Ethics Quotes

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.

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Never Mind NPR: No One Should Trust the New York Times After Its “Get Trump!” Editorial

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Ethics Villain? “Bias makes you stupid”? “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!”? Unethical Quote of the Month? Oh, let’s start with that one:

“Donald Trump, who relentlessly undermined the justice system while in office and since, is enjoying the same protections and guarantees of fairness and due process before the law that he sought to deny to others during his term.”

—-The New York Times editorial board, in yesterday’s biased, manipulative, Trump-Deranged misinformation-fest titled, “Donald Trump and American Justice”

This is no more and no less that a “WE HATE YOU TRUMP! HATE HATE HATE!” statement. As President, Trump never did anything to “deny fairness and due process” to “others.” The claim to the contrary not journalism and it’s not punditry. It is just hurling accusations without support. Yet the Times editorial board never protested when President Obama used his “bully pulpit” to suggest that American citizens were guilty of crimes before they had been tried or even charged, as in the case of George Zimmerman. The editorial provides no examples or evidence to support the statement, because there aren’t any.

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Ethics Quote of the Week: Conservative Pundit David Burge, a.k.a. “Iowahawk” [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Burge’s tweet above was in response to the episode described by ultra-woke UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky in the statement below (you can view Chemerinsky’s damning Ethics Alarms dossier here).

Gee what a surprise.

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A TRIPLE Jumbo for Joe!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Ok, we need a new rule, as Bill Maher likes to say.

Politicians who don’t have the integrity, energy, tech savvy or whatever else it takes to run their own social media accounts may not deny that what was posted in their names, with their permission, by their paid agents, are their true sentiments. I regard the practice of proxy tweeters and Instagrammers per se unethical anyway: the message says it’s from, say, “Joe Biden,” but it’s really from 22 year-old Ohio State grad Stanislaus “Blinky” Furbusher, a former circus geek whose uncle is a big Democratic donor, and whose opinion about anything would normally not get the national attention a typical Oakland A’s day game gets. That makes such a ghost-posted message a lie, flat out. Say what you will, and I have, about Donald Trump’s often stupid and obnoxious tweets, at least he’s the one who sends them, and he accepts full responsibility for them too. (And he knows how to send them, which admittedly isn’t much, but I bet Joe Biden hasn’t sent a tweet in his life.)

This is all by way of noting that when asked about the political and religious controversy about Biden proclaiming Easter Sunday “Transgender Day of Visibility” [Item #3] (the ridiculously named and conceived “day” pandering to the tiny minority represented by the “T’ in LGBTQ and dedicated to destroying women’s sports), the President, who doesn’t lie like Donald Trump and has a mind like a steel trap (we are told) denied that he had done it.

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Unethical Quote of the Week: President Joe Biden

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“They have a point.”

—President Biden responding to pro-Hamas and Palestinians protesters at a campaign event in North Carolina yesterday after they shouted “What about the health care in Gaza?” before being ushered out by security.

This wasn’t Biden’s senility on display. Nor was it one of his lies. That statement demonstrates this President’s complete ethical and moral void as well as his cowardice, the result of which is to render him incapable of analyzing any situation requiring coherent views of history and a commitment to do the right thing regardless of political fallout.

Biden wants to avoid alienating any voter block, This profound lack of integrity prevents him from leading, leaving him only with the task of unprincipled pandering.

The protesters did not “have a point,” any more than protesters shouting “What about health care in Berlin?” during the Allies’ bombing of the city during World War II would have had a point. “We need to get a lot more care into Gaza,” Biden said. Why? The United States is providing weapons for Israel to conquer Gaza and eliminate Hamas, which is supported by a large majority of the population there. Another protester, apparently as clueless as Biden, called out that health centers in Gaza were “being bombed.” Yup, sure are, and that’s because Hamas is hiding in tunnels under such places so that civilians have to die for Hamas to be subjected to the punishment it deserves and dim bulb weaklings like Joe Biden can claim that pro-terrorism, anti-Israel protesters “have a point.”

I have recorded many statements by Donald Trump that I have ruled should, under normal circumstances, disqualify him from office. None are as disqualifying as those four fatuous, offensive words from Biden yesterday.

Unethical Quote of the Month: Lawrence Martin

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“The greater likelihood is that extremes of free speech will continue to be tolerated, creating a pathway for more Donald Trumps.”

—Washington, D.C.-based journalist Lawrence Martin, a Canadian journalist, bemoaning how the “elites” no longer control the limits of free speech because of the internet, and the results are disastrous in a column titled, “Excessive free speech is a breeding ground for more Trumps.”

Even though this guy could be classified as a Canadian journalist, make no mistake: he is stating out loud how a large component, even a majority perhaps, feels about freedom of speech when it doesn’t stop with letting  journalists and their favorite politicians and glitterati say, state and opine about what ever they want in the public square. This is exactly what “saying the quiet part out loud” means.

For that, I suppose we should be thankful to Martin. I would say we should also be thankful that he almost exclusively writes for Canadian publications—you know, the ones that cover the Great Stupid infected country to the north that is seriously considering a law,  Bill C-63, that would establish life sentences for “speech crimes.” Oh, don’t worry: Martin feels that the bill goes “too far.” That’s nice. Based on his screed, I’m sure he favors lesser sentences. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Month: Missouri and Louisiana

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“The bully pulpit is not a pulpit to bully.”

—-The attorneys for Missouri and Louisiana in their U.S. Supreme Court opposition to staying the unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit order declaring that officials from the White House, the surgeon general’s office, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the F.B.I. had violated the First Amendment by secretly pressuring social media platforms to take down posts as “misinformation.”

