Character

Chris Darden: Failing The Accountability Test and Making the Unethical Quote of the Week, Too

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I feel sorry for Chris Darden.

It’s all Johnny Cochran’s fault.

Like Monica Lewinsky and others, he was living a normal personal and professional life  until events beyond his control  thrust him to the center ring of a media circus, and the bright lights of celebrity and hyper-scrutiny derailed his life forever. As a young prosecutor, he could have made many worse errors than his infamous gamble of allowing O.J. Simpson to try on the murder gloves found at the scene of Nicole Simpson’s and Ron Goldman’s death, and been able to learn and move on. But his  blunder was on live TV, during the most watched trial in history. Master defense attorney Johnny Cochran turned it into a ditty (“If the gloves don’t fit, you must acquit”) that found immortality in law school classes, history books and “Seinfeld,” and Chris Darden, working lawyer, became celebrity road-kill. (So did his colleague Marcia Clarke. Seeing today, bleached, botoxed and barely recognizable, desperately trying to eke out a living as a D-list celebrity pundit, it becomes vividly clear that Simpson ruined more lives than the two he snuffed out that bloody night.)

So I understand why Darden, taking part in a panel discussion about the trial at Pace Law School in New York City, shocked his fellow panel members  and the audience by saying, “I think Johnnie tore the lining. There were some additional tears in the lining so that O.J.’s fingers couldn’t go all the way up into the glove.” Darden then asserted that the defense team had unsupervised custody of the glove before the infamous test, which is when he surmised that the tampering took place. I understand it, just as I understand a lot of terrible conduct that is still inexcusable. Continue reading →

The Ethics Corrupter-In-Chief

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

I wanted to stay far, far away from commenting on the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, because I knew that the double standard of media scrutiny of the deceit and dishonesty there ( in contrast to the media’s adversary stance during the Republican convention) would drive me to drink if I thought about it long enough to write coherently. And so I shall stay away, except for this one infuriating topic, which is broader and more significant than the convention itself.

No political party that cares sufficiently about the ethical values of integrity and honesty, as well as responsible leadership, would feature Bill Clinton as its “rock star” speaker. That the Democrats did, and that the media and the public generally gave them a pass for doing so, confirms that Clinton’s corrupting influence on the American culture continues. Recent polls indicate that he is the most popular political figure in the country today, and Democrats will no doubt cite that as justification for inviting him to speak. To the contrary, it shows the damage that he has done to the values of the nation, and how wrong the Democratic party has been to aid and abet that damage.

Bill gave a good speech, as he usually does. There is no way to know how much of it he believes or meant, for Clinton is a recreational liar: he likes lying. He’s good at it, and he does it at every opportunity. In 2008, on The Ethics Scoreboard, the slower and more formal predecessor to this blog, I made Clinton the first (and as it turned out, sole) admittee to the David Manning Liar of the Month Hall of Fame, writing in part that… Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of This And Any Other Month: Bonnie Pollack

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

“It was a real dilemma. I decided to do the right thing.”

—-58-year-old Bonnie Pollack of Manhattan, a doctoral student in social welfare who lives in Manhattan, telling the Wall Street Journal about the time she threw away her husband’s absentee ballot after promising to mail it, because she knew he was voting Republican. She didn’t tell him about the fate of his vote for years.

This photo of a baby polar bear has nothing to do with Bonnie Pollack, but it cheered me up after having to think about her. UPDATE: Now I find out that it’s a toy, so I’m depressed  all over again. If you can’t even trust cute, all is lost.

Ms. Pollack’s jaw-dropping admission appears in an article called “The Marriage Problem That Comes Every Four Years,” but is an example of the year-round ethics problem that makes life intermittently miserable for us all: people whose concept of right and wrong consists of arrogance, self-righteousness, and a full embrace of “the ends justify the means” without any moderation.

Let us do an ethics audit of Bonnie’s words and deeds: Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Day: Rear Admiral Sean Pybus

/ Jack Marshall / 51 Comments

“We do NOT advertise the nature of our work, NOR do we seek recognition for our actions. Today, we find former SEALs headlining positions in a Presidential campaign; hawking details about a mission against Enemy Number 1; and generally selling other aspects of NSW training and operations.  For an Elite Force that should be humble and disciplined for life, we are certainly not appearing to be so.”

—-Rear Admiral Sean Pybus, Commander of Naval Special Warfare Command, in a letter sent to all members of the Special Operations community telling  them to stop revealing information about their secret operations. The letter was sent out as “No Easy Day,” a Navy Seal’s unauthorized account of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, hit the book stores.

The letter is said to be the beginning of a concerted effort by the military to discourage an accelerating trend among Navy SEALs of cashing in on their notoriety and exploits.

Good luck. When a culture based on professionalism, sacrifice, discretion and honor meets a larger culture that values none of those things as much as celebrity, publicity, personal aggrandizement and financial rewards, the results are pre-ordained, and the key word is corruption. The SEALs won’t be able to fix themselves unless they can figure out how to fix America, and compared to that, finding bin Laden was a walk in the park.

______________________________

Facts: NBC

Graphic: By Hero

Ethics Dunce: Novelist R J Ellory

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“Jellybean”

Yes, he really did: best-selling British crime novelist R J  Ellory actually went on Amazon, and using fake names like “Jellybean” and “Nicodemus Jones,” wrote rave reviews of his own books . In one review, he called one of his novels a “modern masterpiece” and wrote that it “just stopped me dead in my tracks.”

