Elizabeth Lauten, communications director for Republican Congressman Stephen Fincher, decided that she is authorized to give parental advice to First Offspring Sasha (13) and Malia (16) Obama. She was deeply troubled by the young ladies looking bored in photographs she saw online, so she posted this jaw-dropper on Facebook:
Wow. What a Thanksgiving feast of unethical features! Let’s see: Continue reading
Ferguson Market and Liquor was looted last night, targeted by protesters demanding “justice” for Michael Brown.
I’d like someone to explain the logic of that act to me, please. Please. That was the store where Michael Brown was captured on video shoplifting and assaulting a clerk prior to his fatal encounter with Officer Wilson.
How dare that store be robbed by an unarmed teen! No, that doesn’t work. How dare an employee be assaulted by a shooting victim! Hmmm…no, no, that’s stupid. How dare the business allow the media to mention its name in connection with the examination of whether Mike Brown was just a gentle giant who wouldn’t hurt a fly or intimidate a clerk! That can’t be it, can it? Or is it, “Let’s honor Mike by really hurting that small business where he stole some blunts and shoved that little clerk!” Really?
What exactly is the theory of justice here? My mind is open, it really is. I so want to understand.
Absent a persuasive explanation, however, I must conclude that anyone who sees “justice” in punishing Michael Brown’s innocent victims, however the teen met his demise, no more understands the concept of justice than I understand string theory, and I have no interest at all in listening to such an individual’s theories, protests, or rants about a subject about which that they are not only embarrassingly ignorant, but deluded as well.
What they did is injustice. They don’t know the difference between injustice and justice, which tells me that neither they nor anyone allied with them, supporting them or sympathetic with them should be taken seriously or heeded.
And when we are told, “The police are biased against people who think looting a store is justice!,” I am compelled to answer,
“As well they should be.”
How wrong is the Change.org petition posted by Ashlea Johnson and demanding that TMZ remove and apologize for the above headline announcing the death of Marion Barry?
1. This is an attempt to whitewashing a very soiled legacy.
2. Barry, and no one else, ruined his legacy. Next to using crack while Mayor of Washington D.C. (and being filmed in the process), Barry is best known for his immortal quote after his arrest with an old girl-friend and drug pal: “Bitch set me up!”
3. TMZ has both the freedom to publish whatever it chooses however it chooses, as long as it is true. This is true. Barry was “the Crack Mayor.” Deal with it.
4. It would have been good for all if Barry’s enablers and supporters forced him to apologize and be accountable for his various crimes, hustles and misdeeds, of which the crack was only the most spectacular. Instead, Ashlea Johnson and those like her kept electing Barry, who was unrepentant and unreformed, to office, sending the message to District politicians that character and honesty, even good citizenship, don’t matter as much as group identification and cronyism
The TMZ headline was certainly not kind, polite or diplomatic, but rogues, miscreants and thieves do not deserve pleasant or respectful obituaries. When Bernie Madoff dies, he will be called a swindler, because he was one. When Anthony Weiner passes on, he will be noted as the “sexting Congressman,” because that was his legacy. Monica Lewinsky will be eulogized in the press as Clinton’s intern plaything, or something nastier: what else should she be remembered for? Marion Barry could have earned a headline describing him as a transformative mayor of the nation’s Capital, for he had the ability to be that and more. Barry chose to be the Crack Mayor instead.
Ashlea should have sent him a petition about forty years ago, demanding that he stop being such a jerk.
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Pointer: Mediaite
It is kind of funny, isn’t it, to hear and read the shocked reactions of pundits to the fact that probable serial rapist Bill Cosby got a standing ovation from his concert crowd of 2100 in Melbourne, Florida last night? “What could this mean?” they ask. Does this mean that Cosby’s popularity will survive the onslaught of women reporting that he drugged and raped them years ago? Well, no, it means that 2100 people who paid premium prices to see Bill Cosby and attended his concert even after hearing more than sufficient evidence that he is a sick hypocrite like Bill Cosby.
Wow.
What a surprise.
Nor should it be any surprise that that many people will adopt rationalizations and tortured logic to avoid confronting the cognitive dissonance resulting from a self-styled moral exemplar having a spectacularly immoral, indeed criminal, past. After all, the Democratic National Convention, with a lot more that 2,100 in attendance, cheered serial sexual harasser and sexual predator William Jefferson Clinton as he spoke to a throng protesting Republican attitudes toward women, as progressive journalists and pundits from MSNBC to the New York Times nodded in approval.
