Ethics Train Wrecks

Andrew Sullivan Makes An Ethics Case For Throwing Out The Democrats

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Because he writes so well and because he is an accomplished critical thinker, iconic blogging pioneer Andrew Sullivan’s opinion pieces are always worth reading even when he’s completely wrong. True, bias sometimes makes Andrew stupid, which shows the awesome power of bias because he’s definitely not stupid. Sullivan’s devotion to gayness is one source of emotionalism for him; another is his blind hatred of Donald Trump, which to my eye seems to be of the George Will/Bill Kristol variety: Sullivan thinks Trump is an unmannerly low-life too vulgar for him to agree with. I think Sullivan may be terrified of cognitive dissonance self-destruction if he admits to agreeing with Trump on most substantive issues, which he does.

In his latest substack newsletter, Sullivan spins his topic a bit to avoid alienating his mostly left-leaning readership, calling it “Will Biden And The Dems Finally Get It? Their far-left record has made the far right more electable.” Oh, see? The real problem with the Biden policy fiascos is that they will let the evil far right gain power. Shame on you, Andrew. Have the guts and integrity to be clear about what you are really saying…which is this:

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And The NYT Dutifully Feeds A Misinformation Loop About Republicans Creating Misinformation About The Paul Pelosi Attack That They Caused, Of Course, And That’s A FACT! [Updated!]

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The report above was mysteriously pulled and denied by NBC last week, not generally known to be a Republican mouthpiece. But the New York Times front page today includes as its primary “news” story, an accusatory piece headlined, “How Republicans Fed a Misinformation Loop About the Pelosi Attack.”

Oddly, the story doesn’t mention the recanted NBC story at all. I guess New York Times readers don’t need to know about that when they are assessing, right before the November 8 election, whether to vote for those evil Republicans.

Nor does the story, by undoubtedly good registered Democrats Annie Karni, Malika Khurana and Stuart A. Thompson, note that all of the theories, speculation and “misinformation” has flourished because of the strange absence of crucial information that police have but so far refuse to release: Pelosi’s 911 call, and security footage of the break-in. A reader will also search in vain for any mention of the details in the original report that caused such speculation, like the statement that there was a “third person” involved. There is no explanation of why Pelosi referred to his attacker as “a friend.” I guess I don’t understand this complex, crucial profession of “journalism,” but it would seem to me, tyro that I am, that an article about the GOP pushing “misinformation” might begin by clarifying the gaping holes in the story that have made people who don’t just swallow biased media narratives whole a teeny bit suspicious.

One thing the story is clear about, however, is that it is cold, hard, irrefutable information that Pelosi’s attacker, a mentally ill, rainbow flag embracing, Black Lives Matter-admiring illegal alien, was motivated to attack Paul Pelosi because Republicans have been saying mean things about Nancy Pelosi for some unknown reason. After all, “Mr. Pelosi’s attacker is said to have believed “Mr. Trump’s lie of a stolen election,” among other falsehoods. Said by whom? Oh, that’s not important; what’s important is that Republicans are circulating misinformation about the attack.

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On Biden’s Speech….

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

I’m not even sure the partisan campaign speech President Joe Biden delivered last night from Union Station [text here] in Washington, DC even rises to the level of grasping at straws. It was certainly desperate and pathetic in its desperation and hypocrisy: Ethics Alarms has been predicting that as the reality of public lashback against the spectacularly failed Democratic Party rule since 2020 (and in many places, before) became undeniable, the lies, tantrums and other excesses of those accountable would escalate. I’m sure even worse is on the horizon, but the most charitable thing one could say about Biden’s speech last night is that it wasn’t a terrible as his earlier one calling Republicans fascists. Nonetheless, in my preliminary research, no President has ever given two such divisive and intellectually indefensible speeches in their entire time in office, and Joe Biden gave them within 60 days of each other.

The speech comes as the various polls are finally showing what anyone paying attention knew was the case long before: Democrats are losing support even from their base, and face an epic shellacking. The slashing conservative blogger Ace of Spades, I think, has this scam figured out. He writes that the polling organizations, most of them allied with with progressive universities and biased news organizations, deliberately slanted their polling groups towards Democrats in order to please their clients. (Another analyst adds that such fake news gives Democrats sufficient hope to peddle in fundraising appeals, knowing well that the real numbers would be far more discouraging.) Now, however, because their future credibility depends on not looking like idiots when the votes are tallied, the pollsters are finally playing it straight.

