Character

President Trump’s Third Term Fantasy

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

We’re back in Julie Principle territory again, unfortunately: “Fish gotta swim, bird’s gotta fly, Trump’s gong to keep saying crazy stuff to make progressives cry…” This is a particularly annoying example. Just as the position of Ethics Alarms is that trusted professionals do not have the luxury of pulling April Fool’s Day hoaxes on the public, it is also unethical for Presidents of the United States to deliberately raise phony issues for public consumption.

The President began raising the possibility of a third term almost from the moment he was elected to his second. It is, of course, impossible. The Constitution forbids it quite unambiguously thanks to the 22nd Amendment, the eventual Congressional reaction to Franklin Roosevelt shattering the unwritten rule, set by our first President, that two elected terms is enough. Over the weekend, Trump said he was “not joking” about there being “methods” to circumvent the two-term limit. No, there really aren’t and never mind that: Trump is 78 years old, not exactly in peak physical condition, and would be 86 at the end of a third term. The real question is whether he can complete this one.

Trump was even sparking speculation about a fantasy race between him and Barack Obama in 2028 for an unconstitutional third term, and a depressing number of morons on social media are taking it seriously. Yes, Dana, that’s your cue…

Here’s what’s happening. I was pondering Trump’s nonsense, and concluded that there are three things going on here, only one of which is substantive:

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Thoughts and Musings While Re-Watching “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World,” Continued: Yes, It’s An Ethics Movie

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Before I leave the first installment of this post and move on to the film’s ethical significance, I should mention that “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World” caught a cultural wave perfectly, accounting for its box office success. In this it was just lucky, and that moment in time is now long gone, which is why the film appeals to me from a historical perspective more than as entertainment.

There have been many attempts to mine the same property for laughs, and none of the offspring of IAMMMMW have equaled its model in reputation or box office success. Blake Edward’s “The Great Race,” just two years later, was billed as the most expensive movie comedy ever made, and bombed. (Peter Falk is in both IAMMMMW and “The Great Race.”) In 2001, the “Airplane!” gang made “Rat Race,” which was obviously inspired by Kramer’s opus. It had a less starry cast (of course) and made a profit, but was generally regarded as a second rate (second rat?) version of the original. “Scavanger Hunt was a 1979 rip-off with a more IAMMMMW-like ensemble cast, and was a flop. Lesser attempts to recycle the film’s formula, “Midnight Madness” and “Million Dollar Mystery” (note the “m” alliterations) were even more embarrassing failures.

On to the ethics…Much was made of the fact that director Stanley Kramer had never directed or produced a comedy before. In fact, his career output was ostentatiously serious, and often criticized as preachy and overly preoccupied with moral-ethical conflicts. Among his most famous movies are “Judgement at Nuremberg,” “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” “Inherit the Wind,” “The Defiant Ones,” “On the Beach” and “Ship of Fools.” I’m sure that part of Kramer’s motivation for directing a huge slapstick comedy was to show his versatility, just as Spielberg felt that he needed to direct a movie musical with “West Side Story.” However, viewed in light of the times and Kramer’s artistic sensibilities, IAMMMMW now seems schizophrenic, a silly comedy with serious social commentary…and both parts undermine each other.

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Unethical Quote of the Week: Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY)

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

“This is the political weaponization of the DOJ. Trump uses his official authority to defend his benefactor Elon Musk. The FBI then creates a task force to use our law enforcement to ‘crack down’ on adversaries of Musk’s. Where are the Republicans so opposed to ‘lawfare’?”

—Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-NY), mounting his challenge to be the most irresponsible and dishonest hack in Congress.

Just when I think I’ve figured out who the most disgracefully unethical member of Congress is after the merciful departures of George Santos, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, another contender says “Hold my beer!”

I thought the current run-away champ was shaping up to be potty-mouthed, jive-talking Rep. Jasmine Crockett, who padded her lead yesterday during the House Oversight Committee’s Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency hearing titled “Anti-American Airwaves: Holding the heads of NPR and PBS Accountable. ” Demonstrating once again that she either doesn’t understand the Constitution or wants to make sure the public doesn’t understand it, she said in one of her characteristic rants, “To be clear, free speech is not about whatever it is that y’all want somebody to say, and the idea that you want to shut down everybody that is not Fox News is bullshit. We need to stop playing, because that’s what you all are doing here, you don’t want to hear the opinions of anybody else,” Crockett said.