Unrelated, you say? Wrong. The phenomenon is exactly the same, and therein lies a serious problem for Hillary Clinton. The rationalizations used to rescue her husband from accountability for his decades long abuse of women are exactly the same as those being used now by Cosby’s desperate fans to try to keep laughing at the wise humor of the icon who includes in his storehouse of wisdom such nuggets as… Continue reading
Since he was elected to succeed Michael Bloomberg as New York City’s mayor, Mayor Bill DeBlasio has earned a reputation for chronic tardiness. He is routinely 15, 30, 45 minutes or more late for appointments and public events, and has shown little resolve to deal with the problem. The most recent instance of the mayor operating on “DeBlasio time” came yesterday, when he arrived late for a memorial event to honor the 260 people who died on American Airlines Flight 587 thirteen years ago. This time he was only 20 minutes late-–not bad, for him–but it meant that he was late for the scheduled moment of silence, which occurred at 9:16 AM, the exact moment the plane crashed in Queens, on November 12, 2001. According to the family member who solemnly rang a bell to signify the moment, DeBlasio’s aides asked her to stall until the mayor graced the gathered mourners with his presence. He is being roundly slammed for the episode, in the public and in the local media.
DeBlasio had excuses, as the habitually tardy always do. Sometimes the excuses are legitimate, and may be in DeBlasio’s case: it doesn’t matter. If you are always late, you forfeit the benefit of excuses, even legitimate ones. DeBlasio said his boat to the event was delayed by fog, and that he just didn’t get rolling fast enough. “I was just not feeling well this morning. I had a very rough night, ” he explained. “I woke up sluggish, and I should have gotten myself moving quicker … just woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep and I felt really sluggish and off-kilter this morning.”
Literally nobody seems to be sympathetic. Wrote Ann Althouse: “He’s an idiot…He thinks people will have sympathy over his struggles with a “rough night.” 260 people died in a plane crash!” Continue reading
Meanwhile, Lincoln pretty much just lay around after he was President…
Face the Nation had George W. Bush on today as its primary guest, so the show’s lead in, CBS This Morning, asked its guest, “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart, what question he would ask the man who preceded President Obama in the Oval Office. Stewart’s smirking reply,
“ ‘Tell me about umber and how it helps you in painting cats.’ Jimmy Carter’s like 108? He’s out in Africa pulling guinea worms out of children’s feet, trying to cure them. Bush is at home. ‘Bring me my fruit bowl. Doin’ a still life!”
The technical term for this is, I believe,“being a dick.” Yes, it’s vulgar, but the usual terms don’t quite do Stewart’s gratuitous and unfair nastiness justice in trhis instance.
I recognize that Stewart, who eschewed a flood of well-deserved Democrat jokes over the past five days because he could not get around his massive anti-Republican biases, is in mourning over the GOP electoral avalanche that turned the nation red at all levels of government in all regions. Poor baby. Nonetheless, mocking one President of the United States for his activities in retirement because they do not measure up, in Stewart’s value system, to what Presidents are supposed to do is evidence of a stunning lack of grace, decency,proportion, self-awareness and common sense. Continue reading
Lena Dunham, creator and star of the inexplicably critically acclaimed HBO series “Girls,” has written a memoir, “Not That Kind of Girl.” Here are ten inquiries regarding its most controversial passages, like the one above, and the reaction to them:
1. What does one say about a Hollywood figure who puts a passage like this in her memoirs, writing about her relationship with her sister, who was six years younger…
“As she grew, I took to bribing her for her time and affection: one dollar in quarters if I could do her makeup like a “motorcycle chick.” Three pieces of candy if I could kiss her on the lips for five seconds. Whatever she wanted to watch on TV if she would just “relax on me.” Basically, anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl I was trying.”
2. Or this…
“I shared a bed with my sister, Grace, until I was seventeen years old. She was afraid to sleep alone and would begin asking me around 5:00 P.M. every day whether she could sleep with me. I put on a big show of saying no, taking pleasure in watching her beg and sulk, but eventually I always relented. Her sticky, muscly little body thrashed beside me every night as I read Anne Sexton, watched reruns of SNL, sometimes even as I slipped my hand into my underwear to figure some stuff out.”
3. Or, most famously, this...
“Do we all have uteruses?” I asked my mother when I was seven.
“Yes,” she told me. “We’re born with them, and with all our eggs, but they start out very small. And they aren’t ready to make babies until we’re older.” I look at my sister, now a slim, tough one-year-old, and at her tiny belly. I imagined her eggs inside her, like the sack of spider eggs in Charlotte’s Web, and her uterus, the size of a thimble.
“Does her vagina look like mine?”
“I guess so,” my mother said. “Just smaller.”
One day, as I sat in our driveway in Long Island playing with blocks and buckets, my curiosity got the best of me. Grace was sitting up, babbling and smiling, and I leaned down between her legs and carefully spread open her vagina. She didn’t resist and when I saw what was inside I shrieked.
My mother came running. “Mama, Mama! Grace has something in there!”
My mother didn’t bother asking why I had opened Grace’s vagina. This was within the spectrum of things I did. She just got on her knees and looked for herself. It quickly became apparent that Grace had stuffed six or seven pebbles in there. My mother removed them patiently while Grace cackled, thrilled that her prank had been a success.
?
