Ethics Dunces

Ethics Dunce: The 100-Year-Old Psychotherapist

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Yes, this topic again: the aging professional who lacks the courage, integrity and common sense to “hang it up” before too much harm is done.

Ethics Alarms had explored the issue with judges (Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsberg, among others), baseball players (Albert Pujols, for example), lawyers (Rudy Giuliani), actors (Bruce Willis), singers (Joni Mitchell, and so, so many others) and Presidents of the United States. It’s always the same tragic tale with different details: someone who has always been remarkable at a difficult, powerful and often high-profile job can’t bring herself or himself to retire with dignity, even when it should be obvious that age is leaching their abilities from them.

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ABC to Terry Moran: It’s OK For You To Be Biased Like the Rest of Us, But For God’s Sake Don’t Be So Obvious About It!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

ABC News suspended senior national correspondent Terry Moran for, shall we say, a revealing but undiplomatic post on Twitter/X that gratuitously attacked both President Trump and top aide Stephen Millers as “world-class hater[s].” Nice!

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!

“Miller is a man who is richly endowed with the capacity for hatred. He’s a world-class hater,” Moran wrote. “You can see this just by looking at him because you can see that his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment. He eats his hate.” Moran continued, “Trump is a world-class hater. But his hatred only a means to an end, and that end [is] his own glorification. That’s his spiritual nourishment.”

If you say so Terry. Amazingly, Moran apparently saw nothing unprofessional about his outburst, which he subsequently deleted. Talk about living in a bubble!

An ABC News spokesperson said in a statement shortly thereafter that Moran had been suspended, pointing to the post as the impetus for the disciplinary action.

“ABC News stands for objectivity and impartiality in its news coverage”—Excuse me, but HAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA–<breath>HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!—“and does not condone subjective personal attacks on others,” ABC said in a statement. “The post does not reflect the views of ABC News and violated our standards — as a result, Terry Moran has been suspended pending further evaluation.”

More Thoughts and Observations on the LA Pro-Illegal Immigration Riots

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

1. This morning, while CNN and MSNBC were raging about the riots, Fox News had an extended feature about how to make faux cocktails using coffee. Gee, it would be nice to have a responsible, trustworthy broadcast news network that was both unbiased and that didn’t assume that is viewers dropped out of junior high school.

2. I am surprised that so few readers have commented on this morning’s introductory post. Was everyone at church? “Is anybody there? Does anybody care?”

3. Here’s the comment on Facebook by an old friend, a retired journalist, and, of course, a Trump Derangement sufferer:

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Ethics Dunce: Anyone Who Buys Karine Jean-Pierre’s Book [UPDATED!]

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

You would have to put a gun to my head to make me buy Ethics Villain Jake Tapper’s book about the Biden dementia cover-up, but at least Jake has a somewhat less despicable co-author and two-brain cells to rub together. What possible excuse is there for buying and reading the book Biden’s ex-paid liar, Karine Jean-Pierre announced yesterday: “Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines”?

I can think of two: brain damage and excessive admiration of chutzpah.

In order to get some buzz yesterday, Jean-Pierre announced that she was leaving the Democratic Party to be an “independent.” “I think we need to stop thinking in boxes, and think outside of our boxes, and not be so partisan,”she said in an Instagram video. Her publisher risibly insists that Jean-Pierre’s book will offer “clear arguments and provocative evidence as an insider” about the importance of dismantling misinformation and will argue that it “can be worthwhile to carve a political space more loyal to personal beliefs than a party affiliation.”

Ethics estoppel doesn’t begin to describe how unethical it is for this fool to criticize “misinformation.” She was not only paid to lie for the apparently all-lies-all-the-time Biden administration, she was one of the most flagrant liars about Biden’s incapacity, including claiming that videos showing the President babbling, wandering off or freezing were all fake.

Every White House Press Secretary lies, but Karine was shockingly bad at it, and at talking, which would seem to be the minimum skill someone in that position should have mastered. How could she possibly offer “clear arguments and provocative evidence” about anything?

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Oh Dear! Patti Lupone Took My Advice and Now Broadway Wants Her “Cancelled”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Back in November of last year, I wrote about the silly–but instructive—Broadway feud between diva Patti Lupone and performer Kecia Lewis, who is black, and who has received some accolades herself. Lewis was starring in “Hell’s Kitchen,” a 2024 jukebox musical about the life and career of Alicia Keys in a theater that shared a wall with the theater featuring “The Roommate,” a quiet, two-actor drama starring Mia Farrow and LuPone. The amplified sound in “Hell’s Kitchen” at two points in the musical could be heard by the audience LuPone’s show, so LuPone sent a polite note to the “Hell’s Kitchen” producers asking them to turn down the volume at those points in the sound design that were loud enough to interfere with her show. (The producer of “The Roommate”should have handled that, but Patti has power and influence and has never been shy about using them.) “Hell’s Kitchen” complied. LuPone, in gratitude, sent a thank-you note to the producers and flowers to the stage management and sound staff.