I don’t understand why someone, maybe even a Democrat with some self-respect and integrity, didn’t have the sense or guts to point out to this demagogue that the First Amendment doesn’t require the government to subsidize political speech, only to avoid restricting it. PBS and NPR will be free to be as biased, partisan and dishonest as they please, but someone other than taxpayers should pay for it. Goldman’s idiocy, however, was even more flagrant. Let me turn the metaphorical mic over to Professor Turley, who already has neatly described what Goldman is doing:

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It’s Official: “A Nation of Assholes” Has Come to Pass, and Its Herald is Jasmine Crockett

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

The U.S. now has a member of Congress who is regarded as a rising leader of a major political party who talks like this…

“Y’all know we got Governor Hot Wheels down there. Come on now! And the only thing hot about him is that he is a hot-ass mess, honey!”

That was Rep. Crockett speaking at a human rights event over the weekend. The intentionally vulgar, street-talking Texas representative (she was raised in a wealthy family and attended private schools, so her Samuel L. Jacskon imitation is pure cynical artifice) was already being justly criticized for telling Democrats to “take out” Elon Musk, at a time when her party’s loonies are looking for an excuse to move from domestic terrorism against Tesla owners to more direct forms of violence. Now this member of what styles itself as the sensitive, caring party is mocking a man, Texas Governor Abbott, who has been in a wheelchair for decades by calling him “Hot Wheels.” Be proud, Democrats, Texans, women, homo sapiens.

Crockett’s excuse after her cruel ad hominem attack was properly condemned tells us even more about the character of the latest “rising star” of the Left:

“I wasn’t thinking about the governor’s condition—I was thinking about the planes, trains, and automobiles he used to transfer migrants into communities led by Black mayors, deliberately stoking tension and fear among the most vulnerable. Literally, the next line I said was that he was a “Hot Ass Mess,” referencing his terrible policies. At no point did I mention or allude to his condition. So, I’m even more appalled that the very people who unequivocally support Trump—a man known for racially insensitive nicknames and mocking those with disabilities—are now outraged.”

She’s beneath contempt, but Crockett’s “Whataboutism” (#2 on the Rationalization List) argument following her self-evident lie is not without validity. How far is calling a governor in a wheelchair “Hot Wheels” from calling a President obviously suffering from progressive dementia “Slow Joe”?

I’ll accept the utilitarian conclusion that electing Trump President twice was, on balance, important for the nation; I might even agree with it. However, I don’t think it is possible to credibly argue that the destructive decline in civility and decorum in society, and especially in political discourse, should not be laid at Donald Trump’s feet. It is a major cultural wound with implications for democracy as well as social relations in our society generally.

I warned about this on September 10, 2015.

Lizzo, Fat Championing Hypocrite

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I hadn’t followed the Lizzo dieting scandal because, frankly, I couldn’t care less about the in-your-face obese pop star who has been the current champion of the “love your body”/”fat is beautiful” mob. Lizzo, who performed with svelte female dancers to emphasize her proud flab, made defiant fatness part of her brand, wearing costumes that normally would be taboo for any woman not a size 6.

Well, if it works, it’s show business! But somehow toward the end of 2024, Lizzo started slimming down via Ozempic, dieting and a personal trainer, so she is now sporting a more conventional model of female beauty. Predictably, her fat fans feel betrayed, and they should.

We’ve seen this so many times before that I hesitated to even post on it, but no previous fat celebrity so aggressively asserted that she loved her extra pounds and that society’s obsession with fit female bodies had to be rejected. All of these photos…

…accompanied past features about how the singer insisted that fat was “normal” and that she “loved her curves.” And now what is she saying? She doesn’t need to say anything; her conduct speaks for her. She decided to exploit being fat as a gimmick, not caring how it would encourage unhealthy lifestyles among her female fans, then as soon as losing weight and becoming more typically attractive seemed like a wise career move—reinvention!—she discarded “fat is beautiful” like a house guest who had stayed too long.

We shall see if a performer of Lizzo’s rather unremarkable talents can stand out among all the other comely female pop singers. If not, don’t be surprised if she starts hitting the all-you-can-eat buffets again.

On Musk Derangement Syndrome

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Perhaps the clearest sign that a formerly mentally competent Facebook friend has gone over the rainbow to Progressive Wacko Land is if they write nasty things about Elon Musk.

