Etiquette and manners

Ethics Dunce: Jared Schmeck [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

That’s nice…embarrassing the President of the United States while he’s engaged in a non-partisan Christmas-related appearance. How clever. How brave.

What an asshole.

As you can see above, President Biden and the First Lady were set up by (allegedly) a father participating in the annual White House NORAD Santa-tracking call, who ended his conversation with POTUS with the “Let’s Go Brandon,” the code for “Fuck Joe Biden.”  After the caller, identified as “Jared from Oregon,” but later revealed to be Jared Schmeck, wished the President and Jill Biden a merry Christmas and added, “…and let’s go Brandon!” Poor clueless Joe responded “Let’s go Brandon, I agree!”

Hilarity and ridicule quickly followed in conservative media- and social medialand.

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From The Signature Significance Files: “The Divine Miss M” Demonstrates When An Apology Is Too Late And Meaningless

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Another thing everyone should thank Joe Manchin for is the way his decision not to capitulate to pressure on the irresponsible “Build Back Better” bill has caused so many prominent Americans to unmask themselves as the jerks, liars and frauds thet are.

Take Paul Krugman...please! The ultra-biased and partisan Times pundit is supposedly a Nobel Prize-winning economist, yet his attack on Manchin’s “betrayal“—yes, a Democrat voting his conscience rather than meekly submitting to orders is a betrayal—is an embarrassing concoction of appeals to emotion, appeals to authority, and “everybody does it.” A high school paper columnist could have written the screed. “And studies show that policies to mitigate climate change will also yield major health benefits from cleaner air over the next decade,” Krugman writes. Yes, and other studies say they might, and still other studies doubt they can.

This economist also calls the multi-trillion dollar bill “Biden’s moderate spending plan,” though the CBO estimates that enacting this legislation would result in a net increase in the deficit of at least $367 billion over the 2022-2031 period, and that’s with increased taxes. He should be ashamed of himself for abusing his own perceived authority and his readers’ trust with such garbage, but we know my now that he’s shameless.

But my favorite self-indicting jerk is Bette Midler.

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The Project Veritas Ethics Train Wreck (So Far)…[Updated!]

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Train-Wreck air

This was certainly inevitable. Project Veritas is an unethical journalism organization with a one-way bias (that’s to the Right, in case you have been studying loftier matters), meaning that it is not interested in truth or informing the public, but only the truth (maybe) that benefits a particular political agenda. But unethical people and organizations where the ends justify the means is a motto provoke unethical responses in the other direction—it is the ethics version of Newton’s Third Law—and that is where ethics train wrecks come from.

The ends of Project Veritas’s various unethical means have been revealing and valuable in many cases. A corrupt community organizing group, ACORN, was exposed, as it deserved to be. Planned Parenthood’s ghoulish lack of respect for human life was also exposed, with fewer consequences. It wasn’t really necessary for Corporation for Public Broadcasting executives to be gulled into saying for posterity that the taxpayer-funded company is progressive and biased because that should be screamingly obvious to anyone who isn’t biased themselves. But progressives (and those brainwashed by the progressive media) continue to gaslight critics with the Jumbo-esque “Bias? What bias?” defense of the indefensible, so this Project Veritas hit was satisfying, if not ethical.

Now, as we knew it would, those embarrassed or exposed by Project Veritas are striking back. The focus is President Biden’s troubled daughter Ashley’s diary, in which, among other things, she suggests that her father showered with her when she was a child. The diary found its way into the clutches of Project Veritas before the election, though it did not publish any of it. (Its explanation for this choice, that O’Keefe felt doing so would be seen as a “cheap shot,” defies belief coming from the King of Cheap Shots, but never mind.) Apparently, the New York Times’ investigation found, Ashley left her diary behind when she moved out of the home of a friend, and it was found by a woman named Aimee Harris, who moved in after Ashley left. {The Times feels it necessary to detail Harris’s personal and financial problems, which is completely irrelevant to the diary. That’s a real cheap shot. Her conduct is what matters in the report, not her problems.)

Harris, whom the Times makes sure we know “was a fan of Mr. Trump,” meaning she was by definition evil, learned that Ashley had stayed there previously and had left some things behind. Harris apparently found the diary.

Subsequent debates center on whether the diary was lost or abandoned. I don’t care about the legal haggling: Harris was ethically obligated to contact Ms. Biden and ask what she wanted done with it. The options for responses were a) “Sent it back to me”; b) “Destroy it,”and c) “I don’t care what you do with it.” Only c) would have entitled Harris to read Biden’s private entrees, or to give it to anyone but Biden.

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Comments On Another IIPTDXTTNMIAFB Classic

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Yes, President Biden really does seem to think the word is “expodentially.” Based on the way he uses it, the word the President means is “exponentially.” Now, normally I regard excessive attention being paid to an eccentric mispronunciation by a public figure as petty and unfair. Jimmy Carter famously pronounced “nuclear” as “nucular.” My father, an articulate and literate man, mispronounced “fiasco” as “fiesca” for some reason, no matter how many times I corrected him.

But if President Trump kept repeating a blatant mispronunciation of a word (for that matter if George W. Bush did) we would never hear the end of it. Comics like Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah would beat the mockery into a pulp by overuse. This would be have been cited as proof that Trump is a moron. Proof that he never reads. Proof that he should be removed via the 25th Amendment. Remember “covfefe”? Trump tweeted that once, and it was obviously a typo. Never mind: he was mocked about it for weeks.