But Lewis decided to play the race card, because that’s what so many of the Woke of Color have been taught to do, because it works. She posted a video on Instagram reprimanding LuPone for supposedly engaging in race-based “microagressions.” I wrote in “Dear Patty LuPone: Please, PLEASE Tell Kecia Lewis ‘Oh, Bite Me!’” that I was ” hoping against hope that LuPone, who is the epitome of a diva (as this Ethics Alarms post demonstrates), either issues an emphatic “Bite Me!” to Lewis or ignores her completely as not worthy of attention from Patti’s perch on Broadway Olympus. Lewis is the racist here; she is the one who is stereotyping a white performer as insensitive and dismissive.”

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In a Competitive Commencement Season, Evelyn Harris Makes a Strong Bid For Most Unethical Speech of 2025

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Favorites Tim Walz, Scott Pelley and Kermit the Frog may have fallen to an underdog: “musician and activist” Evelyn Harris (whoever she is) may have succeeded in embarrassing her host school the most of all with her 2025 commencement speech.

For some reason, Smith College, which has apparently become too woke to function, included Harris, a relatively obscure singer (but more importantly, an activist) among its all female honorees this year. The most prominent one of these would probably be far-left historian Danielle Allen, who has several items in her Ethics Alarms dossier. Or maybe it would be the (historic!) highest ranking trans official in US history, former assistant secretary for health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service Rachel Levine, one of Biden’s DEI appointments. Then there was new age-y guru Preeti Simran Sethi, the only one of the four who is a Smith grad. All of these, however, whatever their issues, at least managed to compose their own speech to give to the graduates.

Harris didn’t. Smith officials learned that her entire speech had been cribbed from other sources without attribution (you know, like Joe Biden once did), and had to inform the Smith community that it had been deceived. “It has come to our attention that one of our honorary degree recipients — musician Evelyn M. Harris — borrowed much of her speech to graduates and their families from the commencement speeches of others without the attribution typical of and central to the ideals of academic integrity,” the letter read in part.

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Ethics Quote of the Month: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

‘”Free Palestine’ is just today’s version of ‘Heil Hitler’”

—-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week, referring to the murder of two young Israelis by a man who screamed “Free Palestine” in Washington, D.C.

The context of that quote, from Netenyahu’s remarks last week: Continue reading →

“The Ethicist” Faces The Ultimate Ethics Test…and Flunks

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The topic is abortion.

This is discouraging, if not unexpected. After all, “The Ethicist,” aka. NYU philosophy professor Kwame Appiah, works for the New York Times, Where Ethics Go To Die. Nonetheless, the clueless certitude of his latest column is as offensive as it is indefensible for someone in the ethics field.

An inquirer asked The Ethicist “Does My Spouse Get a Say in Whether to Carry an Unplanned Pregnancy?” That framing alone was foreshadowing for what was to come; notice that the issue is a “pregnancy” and whether it is wanted. and not the snuffing out of a nascent human life, which is where this ethical conflict becomes difficult to resolve.

This time, I’m going to do running commentary on both “Name Withheld’s” query and Prof. Appiah’s answer. First, the question:

“I’m 46, unexpectedly pregnant despite having entered perimenopause, with three children already (the youngest is 4).” COMMENT: And your age and the number of children you have affects the right of an innocent life to continue how?

“My husband calls this a “disaster,” and believes abortion is the clear choice because we didn’t want another child or plan on this pregnancy.” COMMENT: Ending a human life is only a “clear choice” for psychopaths.

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“Jake Tapper, Ethics Villain” Continues—Today’s Episode: “Jake Is Unethical, But He’s Not Stupid”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

In a just released video, conservative scholar and commentator Victor Davis Hanson adds his perspective to the Jake Tapper scandal, a sub-scandal to the Biden Dementia cover-up conspiracy of which he was a part, itself a sub-scandal of the Democratic Party’s descent into aspiring totalitarianism. From the transcript…

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See How They Spin! One Axis Hack Interviews Another To Try To Rationalize Away The Media’s Complicity in the Biden Dementia Cover-up

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Axis hack #1…

Ezra Klein!

Axis hack #2…

Ethics Villain, CNN’s Jake Tapper!

Almost exactly a year ago, I excoriated the New York Times and Public Enemy Ezra Klein, the infamous “advocacy journalist” responsible for founding uber-Axis propaganda organ Vox, for a wildly unethical Klein disinformation piece titled, “Seven Theories for Why Biden Is Losing (and What He Should Do About It).” Guess what Klein didn’t see as a reason Biden was behind in the polls. Somehow, the fact that the alleged President was obviously suffering from dementia escaped his notice. (Suuuure it did…). The closest Klein got to that flaming, throbbing, flashing red alarm was “Voters think Biden is too old.” Just voters, mind you! I wrote, “[Biden’s] obviously declining mentally, and any fool can see he’s too old to hold any job, much less the most difficult one in the country.” But Ezra Klein, who was not declining mentally (and couldn’t possibly decline ethically, except into negative numbers), actually argued that Biden should do more debates with Trump, not just two, and that “all Biden needs to do is persuade enough voters that he is more capable than the erratic criminal defendant across the stage, who turns 78 next month.” What Klein meant was that all the complicit partisan media hacks—like Klein—had to do was to hide Biden’s incapacity from voters until election day. And that’s what they tried to do, except that Biden couldn’t even get through one debate without making it plain that his brain was mush.

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