Ethics Dunces

Stop Making Me Defend Donald Trump Especially When He Just Barely Deserves To Be Defended!

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

Ugh. How many times will we have to go through this farce? Trump says something off the cuff using gratuitously inflammatory language, Democrats and the Trump Deranged pretend he meant the words in the worst way imaginable, and the biased and dishonest mainstream media tries to bombard the public with the latest “Trump is dangerous and a threat to democracy!” narrative. Will it happen ten more times? Fifty? A hundred?

The current Axis fake-freakout is typical of the script. Trump was riffing yesterday about how countries like Mexico and China are making money from President Biden’s electric vehicle obsession. “Mexico has taken, over a period of thirty years, 34% of the automobile manufacturing business in our country. Think of it, it went to Mexico,” Trump told the crowd. “China now is building a couple of massive plants where they’re gonna build the cars in Mexico and think, they think that they’re gonna sell those cars into the United States with no tax at the border.”

“Let me tell you something. To China, if you’re listening, President Xi — and you and I are friends, but he understands the way I deal,” he continued. “Those big, monster car manufacturing plants that you’re building in Mexico right now, and you think you’re gonna get that, you’re gonna not hire Americans; and you’re gonna sell the cars to us — no. We’re gonna put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line. And you’re not gonna be able to sell those cars. If I get elected — now if I don’t get elected, it’s gonna be a bloodbath for the whole — that’s gonna be the least of it. Its gonna be a bloodbath for the country, that’ll be the least of it. But they’re not gonna sell those cars, they’re building massive factories,” Trump said.

So “bloodbath” clearly meant a financial and commercial bloodbath, using the term metaphorically, like the news media does all the time. They even used it last week: Multiple outlets described the change in leadership and subsequent layoffs at the Republican National Committee (RNC) as a “bloodbath.” What? You mean they were actually claiming that the GOP was slaughtering people? Of course not, but never mind: the Democratic Party-bolstering news media has no shame, so they immediately pretended—and wrote—that Trump had threatened a literal blood bath if he lost the election again.

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Fani Wallis Scandal Footnote: A ‘Bias Makes Legal Ethicists Stupid’ Moment

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This is disheartening, though not unexpected.

I have written about how thoroughly my colleagues in the legal ethics field are politicized, biased and frequently rendered unable to see the ethical issues through the fog of their peer-reinforced distortions. Yesterday, as my legal ethics expert listserv was buzzing with commentary on the judge’s “split the baby” response to Fulton County Fani Willis’s screaming conflict of interest, prosecutorial misconduct, race-baiting and stunning arrogance. One prominent lawyer in the field, a woman whose commentary is usually perceptive, wrote this in part…

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When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring: The Nebraska Gas Heist

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

HEY EVERYBODY, FREE GAS!

Weeeell, not exactly free, but close enough, apparently, for a previously law-abiding, 45-year-old Lincoln, Nebraska woman, Dawn Thompson, to embark on a life of crime. I would love to hear what rationalizations she used to convince herself that what she did was okay. I’d bet anything that she employed a bunch of them.

Her gas-stealing rampage began to unravel when Lincoln Police got a call from Bosselman Enterprise’s loss prevention manager on Oct. 20, 2023. A Pump and Pantry had reported that someone was ripping them off. An investigation revealed that the convenience store’s gas pumps had received a faulty software update a year earlier in November of 2022. The update managed orders and reward cards, but it also allowed anyone who swiped a rewards card twice to shift a pump into its “demo mode.” Once it was set in that sequence, gas was free as far as the pump was concerned. One rewards card had been repeatedly used to fool the pumps, and police traced it to Thompson.

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Ethics Alarms Points Out How Terrible RFK Jr.’s VP “Short List” is; Kamala Harris says “Hold My Beer!”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

What a shameless demagogue.

