Character

Could It Be That It Is Finally Dawning What A Lousy President Barack Obama Was?

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

When I finally completed my laborious examination of the Worst Presidents Ever, an exercise that ended with #46, Joe Biden, winning the booby prize, I “reluctantly” left Barack Obama out of the final nine (Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Woodrow Wilson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Joe Biden.) Of Obama I wrote,

Barack Hussein Obama, #44 (2009-2017) is a perplexing case. Right now he is a wildly over-rated President, and given the overwhelming progressive bias in the academic ranks of historians, that false assessment is likely to be around for a while. It was under Obama, and in part because of him, that journalists almost completely abandoned objectivity and fairness. He joined the Democrats in conning and manipulating the nation into the highly flawed “Affordable Care Act,” and lied outright to get it passed. Obama’s policies slowed what should have been a boom recovery from the 2008 crash; he was feckless and dithering in foreign policy, typified by his ludicrous “red line” threat regarding Syria. His payoff to Iran for a dubious promise to to nuke Israel until Barack and Michelle were deep into retirement was one of the most cynical and ill-conceived bargains in U.S. foreign policy history. 

A President who entered the White House creating hope that he would finally end racial tensions, Barack Obama made them worse. Obama completed the transformation of the Attorney General’s office into a purely political and partisan position; he gave cover to incompetents and Machiavellian leftists. There was the Benghazi attack, the I.R.S. Tea Party group scandal, the ATF gunwalking fiasco, and more: like President Biden, but not to the same extent, President Obama kept loyal incompetents in office, assisted throughout by a lapdog news media. Obama’s racial favoritism, his inattention to illegal immigration, and his inability or refusal to seek compromise with the Republican Senate locked in grid-lock as the status quo. His arrogance and open disdain for white, religious, non-elite Americans launched the political career of Donald Trump and was the catalyst for the chaos that followed…is following.

Barack Obama has a lot to answer for. Nevertheless, he played the role of President as well as anyone since Ronald Reagan. He was an excellent speaker when he stuck to a script. His greatest accomplishment as President was getting elected twice as a black man—that, together with his maintenance and elevation of the image of the President takes him out of the running for Worst President Ever. Barely

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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 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

For Phillies Pitcher Orion Kirkering, In Compassion and Sympathy

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The Philadelphia Phillies, who had the best record in the National league this season are desperate for a World Series championship. They last won it in 2008, and have only won a World Series twice since the team was founded in 1883. Last night the Phillies lost the deciding game of the NL Divisional Series to the Dodgers in a dramatic, extra inning contest (with no stupid “zombie runner” because MLB plats baseball the right way in the post season) on a disastrous final play that is destined to live in Philadelphia infamy.

The culprit was pitcher Orion Kirkering. With two outs and the potential Dodger winning run on third base in the 11th inning, he got the batter to hit a weak grounder back to him. First he fumbled the ball, recovered, and only had to throw to first base to get the third out and end the inning. But he saw the base runner from second running home, and inexplicably threw the ball to his catcher, or tried to. In his panic, he threw wildly. The run scored, the game was lost, and the Phillies season was over.

In baseball terms, Kirkering choked. When the game was on the line and professional athletes are supposed to rise to the occasion and be at their best, he was at his worst. A whole city blames him for the crushing loss: he is now Philadelphia’s Bill Buckner.

All I can do for Orion is to remind him of my father’s favorite poem, by Rudyard Kipling, which he told me gave him hope and solace as young, fatherless boy during the Depression, and later, when having to cope with his own tragedies, failures and perceived shortcomings. I think of it often, and read it again just two weeks ago.

The poem is, of course, “If.”

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs, and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait, and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet, don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;

If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two imposters just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves, to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop, and build ’em up, with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn, long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And—which is more—

You’ll be a Man, my son!

Update on the Jay Jones Fiasco

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

As related here, Jay Jones is the (black, so he can do no wrong and accusing him of such is racism) Democratic candidate for Virginia Attorney General who through texts made it clear to a colleague that he believed that his adversaries deserved to be killed, and worse, that their children (“little fascists”) deserved to be killed as well.