Still, even as all around Biden are losing their heads and blaming it on him, I cannot fathom the epic gall required for this President of all Presidents to base a last ditch appeal for his party on the argument that “we the people must decide whether we’re going to sustain a republic where reality is accepted, the law is obeyed, and your vote is truly sacred.”

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“By Any Means Necessary”: The Final Stage In The Axis of Unethical Conduct’s 2022 Mid-Term Election Freak-Out Begins

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The frantic efforts of the news media, some Democrats (Rep. Jackie Speier tweeted: “While the motive is still unknown we know where this kind of violence is sanctioned and modeled.”) and ranting bloggers and tweeters like this guy to try to link the certifiable lunatic who attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer to Republicans is just the beginning. Pop that metaphorical popcorn—between now and a week from Tuesday, this will get crazier by the day. Reality has set in. The piper must be paid, the chickens are coming home, the walls are closing in, the jig is up and there’s no way out. The vast majority of those active in the Axis of Unethical Conduct (“the resistance”/the Democratic Party/the mainstream media) are evidently going to thoroughly embarrass themselves and soil our political discourse by ensuring as much confusion, bitterness and division as their imagination, energy and ethics void will permit. It’s going to be ugly, perhaps historically ugly. In “1984” terms, those hungry rats are about to be let loose on these dunces and villains faces, and they will do or say anything, betray any individuals or principles, to avoid the horror. They are in the throes of Rationalization #31, The Troublesome Luxury or “Ethics is a luxury we can’t afford right now” nd #40. The Desperation Dodge or “I’ll do anything!”

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Another Damning IIPTDXTTNMIAFB: President Biden Intentionally Violates The Constitution, Hoping He Can Get Away With It

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

IIPTDXTTNMIAFB are the Ethics Alarms initials for “Imagine if President Trump did X that the news media is accepting from Biden.” The phenomenon has been a theme of the Biden Presidency Ethics Train Wreck so far: The Washington Post isn’t keeping an archive of Biden’s lies like they did for President Trump (and most of what they archived weren’t lies anyway), and Biden has arguably engaged in far more substantive and deliberate untruths in less than two years than Trump did in four. It was a recent Biden lie of breathtaking audacity that reminded me to write about this issue: over the weekend just passed, Biden told an interviewer regarding his student loan debt bailout: “It’s passed. I got it passed by a vote or two.”

No, this was an Executive Order. It wasn’t a bill, it wasn’t voted on by Congress, and it didn’t “pass”—that’s exactly why it is unconstitutional. The scary possibility is that Biden actually thinks it did pass, but I refuse to accept “He’s senile, and doesn’t know what the hell is going on” as a defense for such blatant falsehoods.

Prof. Turley, who is becoming increasingly outraged at the Democratic Party’s disregard and disrespect for the Constitution, blasted away at Biden’s deliberate defiance of the law of the land in a recent post. Noting that Biden falsely (or ignorantly) boasted that the courts “are on his side” regarding the illegal EO despite the fact that the initial law suits blocking it were rejected on procedural and not substantive legal grounds (amazingly, Biden went to law school), Turley fumed…

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Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck Update, Part 2: Hospital Masking

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I actually witnessed this exchange three days ago, as part of my four-day Alexandria, VA hospital adventure:

Woman: Put on a mask! This is a hospital!

Man: Why should I? You’re not wearing one!

Woman: I am!

Man: You’re wearing it under your nose!

Woman: I’m still wearing it! Put one on, or I’m reporting you!

Man. Go ahead!

Whereupon the woman turned to the elderly volunteer manning the desk at the entrance. He wasn’t wearing a mask.

Are the idiotic pandemic masks the official symbol and attire of The Great Stupid? I think so. My experience at the INOVA hospital convinced me. At the Emergency Room entrance. a large sign mandated masks. A security guard ordered me to put one on (but not my wife, who was being checked in). The masks being handed out were those cheap paper things that are either completely useless or mostly useless, depending on who you talk to. During the four days of hospital visits, I didn’t see a single N95 mask on the faces of staff, patients or visitors.

