Ethics Quotes

Ethics Quote of the Week (On That Fanciful “International Law” Thingy): Konstantin Klein

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“All the bleating about “international law” shows just how completely deluded some of our elites have become. International law was a pleasant fiction that lasted for a few decades…It was never real. Laws are based on submission to an overarching authority backed by force. There is no such international authority and even if you view the UN as one, it does not have the ability to use force against those who violate “international law”…

—Someone named Konstantin Klein on Twitter/”X.” I have no idea who the hell he is, and I could have just as easily said that myself, but I’ve been waiting for someone else to point exactly this out, because it is true..

As a general rule, those criticizing the U.S. action in Venezuela based on “international law” don’t know what international law is, and those who criticize the seizing of Maduro and his wife who do know what international law is are deliberately misleading those who don’t. Why hasn’t the new media clarified the issue? Well, 1) it would undermine the Axis’s anti-Trump narrative and 2) most journalists are lazy and not too bright.

On The View yesterday, Sunny Hostin, who appeals to her own authority frequently because she is a lawyer and was once a prosecutor, again proved she was an affirmative action botch by her law school (Notre Dame) by showing beyond a reasonable doubt that she’s an idiot. According to her, the Trump administration arresting Maduro and extraditing him the United States was a “kidnapping,” “100 percent Illegal,” and akin to “piracy.” Piracy? Then she played the frayed international law card, babbling “And international law doesn’t allow it unless there is — unless Congress declares war, and Congress did not do at. So, this country was founded on the premise of the balance of power. Right? So, you have a checks and balances. So, you have co-equal powers — co-equal branches of power. So, you have the Judicial Branch and then you have the Executive Branch, which the president is a part of, and then you have, of course, the Legislative Branch and that’s Congress. And they are supposed to check each other!”

Psst, Sunny! International law doesn’t “allow” or disallow anything. The United States was actually founded on the premise that the people who lived here wanted to decide on and enforce their own laws and not be subject to foreign rule.

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On Maduro’s Arrest, the Ethics Dunces and Villains Are All In Agreement: What Does This Tell Us? [Part 2] [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 58 Comments

Part 1 is here.

I assumed that headline was a misstatement, because the jokes write themselves (Hamas is condemning an abduction?). But I checked some Arab world sources, and indeed, all of the terrorist organizations are big mad over President Trump nabbing Maduro. From an Arabic news agency:

Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah has condemned the US aggression against Venezuela as a blatant and unprecedented violation of international law…Hezbollah movement, in a statement, condemned the U.S. aggression against Venezuela and the targeting of the country’s vital facilities, civilians, and residential buildings, describing it as a blatant and unprecedented violation of international law….It added that the military aggression shows disregard for global stability and security, and aimed at entrenching the “law of the jungle” in order to dismantle the remnants of the international system and strip it of any substance that could serve as a safeguard for nations and peoples.

The Palestinian movement, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, denounced what it called an “imperialist American aggression” on Venezuela, including airstrikes and missile attacks on Caracas and civilian, residential, and military sites, casting it as a new episode of ‘organized American terrorism” against sovereign states….

Palestinian Islamic Jihad described the US assault on Venezuela as an escalating campaign, from blockade to direct strikes, aimed at domination, occupation, and plunder, and a flagrant breach of sovereignty and international law. It said Venezuela is targeted for its steadfast support for Palestine and regional resistance forces, describing the struggle as part of a shared anti-imperialist battle.

Hamas, for its part, denounced the military aggression on Caracas and the kidnapping of President Maduro and his wife, calling it a grave violation of international law and the sovereignty of an independent state. The movement cast the assault as an extension of unjust U.S. interventions driven by imperial ambition that have destabilized multiple countries and threatened international peace. Hamas urged the UN, especially the Security Council, to take measures to stop the attack immediately.

I have to say, I find this mordantly funny. Could there be a more villainous, despicable group of critics for Democrats to find common cause with? Any minute now, I’m expecting a statement from the Seven Princes of Hell, Lucifer, Beelzebub, Asmodeus, Leviathan, Mammon, Belphegor,, and Satan, joined by demons Astaroth, Belial, and Azazel, declaring the U.S.’s dazzling Venezuelan operation to be a violation of international law.