To those who, like his desperate defenders, claim this was “just a mistake”—you know, like Joe Biden’s debate meltdown was “just a bad night”—I reply that Jones’ rants were signature significance. He wasn’t joking (compared to Jones’ “jokes,” Jimmy Kimmel’s Charley Kirk comments were comedy gold) and a normal, decent, trustworthy human being never even thinks about wanting his adversaries’ family members dead, much less communicates them to others. No, not even once.

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Ethics Test For Progressives and Democrats

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I had four ethics stories all lined up last night, and then this ugly episode forced its way to the front of the line. I hate that. Still, attention must be paid.

Zohran Mamdani, the presumed next New York City mayor based on polls and the fact that his only viable competition for the job had to resign as New York governor in disgrace, posted a statement on the anniversary of Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel. You can see it above.

To his credit, the “Democratic-Socialist” (that is, communist) was crystal clear about who and what he is, and honest observers from both sides of the partisan divide have not been reluctant to react with appropriate disgust. (The statement should not come as any surprise to anyone who has paid attention to Mamdani, the latest example of a charismatic politician emulating Andy Griffith in “A Face in the Crowd” (1957).

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Worst Excuse For A Lawyer and Elected Official Saying That He Wanted Children Killed: Virginia Atty Gen Candidate Jay Jones

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Isn’t that great? It’s a Rationalization #1 classic “Everybody does it!” It is especially impressive when you know what Jay Jones, the Democratic candidate for Attorney General in Virginia, is trying to worm his way out of, which was writing thusly in 2022…

On August 8, 2022, Republican state legislator received a series of text messages from Jones, a former colleague who had recently resigned from the state house after representing Norfolk, Va. He was outraged that Republicans in the legislature were eulogizing a recently deceased Republican lawmaker. “If those guys die before me,” Jones wrote, “I will go to their funerals to piss on their graves” to “send them out awash in something.” Jones then suggested that, presented with a hypothetical situation in which he had only two bullets and was faced with the choice of murdering then-GOP Speaker of the House Todd Gilbert or Hitler and Pol Pot, he’d shoot Gilbert “every time.”

In other text messages, Jones said that he wished the children of some political adversaries would “die in [their] arms.” When chastised by the former colleague for his comments about killing kids as retribution for conservative political views and actions, Jones wrote “Yes, I’ve told you this before. Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy.” Later he texted, “I mean do I think Todd and Jennifer are evil? And that they’re breeding little fascists? Yes,” he wrote, referring to Gilbert’s wife and two young children.

Nice.

The recipient of the texts told the National Review in a statement. “Jay Jones wished violence on the children of a colleague and joked about shooting Todd Gilbert. It’s disgusting and unbecoming of any public official.” Ya think? But Jones’s defense was that it’s okay to wish death on political opponents and doom on their innocent children because everybody is irresponsible on social media.

It will be fascinating to see how many Democrats vote for this irresponsible creep; it should give us good data on just how devoid of values that rotting party’s supporters are. Republican Winsome Sears, the underdog candidate for Virginia governor running against extreme abortion fan and certified liar Abigail Spanberger, released this ad today:

Can’t say she doesn’t have a point….

CBS Staff Freaks Out Over An Exiled NYT Moderate Being Placed in Charge of CBS

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!

CBS’s new owners have bought The Free Press and are putting its founder, rebel New York Times reporter Bari Weiss, in charge of the news division. Weiss fled the Times with a manifesto condemning her former employer for unethical progressive bias, which, of course, was an accurate assessment. If you have read or listened to Weiss you know that she is a Democrat and a liberal/progressive, just one who does try to keep her biases from tainting her reporting (though not always succeeding).

She is the best that any reasonable person can expect from today’s rotting journalism; it is a field that has disproportionately attracted those from the left end of the political spectrum for more than a century. Journalism ethics demanded that practitioners concentrate on objectivity, but that goal has been almost entirely jettisoned by “advocacy journalism,” which is a euphemism for “Leftist propaganda.” To her credit, Weiss strives to be what journalists are supposed to be: honest, fair and trustworthy.

