Character

Ethics Dunce: MSNBC (In Related News, Night Is Dark!)

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

MSNBC, the fake news champ, expanded its unethical practices to deceptive broadcast settings for the Republican National convention this week. MSNBC’s prime-time coverage of the Republican National Convention looked familiar to the other networks and what veteran viewers are used to from past convention coverage: anchors at a desk positioned above the convention floor. Rachel Maddow, Nicolle Wallace, Jen Psaki, Joy Reid and the rest of the MSNBC anchors were not inside the convention hall as it was designed to appear, however. They were in a Manhattan studio. That backdrop of the convention floor was being projected on a screen behind them.

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Accountability? What’s Accountability? Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle Still Has Her Job, and Only the Prominence of a Confederacy of Ethics Dunces Can Explain That [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 46 Comments

I could go into an analysis of what was so stunningly dangerous and incompetent about the Secret Service FUBAR that almost got Donald Trump murdered, at this point just about the only way the Democrats would be able to keep the White House. I’m happy to wait for the results of Congressional hearings and the investigation, but as I heard many experts say on multiple networks, you don’t have to be an expert to figure from the time-line and what we do know that the Secret Service was spectacularly incompetent, and that Cheatle’s pathetic explanations (I particularly like “the sloped roof was too dangerous for our agents so we let a gunman use it to shoot Trump”) haven’t passed the giggle test. Her ridiculous statements and the fact that the agents knew an unknown person with a gun was within killing distance of Donald Trump and waited for him to take a shot before doing anything (like, say, keeping Trump off the stage: don’t those little earpieces work?) are res ipsa loquitur, so damning that conspiracy theories are unavoidable.

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There Is Hope! Another Incompetent “Squad” Member Is Headed For Defeat

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Above is one of “Cori Bush’s Greatest Hits,” the time in 2021 that she “explained” why she had taxpayers fund a security detail for her so she could advocate de-funding the police. This won her the Ethics Alarms title of “Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month, Year, Decade, Century, And Eon” at the time. Bush, a Democratic House member from the Missouri district occupied entirely by the brain-damaged, isn’t just an “idiot” in the sense that Ethics Alarms usually uses the word. No, the college drop-out and former nurse is a genuine, clinical idiot and an ignoramus to boot. Naturally, she is a member-in-good-standing of The Squad, where being the dumbest in the batch—dumber even than the recently defeated Jamaal Bowman—is quite an achievement.

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Ethics Dunce (Professional Singer Division): Ingrid Andress

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

See, I have a fair amount of sympathy for alcoholics. But the time to check yourself into rehab is before you kill someone driving, before you blow that crucial case for your client, before you leave your scissors in a patient’s stomach after you’ve operated, and, if you are an award-winning Country singer, before you massacre the Star-Spangled Banner at the All-Star Game Home Run derby, like Andress did last night.

Just listen to that caterwauling!

I find the Home Run Derby a bore, so I didn’t hear her off-key, dying-swan version of our National Anthem until the social media complaints about it reached me this morning. Andress’s breathless, lugubrious style, much in vogue these days, doesn’t appeal to me anyway, but that rendition was especially awful even by awful National Anthem standards, a high bar. How could a multiple Grammy-winner be that bad is a public performance on national TV?

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Ethics Villain and Contender for “Asshole of the Year”: Sumaya Thomas

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

18-year-old Sumaya Thomas of North Liberty, Iowa was supposed to go on a blind date with a young man she had met on an online dating app. But by the time her date arrived at her abode to pick her up on the evening of June 16, Thomas had changed her mind. Did she tell him that to his face, like any normal, decent human being, apologizing for wasting his time and dashing his hopes? Oh noooo. Did she text him, the weenie’s way out? No. Did she just leave him on her doorstep, knocking and buzzing while she hid under the bed? No. Did she sneak out the back door? No, not that either.

Instead, Thomas called 911 and said her abusive ex- was outside harassing her because she was seven months pregnant with their child. She said she needed the police to get him off her property as he was threatening to “hit, punch, kick and stab her.”

Nice! A police car was dispatched, and when officers arrived they found an apparently calm, confused young man in the process of walking away. Upon being questioned about the situation, he explained that he had arrived to go on a date with the woman inside the house, and that he had only met her online a week ago.

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Trump-Deranged Asshole Media Headline of the Day: The Economic Times

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I had to wrestle with myself about whether to post this first, or the next post.

Here’s the headline from The Economic Times:

“Trump’s Raised Fist: What the gesture means which is widely used by fascists, socialists, and communists”

…yeah, and also Rocky, Norma Rae, the much-lionized protesting American runners at the Olympics on the winner’s platform, baseball players after they have hit game-winning home runs, my Vietnam War protesting fellow students at Harvard,

and, oh, just about everyone in the past few centuries or so who wanted to symbolize defiance, victory, strength and resistance to forces that would abuse and persecute them.