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On Maduro’s Arrest, the Ethics Dunces and Villains Are All In Agreement: What Does This Tell Us? [PART I]

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

The headline is a rhetorical question.

Every now and then—the last was the assassination of Charlie Kirk—all the masks come off and anyone capable of objectivity can see exactly who the unethical, untrustworthy and dishonest among us are. Unfortunately, most people are not capable of objectivity, because bias makes you stupid. One would think, however, that at least those who present themselves to the public as skilled and independent analysts would take some care not to expose their double standards, lack of integrity and hypocrisy for all to see. One would be wrong to think that, as the video compilation above vividly demonstrates.

But why, oh why, do otherwise intelligent people continue to trust these hacks?

Well, you can decide whether that is a rhetorical question or not.

Meanwhile, here is the first part of an incomplete collection of telling reactions to the U.S.’s perfectly executed incursion into Venezuela to remove an illegitimate ruler and his wife who were both under U.S. indictment.

1. Two lawyer bloggers, Ann Althouse and Jonathan Turley, who I respect and often reference here, made it clear—Turley a bit more expressly than Ann—that the U.S. action was legal and justified. Althouse went back over her previous comments on Maduro—gee, why didn’t Jen Psaki do that?—to find her expressing sympathy with the plight of Venezuelans and the absence of U.S. action, as in her discovery of a post from 2019:

When Trump was pleading with the Venezuelan military to support Juan Guaido, I wrote: “I was surprised that on the channel I was watching — Fox News — the analysis after the speech was about the 2020 presidential campaign…. People in Venezuela are suffering. They’re starving. We need to help. I thought Trump was trying to get something done, but the news folk rush to talk about the damned campaign, as if that’s what sophisticated, savvy people do. I found it offensive.”

Turley has posted twice already explaining that the action was legally justified, with some other useful analysis today, including a pointed reference to Axis hypocrisy:

…Some of us had written that Trump had a winning legal argument by focusing on the operation as the seizure of two indicted individuals in reliance on past judicial rulings, including the decisions in the case of former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and General Dan Caine stayed on script and reinforced this narrative. Both repeatedly noted that this was an operation intended to bring two individuals to justice and that law enforcement personnel were part of the extraction team to place them into legal custody. Rubio was, again, particularly effective in emphasizing that Maduro was not the head of state but a criminal dictator who took control after losing democratic elections.

However, while noting the purpose of the capture, President Trump proceeded to declare that the United States would engage in nation-building to achieve lasting regime change. He stated that they would be running Venezuela to ensure a friendly government and the repayment of seized U.S. property dating back to the government of Hugo Chávez.

… [Trump]is the most transparent president in my lifetime with prolonged (at times excruciatingly long) press conferences and a brutal frankness about his motivations. Second, he is unabashedly and undeniably transactional in most of his dealings. He is not ashamed to state what he wants the country to get out of the deal.

In Venezuela, he wants a stable partner, and he wants oil.

Chávez and Maduro had implemented moronic socialist policies that reduced one of the most prosperous nations to an economic basket case. They brought in Cuban security thugs to help keep the population under repressive conditions, as a third fled to the United States and other countries.

After an extraordinary operation to capture Maduro, Trump was faced with socialist Maduro allies on every level of the government. He is not willing to allow those same regressive elements to reassert themselves.

The problem is that, if the purpose was regime change, this attack was an act of war, which is why Rubio struggled to bring the presser back to the law enforcement purpose. I have long criticized the erosion of the war declaration powers of Congress, including my representation of members of Congress in opposition to Obama’s Libyan war effort.

The fact, however, is that we lost that case. Trump knows that. Courts have routinely dismissed challenges to undeclared military offensives against other nations. In fairness to Trump, most Democrats were as quiet as church mice when Obama and Hillary Clinton attacked Libya’s capital and military sites to achieve regime change without any authorization from Congress. They were also silent when Obama vaporized an American under this “kill list” policy without even a criminal charge. So please spare me the outrage now.