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A Musical Ethics Quiz: D.C.’s Biased Jailer

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Landerkin fuck

There’s really nothing special about this tweet from a woman named Kathleen Landerkin. I have friends and relatives who might tweet the same sentiments, if they were, you know, vulgar, uncivil clods. They aren’t, fortunately: I don’t consort with vulgar, uncivil clods. However, the tweet above is significant, because Ms. Landerkin is the current Correctional Training Facility (CTF) Deputy Warden at the Department of Corrections in the District of Columbia, and thus assists in overseeing day to day operations, inmate transportation, and case management at the D.C. Jail. The D.C. Jail is where Donald Trump supporting participants in the January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol are being kept.

Landerkin has been wildly vocal abut her hatred of al things related to Donald Trump, especially his supporters, and has been tweeting rants and nasty messages about those she creatively calls “deplorables” for years. One of the more provocative comments was this one, from 2018:

landerkin-white-people-extinct

Why should anyone care? Well, she has power over the January 6 inmates, and this degree of hostility, which could be fairly called demented, calls into legitimate question her ability to do her job fairly. Or does it? Literally dozens of over-heated tweets were uncovered by an enterprising social media sleuth, so Landerkin took down her account…but not before he reduced them to a video.

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In Which I Fail My Duty To Fight Civility Rot…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

broken-window

Ah, another day, another ethics challenge at the 7-11! If it isn’t CVS, it’s another local establishment. As Roseanne Roseannadanna used to say,

For the third straight night, some jerk had parked his car in the church parking lot overlooking our cul-de-sac, sitting with his headlights on so they came right in our living room window and driving my wife to distraction. And also for the third straight night, I put my lovey but pit-bully dog Spuds on his leash to confront the driver, and asked him why the hell he was sitting in his car shining lights in my window. They always say the same thing: “I’m sorry, I had no idea!” Why don’t they have any idea? See those houses literally right in front of you? See where the light beams go?

What’s the matter with these people?

Immediately thereafter, I ran an errand for my already annoyed wife that required me to go to our local 7-11. The clerk, whom I don’t think I’ve ever seen before but he was wearing a %&4#@! mask so I can’t be certain, handled my transaction while having a conversation on his cell phone, never looking at me. This has never happened to me before. In fact, more than once I have admonished customers ahead of me in line in various stores for not having the common courtesy and respect to get off their cell phones or bluetooths and treat clerks like human beings rather than robots. I’ve done it at that 7-11, in fact.

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The Worst Loser

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Worst losers

It says something, I am not quite sure what, about our deteriorating political culture that the two poorest losers in American Presidential election history were the last two losing candidates, and whoever third place belongs to—Aaron Burr maybe? John Adams? Adlai Stevenson made some ungracious comments after his second defeat by Eisenhower suggesting that Ike’s weak heart would make Nixon President—is too far from them to be seen with the Mt. Palomar telescope.

Hillary Clinton had the title wrapped up, I assumed for all time, after her four-year whine-fest following her defeat by Donald Trump. She announced herself a member of “the resistance,” blamed everyone and everything imaginable except the real culprit (herself), and encouraged surrogates and the news media to attempt various dishonest arguments to cast suspicion on Trump’s victory. Was her refusal to make the traditional statement wishing the new President well and pledging to do what she could in the interest of unity and the national interest the catalyst for the Democrats’ villainous effort to undermine Trump’s Presidency by false accusations, contrived impeachment and ad hominem slurs? Whether it was or not, Clinton openly fumed and seethed about her loss, trapped in the anger stage of grief and never moving on to acceptance.

Donald Trump, of course, passed her in the Bad Loser race like she was standing still once the 2020 election night showed Joe Biden was a winner. Not only did Trump refuse to concede, he continued to insist that the election was rigged and even that he had won…in fact, won by a landslide. He encouraged public protests and employed lawyers who over-promised, made intemperate claims, and either came close to the line of unethical advocacy or crossed it.

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Ethics Quiz: Fat-Shaming Or Legitimate Criticism?

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

Belgian health

That’s Maggie De Block, the Belgian Minister of Health from October 2014 to October 2020. She is currently serving as a member of the World Health Organization’s Pan-European Commission on Health and Sustainable Development.

For some reason her photograph came to the attention of social media over the weekend, and she is being made the target of considerable mockery (though she is being incorrectly labeled as Belgium’s current Minister of Health). At 59, she is estimated to weigh between 350 and 400 pounds.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz to begin a busy week is…

Is it fair to criticize her for her weight when she is in a position involved with health promotion and policy?

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Ethics Pot Meet Ethics Kettle I: Rep. Boebert (R-Co.) vs. Rep. Omar

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

It’s like one of those monster vs. monster movies, such as “Godzilla vs. King Kong”: who do you root for? In the case of extreme right-wing, irresponsible and uncivil GOP fire-breather Lauren Boebert battling extreme leftist House Democrat Illhan Omar, the only ethical position is to hope they fight each other right out of Congress, where they both do immeasurable harm.

Omar is, I hope I do not have to explain in much detail, horrible. She would be the worst of “The Squad,” but, incredibly, the other members are so irredeemably awful that this is a tough call. Her background is full of scandals that would guarantee the end of the career of any non-black, non-Muslim representative in a sane party, which the Democratic Party is no longer. She repeatedly makes anti-Semitic, anti-Israel comments. Her infamous characterization of 9-11 (a comment barely reported by the mainstream media) was that “some people did something.” She has advocated defunding the police in Minnesota.

None of this justifies any member of Congress attacking her with ad hominem rhetoric, but Colorado’s Lauren Boebert is special, even by far right Republican standards. She has used Omar’s religion against her, calling her part of a “Jihad Squad” and told an audience before Thanksgiving that a Capitol Police officer was concerned about Omar boarding an elevator until Boebert reassured him by saying, “Well, she doesn’t have a backpack. We should be fine.”

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