Character

Well, So Much For the PETA Vote!

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

To many analysts, South Dakota governor Krtisti Noem checked all the right boxes to be Donald Trump’s running mate. She’s a hard-right conservative, a successful and popular governor, an effective speaker, attractive, and a woman. (I must interject here that I find it just a bit hypocritical that the GOP, as it derides and condemns the diversity fad as it makes tribal membership more important than merit, skill, competence and experience, that Trump is almost certainly going to choose a woman or a black man as his VP. The least he could do to defy the Left is pick a Jew…). Noem seemed to be leading the race to be Trump’s second-in-command, in the view of many experts.

And then, as Frank and Nancy would say, she went and spoiled it all by saying something stupid like ‘I shot my dog because I couldn’t be bothered to train it.’

“Ethics Dunce” doesn’t adequately describe what Noem’s new book “No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward,” which will be released in May, reveals about her. Yes, she’s notably missing some key ethics alarms and some pretty basic ones at that, like “Be kind to animals, because they are innocents,” one of my late wife’s mantras. Noem is also, however, lacking in basic understanding of public sensibilities and has the political instincts of a Kamikaze pilot.

“I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story here,” Noem wrote after detailing the horrible story of how she lured “Cricket,” a 14-month old wire-haired pointer, to a gravel pit and shot her because the dog had failed her first pheasant hunting attempt. This wasn’t “Old Yeller”: Cricket wasn’t sick, or dangerous, or old. Cricket, as Noem’s account makes clear, just hadn’t been trained….you know, like Joe Biden’s “bad” German Shepherd, Commander.

Continue reading →

Dispatches From the Great Stupid: NPR Unmasked (Cont.)

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I know I should be writing about the college campuses revealing to administrators and faculty that they have successfully indoctrinated their students into being anti-Semites, bigots, and fascists while remaining ignorant of history and ethics. I’m really tired today, however, and for a while, at least, I’m going to indulge myself elaborating on an earlier ethics mess: the revelation that National Public Radio has become a malign force in American culture, and will lie, obfuscate and spin to disguise its true nature and objectives.

I found two notes worth pondering. From the Times (I’m not making this up)—

Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: The Heisman Trust [Expanded!]

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Ugh. This gets the Steve Buscemi foot-in-the-woodchipper GIF from “Fargo,” because that’s what stories like this make me want to do: dive into one and end it all.

The Heisman Trust announced today the formal “reinstatement” of the 2005 Heisman Trophy to former USC college football star Reggie Bush 14 years after he had been stripped of it. That 2010 decision was made when the NCAA sanctioned USC for multiple rules violations, which included Bush receiving “improper benefits,” as ESPN coyly puts it, during his Trojans career from 2003 to 2005.

USC and Bush cheated, you see. They cheated, and nothing has changed regarding their guilt. They broke the rules. But because the NCAA, the Heisman Trust, football, American sports organizations generally and the American public that supports them all have the approximate ethical literacy of dung beetles, Reggie’s cheating doesn’t count.

Continue reading →

Remove This Judge!

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

The Dexter Taylor case raises interesting Second Amendment issues to be sure.

A New York jury found Taylor guilty of second-degree criminal possession of a loaded weapon, four counts of third-degree criminal possession of a weapon, five counts of criminal possession of a firearm, second-degree criminal possession of five or more firearms, unlawful possession of pistol ammunition, violation of certificate of registration, prohibition on unfinished frames or receivers. Now Taylor, a 52-year-old African-American software engineer, is on Rikers Island waiting to be sentenced. He became interested in gunsmithing as a hobby years ago, but a joint ATF/NYPD task force discovered he was legally buying gun parts from various companies and began investigating him, leading to a SWAT raid and his arrest. His legal team explains his side of the case here.

That’s not the focus of this post, however. This is: during his trial, Judge Abena Darkeh allegedly said at one point, “Do not bring the Second Amendment into this courtroom. It doesn’t exist here. So you can’t argue Second Amendment. This is New York.” Darkeh was appointed by New York City’s crypto-communist Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2015.

Continue reading →

On the Ethical Significance of the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” Finale…

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

I must disclose as my initial bias in approaching this topic that I am not a fan of HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” (though I liked the use of the Gilbert and Sullivan “Three Little Maids from School” melody in its early seasons). Essentially the saga of an unrepentant wealthy asshole in Hollywood, which Larry David, the star and creator, actually seems to be and is apparently proud of it, the show is repetitious and shrill, made more so by David’s irritating voice and narrow range. Never mind: lots of people seem to think it’s hilarious, so I must rate the thing good because “it works.” Fine.