I say that that the Hollywood darling apparently used her little sister as a sex toy for at least a decade, was never stopped or admonished for doing so by remarkably negligent parents, and has grown to adulthood without recognizing that there is anything wrong with her conduct.
The first passage not only treads on the borders of incest, but also leaves the uncomfortable question of what else she did to her sister that emulated a sexual predator. The second is profoundly creepy, and the third describes what, if true, is abuse of an infant in terms designed to sound erotic. As blogger Ann Althouse points out, does anyone believe that an infant would stuff pebbles in herself “as a prank,”or that a compos mentis parent wouldn’t immediately assume that the older girl had done it to the younger girl? At best, Dunham is lying, and doesn’r realize that her lie puts her and her family in a terrible light.
4. What can we conclude about the character of a celebrity who proposes such conduct as harmless fun, apparently unaware that it violates standards of fairness, respect and caring, to be emulated and embraced by her readers and anyone whom they have influence over, including their own children, as a legitimate cultural norm? I conclude that her values are seriously and perhaps clinically warped. and that the more critics point this out, the safer everyone is, present and future. Lena Dunham is an ethics corrupter. Continue reading
“Us punish little boys playing football for scoring touchdowns!”
Combine political correctness, the thoughts of Chairman Mao, incompetent administrators, kids and football, and this is the disgusting mess you get.
The Gwinnett Football League, a children’s sports program, allegedly fined one of its teams $500 and suspended its coach after an 8-year-old playing for the Lawrenceville Black Knights intercepted a pass and ran it back for a touchdown. In a normal sports league, run by sane people, where victory and achievement are appreciated, encouraged and celebrated rather than being stifled to allow losers to preserve their self-esteem when what they need is to be motivated to play better, the child would have had a joyful, memorable childhood experience. Not in the Gwinnett Football League, however. The young player was to learn that his failure to realize that taking advantage of his opponent’s poor play was considered bad sportsmanship in this Bizarro World* league —cruel, unkind, psychically scarring—and would result in his team being fined and his coach being suspended. You see, the touchdown constituted an infraction of league rules, because the GFL has a so-called “mercy rule” that prohibits a team from throttling a weaker squad by more than 33 points.
The parents of the child protested that their son had no idea he should do. Miss the throw intentionally? Run it back the wrong way for an opposition touchdown? Beg the other team to forgive him? The parents of the rest of the team’s players insisted that the fine and suspension were far too severe….for, you know, playing football in a football game. Being fined and penalized for breaching an appallingly misconceived rule that nobody with the brains of an egret thought through? Yes, I think that’s a reasonable cause for complaint.
Hilariously, the president of the league, who must have risen to his place in life after his planned career as pin setter didn’t pan out, told the media that news reports about the reason the team was fined were false. Erik Richards said the team was fined because it made a “mockery of the game” in other respects besides running up the score: laying on the ground, running off the field and mocking the other players. He explained that the penalty for violating the mercy rule is “only” $100.
What the league needs is a fine for incompetent and irresponsible oversight of a kids football league: Continue reading
Under that bus is Monica Lewinsky, and it wasn’t Matt Drudge who threw her there.
It truly pains me to have to write anything negative about Monica, who was exploited and humiliated by a President of the United States, and had her life permanently derailed because she trusted and even loved a rogue who regarded her as little more than an animated sex toy. Her re-emergence now, however—yes it is sad and desperate and makes me furious at Bill Clinton all over again—in the new guise of a “cyber-bullying” victim is intolerable, a delusion on multiple levels, despicable blame-shifting, and a welcome weasel-out of-accountability-free card for the Clintons. Yeccch.
I’m sorry for what happened to you, Monica, but you’re 40 now: it’s time to start seeing life more clearly—especially your own and the reasons why you are in the mess you are.
“Overnight, I went from being a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one. I was Patient Zero,” Lewinsky said in a speech Monday to Forbes’s Under 30 Summit in Philadelphia. “The first person to have their reputation completely destroyed worldwide via the Internet.”
It has to take a near-fatal injection of self-serving historical air-brushing for the ex-intern to say this with a straight face, and it tells us volumes about the audience that it didn’t start throwing tomatoes:
Wow! THAT train wreck picked up passengers fast!
Put a scary disease together with a new terrorist organization and the ever-present threat of undocumented immigrants sneaking over the border, and you’ve got yourself a putrid stew of fear-mongering, irrationality, conspiracy theories, and good old-fashioned Obama-hatred that they’re luxuriating in like it was a warm bath on a cold night…When people are afraid, they’re more likely to vote Republican, so it’s in Republicans’ interest to make them afraid. And you couldn’t come up with a better vehicle for creating that fear than a deadly disease coming from countries full of dark-skinned foreigners. So what if only two Americans, both health care workers caring for a dying man, have actually caught it? You don’t need facts to feed the fear. And they only need two and a half more weeks.
Ethics Alarms 