How embarrassing. Sales a little soft lately, R J? He also used fake identities to post negative reviews of his rivals’ works. Continue reading →

Buzz Bissinger’s Primer on Unethical Reasoning

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Sportswriter Buzz Bissinger, already an Ethics Dunce in good standing, has contributed something immensely valuable to the world of ethics: a cover story for Newsweek that can serve as a teaching aid in college ethics classes.

Titled “I Still Believe in Lance Armstrong,” Bissinger lurches from one rationalization to another, contradicting himself repeatedly along the way. This is a professional journalist, writing in his field, for what once was a respected news commentary magazine. Why is so much of the public unable to tell right from wrong? Because they spend a lifetime reading junk like this: Bissinger’s essay could be Exhibit A.

Bissinger begins by talking about the reactions of his son, a cycling enthusiast who worshiped Armstrong, to the recent news that the tarnished athlete would no longer challenge the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency’s efforts to strip him of his titles:

“Caleb is not blind. He said it was hard not to read the statement and conclude that when Armstrong said, ‘There comes a point in every man’s life when he has to say ‘Enough is enough’ ” and that he was finished fighting the United States Anti-Doping Agency’s fanatical attempt to strip him of his victories, what lay below the outrage was an admission that he may well have cheated with performance enhancers in order to win. That bothers my son. It is why he called the stunning announcement a ‘sad day.’ But it is also why he called it a ‘weird day’ emotionally because of the constant effort to make Armstrong into a villain.” Continue reading →

He Must Not Have Liked The Tofu At The Reception: Worst Wedding Guest Ever

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

“I invited him? I thought YOU invited him!”

The Ethics Alarms week just completed week was notable for the bizarre and lengthy argument over proper conduct by wedding reception hosts, prompted by my criticism of advice columnist Carolyn Hax. It is with some trepidation that I now ask: Can we agree that this is the worst wedding reception guest ever?

The guest is Omar Santiago, a young lad invited to the reception by the brides’ niece, who probably needs to cultivate better taste in boyfriends. Omar was observed around midnight doing something suspicious in a closet at the West Sayville (New York) Country Club as the less larcenous guests were bunny-hopping. The maitre d’ asked bride Joanna Williamson  if she had directed a young guest to handle her gift box. Why no, she hadn’t, Williamson replied—Holy cats!!  Someone is stealing our wedding gifts????? Continue reading →

The Significance of Paul Ryan’s Marathon

/ Jack Marshall / 61 Comments

Interviewer : Are you still running?
Paul Ryan: Yeah, I hurt a disc in my back, so I don’t run marathons anymore. I just run ten miles or [less].
Interviewer : But you did run marathons at some point?
Paul Ryan: Yeah, but I can’t do it anymore, because my back is just not that great.
Interviewer : I’ve just gotta ask, what’s your personal best?
Paul Ryan: Under three, high twos. I had a two hour and fifty-something.
Interviewer : Holy smokes. All right, now you go down to Miami University…
Paul Ryan: I was fast when I was younger, yeah.

Thus did Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Paul Ryan describe his athletic exploits to ABC News reporter Hugh Hewett. But it was bad information: Runner’s World did some digging, and discovered that Ryan, intentionally or unintentionally, fictionally improved his best marathon time by an more than an hour. That “intentionally or unintentionally” is as important as the media and blog sleuths are making it out to be. Continue reading →

When Late Is As Bad As Never: The Thalidomide Apology

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Such a nice apology to the Thalidomide victims! Why no applause?

Harald Stock, Chief Executive of the Gruenenthal Group, has issued the company’s first apology and acknowledgment of responsibility for its role in manufacturing Thalidomide, the drug taken by pregnant women for nausea in the ’50’s and ’60’s. The women who took the drug, primarily in Europe, gave birth to children with deformed limbs or no limbs at all.  Stock  apologized to the surviving mothers and to their children, saying,

“We ask for forgiveness that for nearly 50 years we didn’t find a way of reaching out to you from human being to human being. We ask that you regard our long silence as a sign of the shock that your fate caused in us.”

Wow, that’s some case of shock—50 years! And the shock affected not just the executives of the company that were around when the drug was distributed without adequate testing and so-called “flipper babies” were being born in the thousands, but two generations of subsequent Gruenenthal management too. Let’s translate this apology, shall we? Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week: Harvard Dean Jay Harris

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“We always stress academic integrity with our students. It’s very hard to explain to someone that this raises ethical concerns and that it’s not OK.”

—-Jay Harris, Dean of Undergraduate Education at Harvard College, where about 125 students in a Government course are under investigation for cheating on a take-home final. Similarities in the tests handed in for Government 1310 ( Introduction to Congress) raised suspicions of copying or collaboration. It is the largest cheating scandal in Harvard history.

Wait…what?

Yeah, right.

Harvard stresses academic integrity, but about half a class cheated as soon as some lazy professor was willing to trust the students with a take-home exam? Well, you’re not doing a very good job stressing integrity,are you, Dean? But why does Harvard have to stress integrity—aren’t these supposed to be the best and the brightest? Doesn’t the nation’s most prestigious college only admit students with integrity, or did they cheat to get into Harvard, too? Isn’t part of “best” being honest, and doesn’t “brightest” mean “doesn’t have to cheat”? I’m so confused!

Please help us understand, Dean Harris! Continue reading →