Now (FINALLY!) “Curb” is over, and it had to have an “eagerly awaited” final episode that wraps everything up. Ever since “The Fugitive” set Nielson ratings records by closing the series with David Janssen finally finding the elusive one-armed man and proving his innocence, popular TV series have striven for a boffo send-off, usually failing. “MASH” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” pulled it off; “Cheers” not so much. “Friends” finale was just okay. “St. Elsewhere” and “The Sopranos” last episodes are playing in a loop in Hell. ” Newhart’s” last episode, in contrast, was probably the pinnacle of the genre (“You should wear more sweaters.”)

One of the biggest letdowns was the final episode of “Seinfeld,” written by Larry David, who was the template for George Constanza, the worst sociopath in the group of four toxic (but funny!) narcissists who drove the “show about nothing.” It just wasn’t funny: the concept, which seemed to be to be one of those “Wouldn’t it be great if…” ideas someone raises in jest and it ends up being taken seriously, was that all the many victims of Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer through the years testify against them in a criminal trial. Virtually everyone hated the episode; in fact, it’s infamous. Larry David, being the jerk he is, has insisted that his script was hilarious, and that he’s proud of it.

Continue reading →

Bitter, Pathetic, Miserable Hillary Clinton

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Yes, I know I’m breaking my own rule about not using unflattering photos of Hillary Cinton, a pledge I made during the 2016 Presidential campaign I think—it might have been earlier. She deserves it in this instance.

I feel genuine compassion for Hillary, just as I do for Al Gore (and Samuel J. Tilden) up to a point. It must be terrible to win the popular vote for President of the United States and lose the election. I think it must be a little like what I am trying to deal with right now after waking up one morning and finding my wife dead.

Hillary is bitter and angry, and I understand that. The ethical mandate in such a situation is to strive to deal with these emotions with dignity, and, in her position as a public figure that many Americans admire and respect (mistakenly), to serve as a role model for everyone else who finds themselves suddenly losing something or someone that assumed they had firmly and safely in their embrace.

She’s failed that mandate spectacularly and repeatedly. Clinton lost the Presidency, not only by the quirk of the Electoral College, but also through her own perfidy, arrogance and incompetence, yet she refuses to take responsibility for any of that. In her view, at least publicly, it is all Donald Trump’s fault, along with the”deplorables” who voted for him. From the moment she learned that she had lost the 2016 election in a stunning upset, Clinton has set out to do everything and anything she can to hurt him, beginning with declaring his election illegitimate, spawning the Russian collusion investigation that crippled his Presidency, and using every opportunity to trigger the Trump Deranged with inevitably diminishing returns.

Continue reading →

American Historians Becoming Woke, Biased, and Corrupt

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Jack Henneman operates an excellent podcast called “The History of the Americans.” In his latest installment, he varies from his usual format to give us an editorial on the topic of the corruption of American history scholarship. Regular readers here would assume that I would approve, for Ethics Alarms has been deploring the ethics rot among American history academics for many years. Introducing his podcast, Henneman explains that he recently attended the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association in San Francisco. “I learned a lot,” he writes, “especially how transparently politicized so many professional historians seem have become.”

“This episode recounts some of what I saw and heard, and concludes with my many thoughts on the greatest benefit of learning history, whether history should be ‘useable,’ and,” he adds, “why deploying history for partisan political purposes, as is now happening widely and overtly, corrupts history absolutely.”

The podcaster/historian does an excellent job, and it is work enhanced by his keen understanding of ethics. I listened to the podcast yesterday, and today read the truly nauseating partisan propaganda spewed on Bill Maher’s HBO show by once respectable historian Jon Meacham. Meacham wrote, among other celebrated tomes, “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House.” (I don’t know why I’m promoting this traitor to his profession’s book, except that it is excellent, and he wrote it before he jumped the ethics shark, in 2008). He has since become a partisan Democrat to the point where I would view it as a conflict of interest, and one that he has not been forthcoming in disclosing.