My strong preferences for congressional authorization and consultation are immaterial. The question I am asked as a legal analyst is whether this operation would be viewed as lawful. The answer remains yes.

A couple items in that analysis warrant special attention, like…

  • “[Trump]is the most transparent president in my lifetime.” That is absolutely true, yet the narrative being pushed by the unscrupulous Axis is that he is a habitual liar of epic proportions.
  • “….most Democrats were as quiet as church mice when Obama and Hillary Clinton attacked Libya’s capital and military sites to achieve regime change without any authorization from Congress.” Indeed, this is the gold standard of double standards that should be shaken in the faces of the reflex Trump-haters like a terrier shakes a rat.

2. 2024’s Ethics Hero of the Year Elon Musk called the elimination of Maduro “a win for the world.” Well, the Good Guys of the world, anyway. Russia, China, Iran and Cuba, as well as neighboring South American leftist states like Columbia and Brazil and drug cartel-run states like Mexico, condemned Trump’s action. Gee, wouldn’t that collection provide the Mad Left a big clue regarding the distribution of bad Guys and Good Guys on this issue? No, because to the Trump Deranged and the anti-Americans, wherever Trump is automatically is the House Where Evil Dwells.

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Unethical Quote of the Year (2026): New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”

—New New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani in his speech yesterday to too many ignorant voters who have no idea what he’s talking about and what they are in for.

Choosing that “Bananas” clip from the Ethics Alarms Hollywood clip archive was too easy; not only is it one of my favorites, but other pundits and social media wags has already made the connection to Woody’s Allen’s fictional South American country of San Marcos. And Mamdani’s open embrace of communism in that sentence was, indeed, bananas. I am sorely tempted to just leave the post at that: it’s res ipsa loguitur. It speaks for itself.

Yet it doesn’t speak for itself: that’s the scary part. That is what our education system’s collapse into incompetence and indoctrination has brought us. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” wrote George Santayana in his 1905 book, “The Life of Reason.” The average American not nearing retirement age is likely to say, upon hearing Mamdani’s seductive threat, “Collectivism! Sounds good to me!” as well as “Who’s Santayana?”

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Ethics Quote of the Month: CBS Evening News

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“On too many stories, the press has missed the story. Because we’ve taken into account the perspective of advocates and not the average American. Or we put too much weight in the analysis of academics or elites, and not enough on you.” That changes now. The new CBS Evening News starts Monday at 6:30 p.m. ET on CBS.”

—Out of the mouth of new anchor Tony Dokoupil, on behalf of CBS News.

CBS, like ABC, NBC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, has allowed political agendas and unprofessional practices, not to mention laziness and bias, to make broadcast journalism untrustworthy, corrupt and destructive to a well-functioning democracy for decades. Now, after New York Times rebel Bari Weiss has been installed by the network’s new owners to restore balance, fairness, objectivity and competence to CBS News, once the gold standard for TV news reporting (or so we thought), CBS is promising a reset. That would mean a good faith attempt to return to ethical journalism.

Do you believe it? There are good reasons to be dubious, and that statement, which was presumably drafted with some care, is one of them:

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Ethics Dunce: New Frenchman George Clooney

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

How ironic. The same week we learn that George, his un-American wife and their two children have fled the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave for the Land of the Snail and the Home of the Censored, “Variety” publishes a puff piece on the part-time actor presenting him as more than he is, which is a bubble-dwelling Hollywood progressive laboring under the delusion that he has something useful to contribute to the public discourse. He hasn’t. Neither does “Variety”.

We are told that when George was preparing to make his Broadway debut in the stage adaptation of his film about TV news icon Edward R. Murrow in “Good Night, and Good Luck,” he invited “60 Minutes” to witness that cast’s their first read-through. Clooney ‘s angle was that there is a parallel between McCarthyism in the 1950s and the “political pressure that news organizations face in the second Trump administration.” There’s a parallel all right, but it is the Democratic Party’s adoption of McCarthy’s tactics (like guilt by association) to try to dominate American policy and politics through fear and hate. President Biden’s “Republicans are fascists” speech was pure McCarthyism. The progressive pattern of cancelling any truth-teller who informs the public of what the 21st Century Left is attempting to do to the government and the culture is McCarthyism.