Trump Derangement I can understand. Oh, at this point it’s juvenile and embarrassing to the sufferer as well as his or her family, but I can understand it. I easily could be a victim myself: “There but for the grace of God go I!” [a quote attributed to John Bradford (1510–1555) who was imprisoned in the Tower of London for crimes against Queen Mary I and burned at the stake.]

After all, from 2011 to 2016 I wrote dozens of Ethics Alarms posts about how awful Donald Trump was and a fair amount of very critical posts since then. Trump’s personality, rhetoric and conduct are so far removed from the nation’s historical template for its Presidents that the gag reflex is completely understandable, though if his style causes an individual to fail to appreciate what he has done (or tried to do) that is courageous, necessary and important (what we call “substance”), then bias has indeed made that individual stupid.

Elon Musk, however, is an unquestionable Ethics Hero. He will eventually get honored with a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and could justifiably get the honor tomorrow. Musk’s purchase of Twitter rescued civic discourse from the slowly tightening grip of progressive/Democratic Party control over what the public could read, learn about, consider and write. It is very likely that without the platform’s transformation to “X,” the Democrats would have held on to the Presidency despite their Politburo-like management of it under Joe Biden. That unselfish and patriotic purchase alone should guarantee appreciation even from those who disagree with Musk politically; that it doesn’t reveals ominous aspect of the Left’s priorities and values.

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Friday Open Forum (“Is This a Great Country or What?”)

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I apologize for seeming to force a topic on participants here, as the Open Forum is for you to write about ethics issues that intrigue you, and not necessarily me. However, I can’t think of anywhere else to use the remnants of a post I did a lot of work on before giving up in disgust.

The impetus for this aborted project was reading more of the increasingly unhinged rants of the formerly rational lawyers, artists, scholars and baseball fans on my Facebook feed, whose Trump Derangement is something to behold. One of them posted a chart purporting to list the nations in order of their “quality of life”; this one showed the U.S. 19th, after, among others, Slovenia, Oman, and Estonia. #1 was Switzerland. “I wonder how much lower we will be after Trump and Musk are through with us?” the poster queried to a flurry of likes. angry faces and the “care imogi. The moronic post moved me to look at the most recent such surveys, most of which seem to conclude that Spain is the best country to live in. Spain is a country where you can be imprisoned for criticizing the king, and where the average household income is around $40,000. On the one that was posted by my friend who is leaking IQ points, Spain finished 15th. Huh! First in one quality of life survey, 15th in another. This is, of course, why none of these “scientific” surveys are worth the paper they are printed on: the rankings will always reflect the biases of the researchers. The reason the U.S. always finishes absurdly low in these things is because our learned class believes fervently in socialism, and any nation that isn’t a nanny state is, by definition, inferior. The U.S. allows its citizens to own guns. It allows “dangerous” speech. It isn’t committed to fighting “climate change.” It hasn’t solved its racial tensions, while Switzerland has done such a bang-up job dealing with the descendants of its African slaves.

Yeah well, the U.S. is still guided by the most aspirational mission of any nation on Earth, and it has Major League baseball too, so bite me. (One of the rankings rated the U.S. low for “climate.” Which climate? Hawaii? Fairbanks? )

Spain is, I’m sure, a great country for someone like Richard Gere to live in (he moved there with his Spanish citizen wife and kids after Trump won the election: he was a big Harris supporter) who had lots of money and has already made his mark in life. For the most part, however, the immediate retort that comes to mind when I read someone on Facebook arguing seriously that Spain is a “better” nation than the United States of America, is “Wow, you really are an idiot, aren’t you? I’m so sorry.”

Anyway…Open Forum!

Seeking Accountability For Giving Anti-White, Anti-American Talking Heads Broadcast Platforms

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The recent head-exploding statement by (finally) fired MSNBC racist Joy Reid would be an Unethical Quote of the Day if it were spewed out of the mouth of most people. Reid constantly said such disgusting things and I reflexively put her racist comments in the Julie Principle files long ago. But what she said in a conversation with fellow racist Ta-Nehisi Coates at a program at Xavier University in New Orleans raises another, broader ethics issue.

