior teacher, who is not a member of an underrepresented population.”

Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce (And Partisan Hack): Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Goldman

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Daniel Goldman earns the Ethics Alarms clip with Sir Thomas More’s scalding indictment of the character of “A Man For All Seasons” villain Richard Rich, “Why Richard, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. . . but for Wales?”

Donald Trump, fighting a coordinated (I believe) Democratic assault from all sides in a desperate effort to neutralize him (an effort than has continued unsuccessfully for a ludicrous six years!) invoked his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination at a deposition for New York Attorney General Letitia James (D). While the ongoing January 6 kangaroo court in the House seeks to prove that Trump planned an “insurrection,” and the Justice Department raided his home ostensibly to find sufficient evidence to prosecute him for mishandling of classified documents, James is continuing her state’s long-running attempts to prove Trump engaged in illegal financial activity and/or corrupt business practices

After Trump’s non-response was reported, Goldman, who was an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York for 10 years, tweeted,

“The Fifth Amendment ensures that people are not forced to incriminate themselves. But you don’t take the Fifth if you didn’t do anything wrong.”

Continue reading →

The FBI Raid On Mar-a-Lago

/ Jack Marshall / 60 Comments

Above are some of Andrew Yang’s tweets regarding the raid on Donald Trump’s resort residence in Palm Beach,Florida yesterday, executed by the FBI reportedly to find and retrieve classified documents that the former President improperly kept after leaving the White House. Yang is a tech executive and an amateur politician at best, but he’s smart and perceptive, and as the recent founder of a (doomed) centrist third party with national aspirations, is arguably more objective than most observers.

Except Ethics Alarms, of course…

Here is what we know: The Times reports…

Trump said on Monday that the F.B.I. had searched his Palm Beach, Fla., home and had broken open a safe — an account signaling a major escalation in the various investigations into the final stages of his presidency.

The search, according to multiple people familiar with the investigation, appeared to be focused on material that Mr. Trump had brought with him to Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence, when he left the White House. Those boxes contained many pages of classified documents, according to a person familiar with their contents.

Mr. Trump delayed returning 15 boxes of material requested by officials with the National Archives for many months, only doing so when there became a threat of action to retrieve them. The case was referred to the Justice Department by the archives early this year….

The F.B.I. would have needed to convince a judge that it had probable cause that a crime had been committed, and that agents might find evidence at Mar-a-Lago, to get a search warrant. Proceeding with a search on a former president’s home would almost surely have required sign-off from top officials at the bureau and the Justice Department.

Trump’s statement regarding the raid was classic Trump:

Continue reading →

Poe’s Law In “The Great Stupid”: Which Is Satire And Which Is Woke Derangement?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Two stories, both head-explodingly idiotic, both linked to Bizarro World Ethics and pathological virtue-signaling needs in oppressive leftist-indoctrination saturated cultures. One is a gag, the other is a tragedy, yet there is hardly a filament of difference between them in the 21st Century ethics and rationality rot they illustrate.

I read the two in succession by pure coincidence, and Poe’s Law immediately leaped into my mind. Poe’s Law was formulated in 20o5 (by Nathan Poe, not Edgar Allan Poe) and has become an essential concept since. It holds that satirical accounts involving extreme examples of ideological insanity can be impossible to distinguish from actual events, because current ideological extremism defies parody. Let’s cut to the chase, for this isn’t a quiz: the satirical piece was “I apologize for my white baby.”

Continue reading →

From Acceptance To Celebration: An Ethics Conflict (Don’t Bother Trying To Explain This To Bill Maher)

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

With his uncanny instinct for taking bows for making an obvious observation while missing the point, pseudo-comic Bill Maher once again engaged in his favorite topic of fat-shaming last week, this time with a “Eureka!” to share. The U.S. has inexplicably gone from fat acceptance to “fat celebration,” which the HBO wit <gag!choke!> calls a “disturbing trend.”

This isn’t a “trend,” nor is it disturbing, and it isn’t a phenomenon confined to obesity. Bill could have educated his audience—which, as usual, arfed and clapped like the human seals they are—but instead ignored the real problem, which is partially fueled by people like him.

And it’s an ethical one. Society’s goal is to make the human beings within it safe and happy. This requires setting standards, much of which it accomplishes with law and law enforcement, and the rest it pursues by making values, virtues and positive, societally beneficial conduct clear. Society then encourages and rewards those who meet those standards, and shames, disapproves and rejects those who defy them.

Continue reading →

Performing Arts Ethics: Amateur And Professional Ethics Dunces, Part I…The Professional

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

More than a decade ago, while I was the artistic director for a Northern Virginia professional theater I had co-founded, I offered the greater D.C. theater association a draft ethics code that I had developed after I realizes that the ethics alarms of the typical area theater professional were approximately the same as those of the average drug cartel boss. The response was telling: I received a formal thank-you, but was told that the theater community had no interest in ethics, and had done just fine without any code.

This attitude is not unique to Washington D.C. and environs, or regional theater. Performance artists generally and across all levels and regions tend to be incompetent at ethical analysis, and their ethics alarms aren’t merely dysfunctional, they are warped.

From the world of professional performing, for example, we have this controversy, arising from the announcement that actor James Franco (far left), a Portugese-Swedish-Jewish American, has been cast as Fidel Castro in a film project, and celebrated Hispanic actor John Lequizamo (on the right) was outraged over the casting choice.  “How is this still going on? How is Hollywood excluding us but stealing our narratives as well?” Leguizamo wrote. “No more appropriation Hollywood and streamers! Boycott! This F’d up! Plus seriously difficult story to tell without aggrandizement which would b wrong!”

As you can see, the actor was so upset that he lost the ability to communicate in coherent English.

Continue reading →

It’s “Be Kind To (Cute) Rapist Teachers Week” In Texas

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

That’s former Houston-area middle school teacher Marka Bodine above. Isn’t she pretty? Much too pretty to have to be in an icky old jail. So despite the fact that she was convicted of grooming, harassing, raping and continuously sexually abusing a 13-year-old student until he was 16 years old and finally alerted authorities, Bodine was only sentenced to to 60 days in jail with 10 years of probation. Shades of the infamous 2005 case of Debra Lafave, another sick but comely teacher who raped one of her 14-year-old students! Her lawyer successfully convinced the judge that their client was “too pretty for prison,” and honestly, who can argue with that? Here’s Debra:

As you can see, Marka isn’t quite the hottie that Debra was, so it’s only fair that she got some jail time. But wait! There’s more! Because Marka had given birth shortly before her sentencing (the baby was not her rape victim’s—Whew!— that would be the saga of teacher rapist Mary Kay LeTourneau), Harris County Judge Greg Glass postponed her imprisonment for a full year. Continue reading →