Ethics Quotes

Return of the “2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck”

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

Here is another important news story that the mainstream media (or Democratic operatives, per Instapundit) is ducking, spinning and warping like mad in order to protect its totalitarian allies in the Axis of Unethical Conduct (“The resistance”and the Democratic Party): the emails and other material recently declassified and released by Tulsi Gabbard backs up the contention Ethics Alarms began putting forward in the first Trump administration when it christened the 2016 Post-Election Ethics Train Wreck.

This morning I stumbled on Fox News contributor and former GOP House member Trey Gowdy flipping out in frustration over the revelations and pretty much quoting Ethics Alarms from years ago. I can’t find a video of his explosion that will embed, and I can’t type well enough to make a transcript, but here’s the link, and here is a close approximation of the key quote:

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Comment of the Day: “Ethics Quote of the Week: The New York Times”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Steve-O-in NJ has some trenchant comments about what the Democrats are doing, or trying to do. Personally, I think the operative word here may be “denial.” Or cowardice. Or a political party that has become wedded to lies as its primary tactic whatever the issue, and can’t kick the habit even when it obviously isn’t working any more.

At the 1968 Masters Tournament, pro golfer Roberto De Vicenzo (above) signed an scorecard without checking it, thereby costing him a spot in an 18-hole playoff for the storied championship. He said, “Oh what a stupid I am!” and it stuck with me, as well as with many others, remembered as a poignant expression of regret and self-recrimination. I wasn’t in the ethics biz back then, but I admired the golfer for an honest, brutal assessment of his accountability. I am certain that he never again signed a scorecard without checking the strokes.

What the apparent plan of the Democrats in the wake of last November’s disaster—that is, the Harris-Walz ticket and their stunningly incompetent campaign—is to admit nothing, learn nothing, and to keep existing in as miasma of self-deception. Good luck with that. And I can’t wait to hear the argument asserting why anyone should ever trust a party that responds to failure like that to run anything, not just an economy, but a shoe-shine stand. President Trump and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced last week that about $4 billion in unspent federal funding for California’s absurdly delayed and overbudget high-speed rail project has been terminated.  This boondoggle was originally passed as a ballot initiative in 2008, a 800-mile rail line to be completed by 2020 in two phases on a $33 billion budget, connecting San Francisco with Los Angeles and branches stretching north to Sacramento and south to San Diego. In 2019, Newsom announced that there was no path to completing the original plan after costs ballooned, so the project was cut back to a 171-mile section between Merced and Bakersfield. Of course, the responsible course would have been to end the project entirely. High speed rail, however, as one wag wrote last week, is to transportation what wind farms are to energy: woke, virtue-signaling fantasies unmoored to reality.

Here is Steve-O’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics Quote of the Week: The New York Times”:

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Unethical Quote of the Month: NPR’s CEO Katherine Maher

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“As far as the accusations that we’re biased, I’d stand up and say, ‘Please show me a story that concerns you.’”

The infuriatingly dishonest, smug and biased Katherine Maher, head of NPR, on CNN yesterday.

Social media and others, like Senator John Kennedy and Instapundit, are going wild picking obvious examples. Hell, I have a lot of them; here’s one you may have forgotten (I had).

If Congress doesn’t finally strip public funding from NPR and PBS, there is no reason to trust those people to do anything. The Democrats love them because they are permanent propaganda mouthpieces for their party, but what’s the Republicans’ excuse?

Smug, Self-Satisfied Progressive Asshole of the Year: David Litt

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

The obnoxious screed “Is It Time to Stop Snubbing Your Right-Wing Family?,” authored by an obscure writer I never heard of (three of his better-known mentors are above) and hope I never hear of again, was deemed appropriate content for New York Times readers, and not as satire either.

Litt epitomizes the type of insufferable elitist jerks that have made the modern Left the pit of despond that it has become over the last decade or so. Yuck. Was this guy ever a tolerable human being? The Times should be required to publish a full analysis of how Litt got this way as a public service, kind of like that episode of “I Love Lucy” where her book draft was sought by a publisher to use in a how-to tome to illustrate what writers shouldn’t ever do.

The column is about how Litt “felt a civic duty to be rude” to his wife’s younger brother because he hadn’t seen the light and surrendered his mind to the Woke and Wonderful. A few excerpts will tell you all you need to know about Litt, but I may add a little commentary here and there:

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Unethical Quote of the Week: SCOTUS Justice Sonia Sotomayor

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

 “Public schools, this Court has said, are “at once the symbol of our democracy and the most pervasive means for promoting our common destiny.” … They offer to children of all faiths and backgrounds an education and an opportunity to practice living in our multicultural society. That experience is critical to our Nation’s civic vitality. Yet it will become a mere memory if children must be insulated from exposure to ideas and concepts that may conflict with their parents’ religious beliefs. Today’s ruling ushers in that new reality.”

—-Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissenting (ignorantly as usual) in the case of Mahmoud v. Taylor, the 6-3 ruling in which the Court held that schools have to give parents the option of having their children absent themselves from lessons that are adverse to the family’s’ religious beliefs.