I am immediately torn, because every Kamala Harris head-exploding utterance raises a Julie Principle issue: OK, an elected official who has conclusively proven herself to be dumb, irresponsible and ethically inert says something that is dumb, irresponsible and ethically alert. Why is that worth complaining about or criticizing? Nevertheless, some of Harris’s outbursts are just too despicable to be ignored. Like this one, today, as she visited abortion providers and staff members at a clinic in St. Paul, Minnesota to cheer on women putting the unborn to death for the crime of complicating their mothers’ lives:

“These attacks against an individual’s right to make decisions about their own body are outrageous and, in many instances, just plain old immoral,” she thundered. “How dare these elected leaders believe they are in a better position to tell women what they need, to tell women what is in their best interest. We have to be a nation that trusts women.”

Nice. Kamala had previously used the “How dare they!” stunt to condemn the U.S. Supreme Court for daring to do their jobs, which includes striking down bad decisions that made up constitutional rights that didn’t exist. The abortion-fanatic’s dishonest defense has always relied on pretending that only one life is involved in an abortion, though the state has a valid interest in protecting all lives, including unborn humans who their mothers want to kill. When does an abortion in Harris’s world suddenly involve more than just the woman’s body? Six weeks? 15 weeks? 9 months? Never, if her words mean what they appear to mean. “Plain old immoral” has always included “Thou shalt not kill”: what weird definition of “immoral” is Harris alluding to? It must be really old; Sumarian, maybe? Ancient Aztec?

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Ah! I See That RFK Jr. Is Going After the Idiot Vote…

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

In case anyone serious had concluded that senile Joe Biden and untrustworthy Donald Trump were so bad that it justifies considering the Presidential option of Robert Kennedy Jr, the latter’s “short list” of running mates he claims he’s considering ought to end that alternative forever.

Kennedy told CNN this week that he had “made up his mind” on his VP, who would come from this motley crew: NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers, former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura, former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Republican Senator Rand Paul, former television host Mike Rowe, motivational speaker Tony Robbins, civil rights attorney Tricia Lindsay, Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang.

“We wanted somebody who was aligned with my values, optimistic about our country and its potential and able to run the country at a moment’s notice,” Kennedy explained.

Oh. That list is not nearly short enough. Any group in which Jesse Ventura is arguably the most qualified to be President by definition is ridiculous. Any list of potential VPs that includes Aaron Rodgers and Tony Robbins can only be taken seriously in the sense that its creator has outed himself as a dangerous wacko, though everyone should have known that about Kennedy already. Mike Rowe is “able to run the country at a moment’s notice”? Jesse, who is 71 and has been dabbling in nonsense since his quixotic run as governor of Minnesota ended, is the only one on that list who has any government executive experience. Kennedy outed himself as irresponsible and incompetent by mentioning such a list.

Oh-Oh. Another Ethically Obtuse Question for “The Ethicist”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but it sure seems to me that the questions being asked of the New York Times “The Ethicist” column (or the ones he’s choosing to answer) are increasingly obtuse. This suggests a dangerous trend. Are most Americans really that ethically incompetent? Or are the increasingly frequent (it seems to me) instances of blatantly unethical conduct modeled by our elected leaders and shrugged off by our news media causing galloping ethics rot?

The latest query for “The Ethicist” was, in my estimation, steeped in grade school-level ethics ignorance. A female designer who used to work for a sexually harassing boss when she was just getting started eventually told the bastard off and was fired in retaliation. Now she asks,

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The Democrats’ Orgy of Bad Ethics in the Hur Hearing

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

One of the late Justice Scalia’s favorite derogatory shots was to write that the author of a particularly weak legal argument (in his assessment) should hide his head under a bag. I would hope that any Democrat watching the astounding displays of “whataboutism,” “It isn’t what it is,” “gotchas” and ad hominem attacks by their party’s House members would have bags on their heads this morning. How ugly. How dispiriting. How stupid and desperate! How can they continue to support these people?

Prof. Turley, who has emerged in recent years as one of the very few fair, objective and non-partisan political analysts in academia and the legal profession, correctly but too-kindly described the Democrat attacks on the Special Counsel Robert Hur during the congressional hearing on his report on President Biden as “delusional.” The conduct of the worst of the Democrats was much worse than that.