The fact that CBS staffers are reportedly furious and frightened that a real journalist like Weiss will be their new boss should tell you all you need to know about CBS, and, by extension, broadcast news generally.

Here’s the funniest section of the Independent’s report on the matter:

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Michael Mann Helpfully Continues To Prove Just How Much “Climate Science” Is Warped By Partisan Agendas and Unprofessional Bias

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Climate change hysterics cannot discuss the basis for their passion without mentioning Michael Mann, who must be regarded as the face of whole climate change movement. Wikipedia makes him seem like a master of his domain:

Mann has contributed to the scientific understanding of historic climate change based on the temperature record of the past thousand years. He has pioneered techniques to find patterns in past climate change and to isolate climate signals from noisy data.

As lead author of a paper produced in 1998 with co-authors Raymond S. Bradley and Malcolm K. Hughes, Mann used advanced statistical techniques to find regional variations in a hemispherical climate reconstruction covering the past 600 years. In 1999 the same team used these techniques to produce a reconstruction over the past 1,000 years (MBH99), which was dubbed the “hockey stick graph” because of its shape. He was one of eight lead authors of the “Observed Climate Variability and Change” chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Scientific Assessment Report published in 2001. A graph based on the MBH99 paper was highlighted in several parts of the report and was given wide publicity. The IPCC acknowledged that his work, along with that of the many other lead authors and review editors, contributed to the award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, which was won jointly by the IPCC and Al Gore.

Mann was organizing committee chair for the National Academy of Sciences Frontiers of Science in 2003 and has received a number of honors and awards including selection by Scientific American as one of the fifty leading visionaries in science and technology in 2002. In 2012 he was inducted as a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and was awarded the Hans Oeschger Medal of the European Geosciences Union. In 2013, he was elected a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and awarded the status of distinguished professor in Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences. In 2017, he was elected a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

Mann is author of more than 200 peer-reviewed and edited publications. He has also published six books: Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming (2008), The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars (2012), together with co-author Tom Toles, The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy (2016) with Megan Herbert, The Tantrum That Saved the World (2018), The New Climate War (2021), and Our Fragile Moment (2023). In 2012, the European Geosciences Union described his publication record as “outstanding for a scientist of his relatively young age”. Mann is a co-founder and contributor to the climatology blog RealClimate.

All the honors and accolades prove is how politicized the scientific community is, and how progressive bias has infected so many of the world’s institutions. His so-called “hockey stick graph,” supposedly a reconstruction of past climate temperatures, was shown to be the product of dishonest statistics methodology; for example, it conveniently ignored the Medieval Warm Period that continues to bedevil the climate change narrative.

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The Democrats’ Way: When The Facts Are Damning Just Make Stuff Up and Count On Your Complicit News Media To Have Your Back.

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Kamala Harris, the worst, most unqualified major party Presidential candidate since Horace Greeley, continued her ridiculous “It wasn’t my fault!” tour last week by telling Rachel Maddow on MS (MSNBC) that 2024 was “the closest presidential election in the 21st Century.”

It wasn’t. It wasn’t even close to the closest. Donald Trump beat Harris in the Electoral College 312-226. Joe Biden beat Trump in 2020 by a tighter margin, 306-232. Trump beat Hillary Clinton 304-227 in 2016. also closer. Only two elections in the 21st Century have been decided by wider margins in the EC, 2008 and 2012.

The 2024 election wasn’t closer than most of the recent elections in the popular vote either. Bush lost the popular vote, but won the Electoral College in 2000, as did Trump in 2016. Al Gore in 2000, John Kerry in 2004, Clinton in 2016, and Trump in 2020 all needed fewer votes to flip to win the Electoral College than Harris in 2024 too. In short, Harris’s claim had no basis in reality. At all. Whatsoever. Sort of like the claims that she ran a “flawless” campaign. Or the DNC’s spin that Harris lost because America is racist and sexist.

Did you know Donald Trump lies all the time? He exaggerated the size of his inauguration crowd in 2017!

Yet there was Rachel Maddow, nodding and smirking away as Kamala flogged her fake history, helping to make her show’s viewers more ignorant and misinformed that they already were, which, he show being on MSNBC, was already considerable.

Nice.