“When the other three estates fail — when the judiciary and the executive and the legislative branches fail us — the fourth estate has to succeed,” Clooney tells “Variety.” I’m sure he really believes that, because George, while intellectually ambitious, just isn’t very bright: bias has made him stupid. If he was alert and capable of objective analysis, he would realize that journalism has already failed, unless one calls abandoning journalism for partisan propaganda is “success.”

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Unethical Quote of the Week: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

“My understanding was that independent agencies exist because Congress has decided that some issues, some matters, some areas should be handled in this way by non-partisan experts, that Congress is saying that expertise matters — with respect to aspects of the economy, and transportation, and the various independent agencies that we have. So, having a president come in and fire all the scientists, and the doctors, and the economists, and the PhDs, and replacing them with loyalists and people who don’t know anything, is actually not in the best interest of the citizens of the United States.”

—-Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, making the case for a technocracy that directly contradicts the structure of government dictated by that U.S. Constitution thingy, in her questioning of  U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer during this week’s oral argument in “United States v. Slaughter”.

As Professor Turley archly comments in his post on Jackson’s classically totalitarian belief that the proletariat can’t be trusted and must be guided by supposedly wise and beneficent “experts” (like her), “Jackson simply brushed aside the fact that the president is given authority to execute the laws and that the executive branch is established under the Constitution…The use of “real-world consequences” seems to overwhelm any true separation-of-powers protections for presidents against the administrative state. It also allows the Court to delve into effective policy or legislative impacts in support of the expert class over what are framed as ignorant or vengeful presidents.”

To state what should be obvious about the so-called “expert class,” they have proven themselves to be very partisan and therefore not sufficiently trustworthy for Congress to bestow on them “independence” from Presidential oversight within the Executive Branch. We have seen that experts like university professors and scholars are overwhelmingly biased and partisan, that scientists are biased and partisan, that doctors, lawyers, economists, psychologists, judges and, yes, ethicists are biased partisan. The concept of the non-partisan, independent expert is a convenient ideology-driven mythology, and anyone paying attention to what we have witnessed in our country, society, and culture over the past couple of decades has to admit that it is as believable as Santa Claus.

Let me add in closing that the arrogance and smug entitlement that radiates from Jackson’s “people who don’t know anything” is staggering, obnoxious, and ironic. She’s a Supreme Court Justice and apparently doesn’t know what the Constitution means…

Ethics Dunce, Unethical Quote of the Month, Incompetent Elected Official of the Month—Wow, What An Idiot!—Sen. Tammy Duckworth

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

If you can watch Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth in that CNN segment without your head exploding at the 3:43 mark, you are a better man than I am, Gunga Din.

After stating that the the so called “double-tap” bombing of alleged Venezuelan drug-smugglers was a war crime and murder, Duckworth is asked by Dana Bash, inadvertently practicing journalism, whether the Senator in fact knows what the hell she is ranting about, and gets the equivalent of “no,” “I just know what I’ve read online” and “I only know what I read in the newspapers.”

What Duckworth answered can be fairly translated as “I don’t really know anything the average channel-surfing short-order cook knows about this, and maybe less only I just tuned in to MSNBC, but I’m a Democrat, we have to criticize anything the Trump administration does, and I’ve got some talking points that my staffer was emailed from the DNC—maybe the same ones you were sent, Dana—and I’m just going from those.”

Duckworth was on CNN to discuss the incident as a purported expert: she’s built her entire political career by relying on her Army National Guard veteran status and losing her legs when her helicopter was hit by a missile during the first Iraq War. It’s an insult to viewers for her to go on the air and accuse the Department of War of “murder” without doing more than checking “what’s available in the media,” whatever that means in her case. I bet she got a summary of “what’s available in the media” and what she “knows” is double hearsay.

If I am asked on a radio show to give my opinion as an ethicist about, say, a law firm firing a member for a social media post denigrating Charlie Kirk and President Trump, I’d better have read the various analyses by my colleagues in the field, looked at the relevant ethics rules and legal ethics opinions, kno what the fired attorney wrote, and be ready to provide some trustworthy analysis other than “I only know what I read on ‘Above the Law.'”