Rep. Gerald Nadler, for example, thought that Donald Trump’s assorted verbal gaffes were relevant to Hur’s report, so he showed a super-cut of them as a preemptive strike, or something. Hur’s report and investigation didn’t involve Trump (I would have ruled Nadler’s cherry-picked video out of order if I had the gavel), and even if it did, Nadler’s intended message was gaslighting: Biden’s mental decline is literally on display every day, every time he speaks or moves. Democrats like Nadler are committed to denying the obvious and trying to shift attention to Trump, who, unlike Biden, has a typical percentage of verbal missteps for any public speaker who emotes spontaneously or frequently. (A Nadler-style compilation could be made of Barack Obama’s gaffes. Or mine.) Nadler and his minions even stooped to including a clip in which Trump said he did not remember saying he had a great memory. Back in 2015, Ethics Alarms discussed several episodes in which Trump either contradicted what he had said earlier or denied that he said it. Nobody who babbles unfiltered like Donald Trump could possibly remember everything he has said. This “gotcha!,” like the rest of the video, was meaningless.

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Sen. Britt’s Atrocious SOTU “Response” Was Even Worse (and More Unethical) Than I Thought…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

That’s not Sen. Britt in her immediately reviled “response” to President Biden’s faux State of the Union address. That’s Scarlett Johanssen as Britt in a subsequent Saturday Night Live “cold open” that practically wrote itself and was as richly deserved as any target of satire the 50 year-old show has ever taken on.

The principle is pretty basic: if the opposing party’s “response” to a SOTU is so bad that it distracts potential critics of the President’s speech, it’s a disaster. But Britt’s flame-out wasn’t just her speech’s “give Democrats a stick to beat Republicans with” kitchen setting, Britt’s creepy forced smile, and her community theater theatrics that marked her performance as a an embarrassment to the GOP and a gift to Democrats. It turns out that Britt was also lying her head off….and not even well.

Bill Clinton could make a fortune giving lessons.

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For the EA “Do As I Say, Not As I Do” Files: Iowa Lawyer David L. Leitner

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

My chosen profession of legal ethics has not been covering itself with glory lately.

The Iowa Supreme Court suspended 68-year-old lawyer David L. Leitner as explained in a discouraging story in the Iowa Capital Dispatch. He’s out of the practice of law for two years: I would have disbarred him. First, Leitner represented an Iowa seed dealer who was convicted of bankruptcy fraud in 2007 after the lawyer helped him hide assets. Leitner created a company for the seed dealer with himself the company’s manager , allowing the seed dealer to send part of his income to the company while hiding it from the government, which the dealer owed about $71,000. (Can’t help clients try to defraud the government. Can’t go into fake businesses with clients designed to cheat on taxes. Pretty basic legal ethics.)

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Regarding Sen. Britt’s Incompetent SOTU “Response”

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

Ugh. Distinguished EA commenter valkygrrl gets the pointer and my gratitude for this one: she flagged Senator Britt’s performance in an email late last night, and I might never have seen it otherwise. Here, if you were fortunate enough not to see this thing without a trigger warning, it is…

I already said “Ugh,” now I’ll say, “Yecchh!”

To begin with, the whole concept of the opposition “response” is built on a lie. Although the speech is always presented as a reaction to what America just heard and saw, it is always (has there been an exception?) a pre-written and prepared speech often based on the transcript of the President’s speech released before he delivers it, but sometimes just based on what the opposing party assumes the President will say. So it is always fake: the speaker refers to the speech, but the speaker seldom (ever?) has the wit to go off script and comment on what just happened.

Britt definitely didn’t, and, presumably, couldn’t. Biden was shouting and acting like he was on speed. The State of the Union is supposed to be a Presidential address on the state of the nation itself, not a campaign speech. Biden made numerous false statements. He called illegal immigrants “illegals”—which they are—instead of the benign “migrants” the Axis uses to blur the issue. He mangled rape and murder victim Laken Riley’s name on the same day his party overwhelmingly voted against a House bill that established the outrageous requirement—in the democratic Party’s view— that illegal immigrants arrested for crimes should be detained by ICE. Surely the GOP must have some prominent party member quick and articulate enough to give a genuine response to a State of the Union based on what the speech performance really was. Ted Cruz could do it. Rand Paul. Heck, get a right wing radio talk-show host for the job.

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