What a great line! I’m amazed it has never been used before: an instant classic and useful quote.

Today the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the oral arguments in a case to determine whether the Biden administration violated the First Amendment in combating that endlessly useful word to progressive and Democratic censors, “misinformation,” on social media platforms. There are four case before SCOTUS on this topic, which, among other expressions of alarm, was the target of the so-called “Twitter Files” posts organized by Elon Musk in 2022.

The case being argued today, like the other ones, arose from revealed communications from administration officials urging/ persuading/ threatening social media platforms to take down Left-unfriendly posts on the Wuhan virus vaccines, the 2020 election and Hunter Biden’s laptop and other matters. Last year, the Fifth Circuit hit the Biden administration with an injunction that severely limited this tactic. The three judge panel wrote,

Defendants, and their employees and agents, shall take no
actions, formal or informal, directly or indirectly, to coerce or
significantly encourage social-media companies to remove,
delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their
algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected
free speech. That includes, but is not limited to, compelling the
platforms to act, such as by intimating that some form of
punishment will follow a failure to comply with any request, or
supervising, directing, or otherwise meaningfully controlling
the social-media companies’ decision-making processes.

And the Biden administration opposed that language. Let me repeat that for emphasis: the Biden administration opposed that language. This is, you will recall, the administration and the party that has based its campaign against Republicans before the election this year on the premise that it is the Republicans and their presumptive Presidential candidate, Donald Trump, who pose an existential threat to democracy. Yet these are the same aspiring totalitarians who used the power of the government—“Nice little business you have here…be a shame if anything were to happen to it!”—to secretly coerce, pressure, and infiltrate (read the whole order linked above) social media and Big Tech platforms to do their bidding regarding what opinions and assertions could be communicated by citizens.

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Ethics Quote of the Month: Blogger-Criminal Defense Lawyer Scott Greenfield

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

“If Hamas is not destroyed, or at least its capacity to attack Israel eliminated, then it will attack again. Hamas has made clear that it intends to do so, over and over. Until Hamas is destroyed, there can be no peace as Hamas has no interest in peace. There can be no “two-state solution” with one state controlled by terrorists bent on destroying the other state. For those anti-colonialists whose solution is the eradication of Israel, they will be surprised to learn that Israel is not inclined to commit suicide and disappear.”

—-Scott Greenfield, explaining in no uncertain terms why the progressive Left’s support for Gaza and condemnation of Israel is based on its determination to refuse to face facts

There are so many articles, grandstanding declarations and bad punditry bemoaning the fate of the Palestinians in Gaza—Jonathan Glazer’s fatuous speech at the Oscars being the most obnoxious recent example—that when an intelligent voice from the Left points out that the “Give Peace a Chance” whining is utter bunk, attention must be paid. I highlighted Hillary Clinton’s spot on and clear explanation of reality for the cement-headed ladies of “The View,” and now criminal defense lawyer and eloquent blogger Scott Greenfield has performed the same service in print. Bravo. Having read Greenfield for many years, I regard him as a traditional liberal but stubbornly unwoke. Like Althouse, bias seldom makes him stupid.

In an essay beginning with Biden’s foolish “red line” comment (what is it about Democratic Presidents that they think they can assert “red lines” when they have no intention of doing anything should their bluff be called?), Greenfield, like the good Democrat he almost surely is, briefly tries to mitigate President Biden’s cowardly and cynical attempts to mollify his anti-Semite base while still insisting that he supports Israel, recently highlighted as he ordered aid to Gaza while the US supports the Israeli attacks that make the aid necessary. But Greenfield still writes,

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Unethical Quote of the Week (and a KABOOM!): President Biden

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I gave the President a Julie Principle pass last week by not highlighting his hilarious open mic comment calling for Israel to have a “come to Jesus moment,” but I can’t let this one pass:

“I shouldn’t have used ‘illegal.’ It’s undocumented. When I spoke about the difference between Trump and me, one of the things I talked about in the border was his, the way he talks about vermin, the way he talks about these people polluting the blood. I’m not going to treat any of these people with disrespect. Look, they built the country. The reason our economy’s growing.”

The statement is by turns incompetent, irresponsible, and dishonest; in non ethical terms, cowardly, offensive and idiotic.

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Ethics Quote of the Week: Holly Mathnerd

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

“Dishonesty is so normalized that this kind of performative fragmentation—signaling that one believes certain things while acting as if one believes other things—may eventually be recognized as a marker of intelligence and proper preparation for class climbing (or class maintenance, if one starts off in that class).”

—Substacker “Holly Mathnerd,” reviewing a book I haven’t read (“Troubled”) by a writer I never heard of (Rob Henderson), but gleaning from it wisdom that sorely temps me change both conditions.

It is pure coincidence that so soon after this post and this one —and even this one—another dishonesty and hypocrisy assessment presented itself. Something is in the air.

This is a phenomenon that Ethics Alarms has discussed frequently. The “elite classes,” like those who sent my college classmates to a series of prestigious schools, pushed for the legalization and cultural approval of regular pot use which they insisted was harmless. The resulting new social norm has devastated the lower socio-economic reaches that are more likely to abuse the privilege without the means to cope with the results. Support for “illegals”—Joe’s accurate word—via sanctuary cities and bleeding heart rhetoric was adamant until the progressive virtue-signalers in “sanctuary cities” had to deal with the real consequences of an open border policy.

More from Holly:

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