This is the very epitome of political hackery. The Senator goes on CNN with no preparation at all, and spews a predetermined and predictable position because Trump Bad, while not even pretending to have any special insight into what occurred.

Unethical Quote of the Week: “Good Illegal Immigrant”Rahel Negassi

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” she told him. “The only thing I’ve done is that I am Eritrean.”

—-Illegal Eritrean immigrant Rahel Negassito to her son, in the latest “Feel badly for illegal immigrants who finally get what they deserve” feature by the New York Times.

Rahel looks smug and defiant in the photo, as indeed she is. She did nothing wrong, but the (revoltingly) sympathetic story of her problems relocating to Canada from the U.S., where she has been residing illegally for 20 years, reports that she got into the country by

  • “…paying a smuggler who eventually got her to Britain, where she bought a fake British passport” to get her into the U.S.
  • …getting caught by ICE when the passport was recognized as fake
  • …being released after her application as a refugee was rejected, as a “paroled undocumented migrant.” 
  • ….living with her citizen sister for 20 years, counting on America’s slack and, for most of the period, law-ignoring immigration process to protect her.

Then as the story tells us, cruel Donald Trump was elected and set out to fulfill his campaign promise to clear as many illegal immigrants out of the U.S. as possible. A gift link is here.

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And This Is Supposed To Be A Rising Leader of the Democrat Party…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Unbelievable. Or at least it should be unbelievable that an elected member of Congress would behave like this. That the party such an indefensible hack belongs to—and who is regarded as a leader of???— wouldn’t collectively disclaim any responsibility for said hack and wear paper bags over their heads in penance. That…oh, never mind. Why do I bother?

Diving in to try to defend Virginia Islands Delegate Stacey Plaskett (D) after the Epstein files revealed that she had been reading texts from the convicted sex-trafficker during a House hearing, Crockett got up and accused Mitt Romney, John McCain, Sarah Palin and Trump official Lee Zeldin among other Republicans officials of receiving political contributions from “someone named Jeffrey Epstein” as she claimed that Republicans were exacting a double standard—you know, like Democrats do routinely. But the Jeffrey Epstein she was tying to Romney et al. was a completely different person.

Was the ethically-inert Texas Congresswomen shooting off her mouth using false information because she is irresponsible and incompetent, or was she engaging in despicable deceit (that is, lying) to mislead the public? Who knows, and I don’t care: her declaration was a bright-line ethics breach and sanctionable in either case, as well as signature significance both for an untrustworthy member of Congress and a hyper-partisan asshole.

Ah, but this in-your-face blot on the U.S. Legislative Branch wasn’t done. When her false innuendos were raised in a CNN interview, Crockett exploded in double-talk to try to weasel out of her indefensible conduct:

“Listen, I never said that it was that Jeffrey Epstein. Just so that people understand, when you make a donation, your picture is not there. And because they decided to spring this on us in real time, I wanted the Republicans to think about what could potentially happen because I knew that they didn’t even try to go through the FEC,” this awful woman humina-humina-ed. “So my team, what they did is they Googled. And that is specifically why I said, ‘a Jeffrey Epstein’. Unlike Republicans, I at least don’t go out and just tell lies.”

Somebody pleas explain to Crockett what a lie is.

” Because it was not the same one, that’s fine,” she continued, spinning like Dorothy’s cyclone. “But when Lee Zeldin had something to say, all he had to say was it was a different Jeffrey Epstein. He admitted that he did receive donations from a Jeffrey Epstein. So at least I wasn’t trying to mislead people. Now, have I dug in to find out who this doctor is? I have not. So I will trust and take what he says is that it wasn’t that Jeffrey Epstein, but I was not attempting to mislead anybody. I literally had maybe 20 minutes before I had to do that debate.”

Right. Of course she was trying to mislead.

Kaitlin Collins responded (more equivocally than she should have): “Yeah, but people might see that say, well, you’re trying to make it sound like he took money from a literal sex offender.”

“But I literally did not know,” Crockett answered.

Jasmine Crockett is a walking, jive-talking insult to the nation.