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“Platforming Ignorance!” What a Useful and Descriptive Term….

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The term, which I had never heard before or at least had never focused on, is featured in an essay by Jonathan Tobin at the Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) titled, “Candace Owens is a cautionary tale about platforming ignorance.” Indeed she is: I had written about how Owens has embarrassed conservatives by, as I put it last November, “being revealed as an ignoramus” by her embrace of Palestinina propganda after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. More recently I listed her as one of the political performance artists (Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Bill Maher, James Carville, Ann Coulter, yada yada) who cannot be trusted to provide genuine opinions because they calibrate what they say and write according to what they think will get them the most clicks, eyeballs, gigs, and cash. Clearly, I was giving Candace far too much credit.

She is a genuine, bona fide idiot, whose recent self-outing as a virulent anti-Semite ( the inspiration for the JNS piece) is just the tip of a really stupid iceberg. As conservative collective AG noted on “X,” Owens has recently declared that…

  • Israel was involved with 9/11
  • The earth may be flat
  • It’s absurd to believe dinosaurs roamed the earth and were killed by an asteroid
  • Macron’s wife is secretly a man
  • Jews were behind the Bolshevik revolution and it was secretly a genocide targeting Christians that was worse than the Holocaust
  • The Holocaust is either fake or severely exaggerated
  • The crimes of the allies in WWII and post-WWII were worse than anything the Nazis did
  • The deportation of ethnic Germans from the rest of Europe post-WWII was worse than The Holocaust
  • US dropped the bomb on Nagasaki to target Christians
  • Israel/AIPAC/Jews were secretly behind the JFK assassination
  • A secret cabal of Hollywood Jews were behind the death of Michael Jackson and people around him.

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A “The Fish Rots From The Head Down Cultural Note”: Now You Can’t Even Trust Hot Dog Eating Contests

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

The President of the United States cheated in several ways last night, and we have been watching cheating become an accepted norm in the worlds of government, politics, law, academia, and sports. And so it has come to this: there was either cheating or an “appearance of impropriety” at Nathan’s Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest over the Fourth of July.

When competitor Nick Wehry finished the 10 minute contest, judges ruled that he had eaten 46.75 hot dogs and buns, placing him 4th. But Wehry asked to have the officials check his results and they determined that there was an additional empty plate in his “finished” stack, which is how judges determine how many wieners an individual has eaten. The recount gave him a new score of 51.75.

Then the New York Post published “Buns of Steal”, reporting that witnesses accused Wehry of tampering with the empty plate total to add to his score. On EatFeats, an anonymous commenter posted links to videos with timestamps seeming to show that Wehry illicitly added to his empty plate count.

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7/11 Convenient Ethics Notes…[Updated As The Evening Unfolds]

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

1. It is now 7:15 pm, E.S.T. as I write this. The “big boy” news conference , we were told, would begin at 6:30. Wouldn’t you think the President, or whoever pulls his strings, would make sure he was ready to go on time? I have images of make-up artists, doctors with needles and last minute electronic devices being planted. Doesn’t everybody?

2. Oh yeah, this is a good sign: Speaking at the NATO summit in Washington, D.C. today, President Biden introduced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky by saying, “And now, I want to hand it over to the president of Ukraine, who has as much courage as he has determination. Ladies and gentlemen, President Putin.”

3. Landing very briefly on Fox News during “The Five,” I heard a black reporter I’ve never see before express annoyance that Kamala Harris is being called a “DEI Vice-President.” When a member of the panel asked, “Why was she chosen then?” He answered immediately,”Because she was qualified!” Shameless. Biden made it clear from the beginning that he was going to nominate an African-American woman. There were even three widely publicized finalists: the indefensible Stacy Abrams, the ridiculously unqualified Cory Bush, and Harris, who might have been the best of the three, which is like saying Moe was the smartest Stooge. How do members of the Axis media get away with lying like that, openly, in defiance of known facts, on national TV? Are they depending on public amnesia? Stupidity? The fact that Democrats will accept outright dishonesty if that’s what it takes to win?

4. Biden finally arrived and immediately launched into a Trump bashing campaign speech. Has a President ever begun a press conference that way before? It’s cheating, a bait-and-switch. Biden is exploiting the network coverage to get a purely partisan speech broadcast, one that he is reading off a teleprompter. Republicans should demand equal time.

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Ethics Quote of the Month: Mark Judge

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“The media are not trusted, and all the conferences and articles in the world are not going to help them out of their hole. What will help is if the media industry learns to do what it once did with some honor: Apologize for mistakes.”

—–Mark Judge, reflecting on the current Joe Biden cover-up disaster that has implicated the mainstream news media and lowered its already abysmal level of public trust even further

Judge makes a profound point. If reporters, journalists, publishers and editors acknowledged their mistakes, ethical lapses and instances of incompetence, bias, dishonesty or worse, there would be at least some sense that they recognize their deficiencies and are committed to correcting them. Judge writes,

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