Around the busy ER waiting area, there were unmasked people, masked people, and people wearing masks under their noses or chins. When my wife was being checked in, nobody appeared to care about the masks at all. The nurse processing us wore no mask. I didn’t; my wife didn’t. The attendants who took her to the temporary room did. Later on, all of the nurses and techs were masked, but some doctors were not. Nobody ever asked me or my wife to put one on. In the nearby rooms, the typical scene was an unmasked patient and a mixed crowd of masked and unmasked family members, shoulder to shoulder.

Later, when my wife was moved to a regular hospital room, the signs even disappeared. The Patients Entrance and Visitors entrance had cheap masks available, but there were no apparent requirements. Sometimes the receptionists were masked, sometimes not. Sometimes one was and the other wasn’t. I walked in maskless (let’s see…) eight times, and nobody said a word.

What’s going on here?

Madness, as Major Clipton said. Virtue signaling. Confusion. Mixed messages. Chaos. Fear. Stupidity.

Science!

For Some Strange Reason, The Playwright Didn’t Think “N-Word” Carried The Same Dramatic Punch..

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Yes, this is another Strange Tale of the Great Stupid.

A depressing one.

In the opening scene of Down in Mississippi by African American playwright Carlyle Brown, a white man calls a black character “nigger” multiple times and threatens him after learning that he’s in the area to help register black citizens to vote. Texas Wesleyan’s Black Student Association shared an Instagram post about how many students were “deeply disturbed” that such scenes would be shown on campus, because it might “hurt Black students and possibly students from other marginalized communities.”

So the university decided not to mount the production. Brown, the playwright, argued that the word’s use in the play was necessary to maintain historical accuracy and to provoke strong responses. Yes, and he might have also pointed out that this is live drama, and the objective of live drama is to arouse the audience’s emotions. Glenn O. Lewis, the first black board chairman the university has had, diplomatically said that he understood how the language could make some students uncomfortable, “But when have we ever … learned anything in our comfort zone?” Lewis asked. “You don’t learn anything new until you get out of your comfort zone, and I think that is what Mr. Brown intended for this play to do.” Lewis added that censorship of Brown’s work is not a real solution.

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It Looks Like Donald Trump Was Betrayed By Another One Of His Lawyers, Someone Else…Or Himself

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Just because Trump is paranoid doesn’t mean almost everyone around him isn’t trying to stab him in the back.

From the New York Times:

Shortly after turning over 15 boxes of government material to the National Archives in January, former President Donald J. Trump directed a lawyer working for him to tell the archives that he had returned all the documents he had taken from the White House at the end of his presidency, according to two people familiar with the discussion.

The lawyer, Alex Cannon, had become a point of contact for officials with the National Archives, who had tried for months to get Mr. Trump to return presidential records that he failed to turn over upon leaving office. Mr. Cannon declined to convey Mr. Trump’s message to the archives because he was not sure if it was true, the people said.

The story was leaked to, naturally, Maggie Haberman, the full-time Trump Fury on the Times staff. She’s currently peddling a book full of anti-Trump tales, gossip and embarrassments. A lot of her stories over the last six years have been about what the President supposedly said behind closed door, or suggested, or asked others to do, none of which actually came to anything but the point is to make Trump look bad, dangerous or stupid. Of course, ethical aides, associates and lawyer don’t tell hostile reporters (or anyone at all) about such conversations because they are in the positions they are because the President trusts them. Donald Trump has been betrayed by such people more times, I would estimate, than all of the last six Presidents combined. Continue reading →

For Amherst College Students, A Values And Self-Respect Test…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

…and for Amherst itself, a test of how well its totalitarian indoctrination program is working. Just look at this head-exploding thing:

Well.

The new policy at Amherst College has each student and teacher fill out an anonymous survey to state whether they want a mask mandate in their classroom. If a single student, or the instructor, so desires, everyone will be required to wear a mask, despite the fact that masking as the paranoid and largely useless security-blanket response to the lurking Wuhan virus and its relatives is no longer required by CDC guidelines (Science!) and that masks are now almost exclusively worn by phobics, lock-step progressives seeking to show their fealty using the equivalent of a Nazi armband, and people so immuno-compromised that they probably shouldn’t be out in public at all. Continue reading →

From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: The FBI’s Draft Termination Letter To FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

What more is there to be said? Well, just a little.

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