Reid said, “When my mother came from Guyana, she realized it is not a land of opportunity for people like us.” That claim, coming from someone with the American experience Joy Reid has enjoyed, is beyond insulting and false on its face: it is also incredibly stupid, even for Reid. When she was finally let go, Reid was making $3 million a year, and had been pulling down a seven figure salary for at least a decade. Her life is powerful evidence that the U.S. is a “land of opportunity” for people like her, meaning, as she did, black people. (It is also obviously a land of opportunity for America-hating, anti-white bigots who will make self-evidently false claims designed to divide the country.)

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The 2024 Gallup “Americans’ Ratings of Honesty and Ethics of Professions”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I write a post about this annual Gallup survey every year, but my observations apart from the obvious have been increasingly redundant. This will be reflected in my comments this year as well, largely because little has changed significantly since 2023. Gallup writes in its introduction,

Gallup began measuring public trust in various professions in 1976, initially covering 14 jobs. Over the years, the list has changed, with some occupations added and others removed. Since 1999, 11 professions have been tracked annually, while others have been included periodically.

The average very high/high ethics rating of the core 11 professions has decreased from routinely 40% or higher in the early 2000s to closer to 35% during most of the 2010s. It rose slightly in 2020, to a seven-year high of 38%, reflecting enhanced public trust in healthcare workers and teachers during the pandemic. Thereafter, the average declined each year through 2023, when it reached 30%, and it held there in 2024. This mirrors the long-term decline in Americans’ confidence in U.S. institutions.

There is mordant humor in that text: the enhanced public trust in healthcare workers and teachers was wildly misplaced. The healthcare profession was inept and dishonest during the pandemic, and the teachers unions crashed the economy by lobbying to keep the schools closed for their own interests. It also reflects the trend I’ve see in these surveys for years: the public tends to trust occupations they have to trust, explaining why pharmacists and nurses have always been among the most trusted professions.

One reason the trust freefall has slowed, I believe, is that so many professions are trusted so little now that there isn’t much farther for them to fall. Only 8% of those surveyed trust Congress strongly: I’d assume that just the number of apathetic ignoramuses in the population would account for that number. It will be interesting to see if this clown show…

…drives trust in Congress lower still in the 2025 survey. And who knows what horrors are to come?

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Monday Ethics Catch-Up, 3/10/25

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

That meme above was just posted on my Facebook page today by a previously functional Georgetown Law Center lawyer of mu acquaintance. Could the whining of the Trump Deranged be any more humiliating and irrational? How tragic: a duly elected President of the United States is following through on his campaign promises in record time. Or is the whiny Democrat on the verge of tears because her party is behaving like seven-year olds? I doubt it.

In a comment I made to this post, explaining why some of my friends whom I know well, respect, and have seen fall into the pit of despond since Trump 2.0 got underway, I wrote in part,

First, there are many liberals, many of them devout Christians, who really do think that the United States should be in the business of income re-distribution and hard government over-sight of virtually all individual activities. Even though they know government is untrustworthy and incompetent as well as corrupt, they won’t give up—or are in denial about–the dream. They also somehow thought that the US was really on the way to this Nirvana, and living in a bubble—the arts, education, academia, the non-profit sector, they have been bombarded for years by one-way propaganda. They also tend to trust the news media, which is dominated by people with a similar orientation. Such individuals, who may be wise and perceptive in most other areas, shift to pure emotion now because they were under the influence of the mirage that the country was overwhelmingly in favor of the nanny state, and it isn’t and never was. Trump is the most jarring human splash of ice water in the face that these people could experience, so their reaction is visceral, emotional (angry) and irrational.

We need to learn from people who react this way. My sister, for example, is essentially furious now all the time. It’s all rooted, unfortunately in hatred for Trump, some of it legitimately based on one comment or another, some on class prejudice and intellectual snobbery, a lot on ignorance of history and leadership, and too much on getting lied to by the news media. My sister, for example, insisted that the GOP was to blame for the illegals tidal wave because Trump killed the bill that was the best that anyone could do to stem that tide. But that was just an Axis lie, as Trump made clear in his SOTU. He didn’t need that law, and neither did Biden. My sister is also very intelligent about most things, but regarding Trump she is a fully programed useful idiot.

I don’t know how these people can be saved.

Then there are the completely ethically crippled Trump Deranged responsible for these bumper-stickers…

I have yet to discover what group or collection of psychopaths is responsible for them, but the way Democratic officials have been acting of late, I would not be surprised to find their origin to be from some pretty damning places.

In other ethics news…

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