Ethics Alarms already weighed in on this case earlier here, but I neglected to focus on the full calamity of the Wise Latina’s sinister dissent. The flood of incompetent, woke garbage spewing from her colleague Justice Jackson of late has raised a lively debate over which of the two women was the worst DEI appointment. Obama picked Sonia before DEI was a thing, so maybe Jackson, Biden’s selection, wins by default; still O made it clear that it was Sotomayor’s ethnicity and gender and not her legal acumen that got her the “historic” seat on the Court.

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Kudos To The New York Times For Finally Eliminating All Doubt That It Is a Democratic Party Propaganda Organ And Not a “Newspaper”…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This would be an Unethical Quote of the Week if there were any reason to believe what the New York Times says about President Trump, and if the Times didn’t make equally unethical quotes every day.

Here’s part of the Times editorial titled, “Antisemitism Is an Urgent Problem. Too Many People Are Making Excuses”:

“…The political right, including President Trump, deserves substantial blame. Yes, he has led a government crackdown against antisemitism on college campuses, and that crackdown has caused colleges to become more serious about addressing the problem. But Mr. Trump has also used the subject as a pretext for his broader campaign against the independence of higher education. The combination risks turning antisemitism into yet another partisan issue, encouraging opponents to dismiss it as one of his invented realities.

Even worse, Mr. Trump had made it normal to hate, by using bigoted language about a range of groups, including immigrants, women and trans Americans. Since he entered the political scene, attacks on Asian, Black, Latino and L.G.B.T. Americans have spiked, according to the F.B.I. While he claims to deplore antisemitism, his actions tell a different story. He has dined with a Holocaust denier, and his Republican Party has nominated antisemites for elected offices, including governor of North Carolina. Mr. Trump himself praised as “very fine people” the attendees of a 2017 march in Charlottesville, Va., that featured the chant “Jews will not replace us.” On Jan. 6, 2021, at least one rioter attacking the Capitol screamed that he was looking for “the big Jew,” referring to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, Mr. Schumer has said.”

It gives me great pleasure to know that Times boot-licker ” “A Friend,” the long-banned EA commenter who has set a nearly unbreakable record for unauthorized posts here, most bleating about how unfair I am to the noble Times, will be desperately searching for a way to rationalize that verbal offal without having to admit, “Okay, the Times editors are partisan hacks.”

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Unethical Quote of the Week, In So, So Many Ways: Becky Pringle, National Education Association President

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“We know what this administration is doing, so we are saying to Donald Trump and all of his allies, we will not, we will not scapegoat immigrants, we will not—the people who have built this country—we will not stand by and allow you to do that.”

—-Becky Pringle, President of the NEA, declaring her union’s support for open borders and illegal immigration while demonstrating dubious critical thinking skills.

Pringle just got up at a microphone and screamed all of that, and more. There’s a video here that I can’t embed; I have to say that I am suspicious that YouTube does not yet have a video of the hysterical display and that Pringle’s rant has not been more prominently shown on broadcast media. For it is tey another clip that will make a wonderful campaign ad for Republicans. Here is more of her craziness: I could have picked almost any sentence as an “unethical quote”:

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One For the Unethical Quote of the Month Hall of Fame…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“Yes, there were many mistakes, but everybody makes mistakes.”

—–Liliya A. Medvedeva, Russian pensioner, quoted by the New York Times in “Stalin’s Image Returns to Moscow’s Subway, Honoring a Brutal History” about how many Russians regard the brutal dictator as a hero for his role in defeating Germany in World War II.

But Lily, everybody doesn’t make “mistakes” that result in the deaths or executions of between six and nine million people.

You idiot.

For the record, Lily’s rationalization is one of the most obnoxious on the list, #19, The Perfection Diversion, or “Nobody’s Perfect!” and “Everybody makes mistakes!”

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 Sequel to “Is It Ethical to Continue to Slam Former President Biden Now That It Has Been Revealed That He Has Metastatic Prostate Cancer?”— Unethical Quote of the Week: David Axelrod

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“I think those kinds of discussions are going to happen, but they should be more muted and set aside for now as he’s sort of struggling through this.”

—Former Obama campaign manager David Axelrod on CNN, speaking of the reporting on the cover-up of Joe Biden’s dementia for four years by Democrats and the news media

You have to say this for horrible human beings like Axelrod: at least they don’t do a very good job at hiding their cynicism, corruption, and shameless efforts to keep Americans from knowing just how little regard for democracy they have.

Many believe that the news of Biden’s rapidly advancing prostate cancer was released specifically to distract the public from the dawning realization that he was a puppet President and that persons unknown were operating the levers of power Americans thought they had elected Biden President to handle. There is substantial justification for such suspicion, as well as the belief that Democrats also withheld Biden’s cancer diagnosis in the hope that they could get him a second term so Kamala Harris would become President without having to be elected.

So Axelrod comes right out and says, “Please be distracted by the ‘Awww, poor Joe!’ strategy, and stop trying to find out who was really making decisions and policy in the White House!” Thanks, David! It’s good to remove any doubt about just how stupid your party thinks we are.