It takes a lot for MSNBC to punish anyone for being unethical, that being one of the far, far left network’s missions, but Meacham was fired as a paid MSNBC contributor after he failed to disclose to the network that he was a Biden speechwriter. Before he was caught playing the role of objective scholarly analyst who was secretly being paid to endorse one party, he had made such obviously slanted claims as asserting on MSNBC that the Clinton impeachment process was wholly partisan, while Trump’s first impeachment was not. That’s not just biased, it’s counter-factual: Clinton’s impeachment had a bi-partisan House vote of 258-176, with 31 Democrats joining the Republicans. No Republican voted for Trump’s first impeachment. This is in the same category of dishonest historical analysis for partisan gain practiced by CNN’s pro-Democratic “Presidential scholar” Michael Beschloss, who just makes stuff up now.

Meacham is always described as a “Pulitzer Prize winning historian,” so it is prudent to recall that Nikole Hannah-Jones also got a Pulitzer for the fake history in her “1619 Project.” But when he’s being a pundit, which is apparently most of the time lately, Meacham just skips the facts as it suits him. He tweeted, for example, in 2019, that Trump’s mean tweets about “the Squad” meant that he “has joined Andrew Johnson as the most racist President in American history.”

Continue reading →

Searching For a Tipping Point…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

This is probably too trivial an episode, but you never know. What might it take to cause a tunnel-visioned, propaganda-marinated, Trump-Deranged, ethically-stunted Democrat or progressive to slap himself,herself or whateverself briskly in the forehead and say, “What the hell? Why have I been supporting these people? They are corrupt and embarrassing!”

On April 17, our President informed a shocked nation that he thinks his uncle was eaten by cannibals. The purpose of his rambling discourse was, of course, the evilness of Donald Trump, as Biden repeated the now Axis-enshrined claim that as President, Trump refused to visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France in 2018 because the U.S. soldiers buried there were “losers” and “suckers.”

Here’s what Biden said:

Continue reading →

When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring, and, Uh, I think You’re Missing Something Else, Carol…

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

For some unfathomable reason, veteran Hollywood producer Carol Baum (that’s her on the right) felt compelled to gratuitously insult the current Hollywood “It” girl, Sydney Sweeney (on the left) in an on stage interview with New York Times film critic Janet Maslin. Baum said, “There’s an actress who everybody loves now: Sydney Sweeney. I don’t get Sydney Sweeney. I was watching on the plane Sydney Sweeney’s movie [‘Anyone but You’] because I wanted to watch it. I wanted to know who she is and why everybody’s talking about her. I watched this unwatchable movie — sorry to people who love this … romantic comedy where they hate each other.”

The adjunct professor at the University of Southern California, added: “I said to my class, ‘Explain this girl to me. She’s not pretty, she can’t act. Why is she so hot?’ Nobody had an answer.”

Huh. What could it be? And nobody had an answer! It’s a mystery. What is it about Sydney Sweeney that anyone would possibly find “hot”? Wow. That’s right up there with the “Mary Celeste” and the Lost Colony. Incomprehensible!

Continue reading →

Update on NPR’s Unmasking

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

That is kind of a fanciful title, I guess. The only people who didn’t realize that NPR has been strongly biased leftward over the last, oh, two decades or more would be those who agree with that bias, so naturally think the taxpayer funded radio network is just “telling it as it is.” Selective editing to make, say, Ted Cruz sound like a far-right nut case, or having a Supreme Court correspondent who is pals with the most liberal justice on the Court are just, you know, “mistakes.”

But having an insider who is obviously a progressive Democrat himself blow the whistle and announce that “the nonprofit radio network had allowed liberal bias to affect its coverage” (Ya think???) meant that attention must be paid, and the furious reaction of NPR’s leadership to that statement of the obvious–-“How DARE he! We’re NPR!”—gave instant credibility to his indictment, again, not that it should have needed any more, if people were paying attention.

Now comes the news of the obvious other shoe dropping: Uri Berliner, the senior business editor who blew said whistle, has been suspended by the network but for just for five days. In an interview with NPR earlier this week, Berliner revealed that NPR said he would be fired if he violated the policy against unapproved work for another media outlets again. Apparently NPR figured out that the Streisand Effect applies, and the more they go after Berliner and deny, deny, deny, the more visible the network’s progressive propaganda proclivities will be.

They figured it out too late, unfortunately. The mask, which was hanging anyway, is off now. NPR can blame any future criticism on Republicans and conservatives “pouncing,” but as long as it is led by a woman whose social media comments mark her as an extreme anti-American social justice activist, the strategy is unlikely to work. Fine, let NPR preach to the metaphorical choir—but I shouldn’t have to pay for it.

Meanwhile…

Continue reading →