Government & Politics

Accountability? What’s Accountability? Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle Still Has Her Job, and Only the Prominence of a Confederacy of Ethics Dunces Can Explain That [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 46 Comments

I could go into an analysis of what was so stunningly dangerous and incompetent about the Secret Service FUBAR that almost got Donald Trump murdered, at this point just about the only way the Democrats would be able to keep the White House. I’m happy to wait for the results of Congressional hearings and the investigation, but as I heard many experts say on multiple networks, you don’t have to be an expert to figure from the time-line and what we do know that the Secret Service was spectacularly incompetent, and that Cheatle’s pathetic explanations (I particularly like “the sloped roof was too dangerous for our agents so we let a gunman use it to shoot Trump”) haven’t passed the giggle test. Her ridiculous statements and the fact that the agents knew an unknown person with a gun was within killing distance of Donald Trump and waited for him to take a shot before doing anything (like, say, keeping Trump off the stage: don’t those little earpieces work?) are res ipsa loquitur, so damning that conspiracy theories are unavoidable.

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There Is Hope! Another Incompetent “Squad” Member Is Headed For Defeat

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Above is one of “Cori Bush’s Greatest Hits,” the time in 2021 that she “explained” why she had taxpayers fund a security detail for her so she could advocate de-funding the police. This won her the Ethics Alarms title of “Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month, Year, Decade, Century, And Eon” at the time. Bush, a Democratic House member from the Missouri district occupied entirely by the brain-damaged, isn’t just an “idiot” in the sense that Ethics Alarms usually uses the word. No, the college drop-out and former nurse is a genuine, clinical idiot and an ignoramus to boot. Naturally, she is a member-in-good-standing of The Squad, where being the dumbest in the batch—dumber even than the recently defeated Jamaal Bowman—is quite an achievement.

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Ethics Dunce (Professional Singer Division): Ingrid Andress

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

See, I have a fair amount of sympathy for alcoholics. But the time to check yourself into rehab is before you kill someone driving, before you blow that crucial case for your client, before you leave your scissors in a patient’s stomach after you’ve operated, and, if you are an award-winning Country singer, before you massacre the Star-Spangled Banner at the All-Star Game Home Run derby, like Andress did last night.

Just listen to that caterwauling!

I find the Home Run Derby a bore, so I didn’t hear her off-key, dying-swan version of our National Anthem until the social media complaints about it reached me this morning. Andress’s breathless, lugubrious style, much in vogue these days, doesn’t appeal to me anyway, but that rendition was especially awful even by awful National Anthem standards, a high bar. How could a multiple Grammy-winner be that bad is a public performance on national TV?

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Is J.D. Vance Qualified To Be Vice-President of the United States of America?

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

As Bill Clinton might say, “It depends on what the meaning of ‘qualified’ is.”

The Vice-President has only two clearly defined jobs. The first is to preside over the Senate, and that’s a job even Joe Biden could do in his current state of confusion. The second job is to be the President’s back-up, insurance policy, and stunt-man. That’s a bit trickier, and as Kamala Harris has proven, it’s too challenging for some people. Still, paraphrasing Woody Allen, “Ninety percent of success as Vice-President is just showing up.”

I have this idealistic notion that a VP candidate should be at least minimally qualified to be President, since 9 out of 45 Presidents got the job when the top of their ticket couldn’t perform his duties any more. That’s 20%, one in five. Despite these ominous odds, most Presidential candidates choose their understudies without any concern about their fitness to be President, not to say that most of the choices weren’t at least theoretically qualified. Joe Biden was, in my view, one of the least qualified VPs ever, and look where he ended up.

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Trump-Deranged Asshole Media Headline of the Day: The Economic Times

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I had to wrestle with myself about whether to post this first, or the next post.

Here’s the headline from The Economic Times:

“Trump’s Raised Fist: What the gesture means which is widely used by fascists, socialists, and communists”

…yeah, and also Rocky, Norma Rae, the much-lionized protesting American runners at the Olympics on the winner’s platform, baseball players after they have hit game-winning home runs, my Vietnam War protesting fellow students at Harvard,

and, oh, just about everyone in the past few centuries or so who wanted to symbolize defiance, victory, strength and resistance to forces that would abuse and persecute them.

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Ethics Quiz: The Biden Campaign Model

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

This one fascinates me the more I think about it.

Above is the model at the Official Biden-Harris Campaign Store advertising the Biden-Harris T-shirt. There are three other models to be seen at the home site: a kind of wimpy male-of-indeterminate-color modeling a “Free on Wednesdays” T-shirt (I don’t know what that means), a butch-looking female model who might be a stand-in for Lia Thomas, and a chunky middle-aged bespectacled guy, also of-some-sort-of-color, holding a “Color-Changing Mug.” This is clearly a DEI campaign site: apparently white models need not apply. But the model above is strikingly unattractive as well as sexually ambiguous. Unless the marketing industry no longer operates according to the Cognitive Dissonance Scale, the idea in advertising is still to connect the product with positive images.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

What’s going in here?

I could see the same model being used in a satirical ad put out by the Trump campaign. Is this flagrant virtue signaling? (What’s the virtue?) Pandering to radical feminists? DEI madness? Gross incompetence?

Oh…here are two of the Trump campaign’s models:

Yeccchh.

“Ignorance Saturday” Continues: If This Survey Is Accurate (And I’m Sure It Is) What Good Is College?

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni have released a survey titled LOSING AMERICA’S MEMORY 2.0,A Civic Literacy Assessment of College Students. It’s a follow-up to its earlier report, Losing America’s Memory: Historical Illiteracy in the 21st Century. None of the depressing results in either study surprised me, and, I presume, will surprise you, but they do raise obvious questions as well as compel some conclusions.

Among the findings in the most recent survey of more than 3,000 college and university students regarding their basic civic literacy:

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“Platforming Ignorance!” What a Useful and Descriptive Term….

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The term, which I had never heard before or at least had never focused on, is featured in an essay by Jonathan Tobin at the Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) titled, “Candace Owens is a cautionary tale about platforming ignorance.” Indeed she is: I had written about how Owens has embarrassed conservatives by, as I put it last November, “being revealed as an ignoramus” by her embrace of Palestinina propganda after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. More recently I listed her as one of the political performance artists (Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Bill Maher, James Carville, Ann Coulter, yada yada) who cannot be trusted to provide genuine opinions because they calibrate what they say and write according to what they think will get them the most clicks, eyeballs, gigs, and cash. Clearly, I was giving Candace far too much credit.

She is a genuine, bona fide idiot, whose recent self-outing as a virulent anti-Semite ( the inspiration for the JNS piece) is just the tip of a really stupid iceberg. As conservative collective AG noted on “X,” Owens has recently declared that…

  • Israel was involved with 9/11
  • The earth may be flat
  • It’s absurd to believe dinosaurs roamed the earth and were killed by an asteroid
  • Macron’s wife is secretly a man
  • Jews were behind the Bolshevik revolution and it was secretly a genocide targeting Christians that was worse than the Holocaust
  • The Holocaust is either fake or severely exaggerated
  • The crimes of the allies in WWII and post-WWII were worse than anything the Nazis did
  • The deportation of ethnic Germans from the rest of Europe post-WWII was worse than The Holocaust
  • US dropped the bomb on Nagasaki to target Christians
  • Israel/AIPAC/Jews were secretly behind the JFK assassination
  • A secret cabal of Hollywood Jews were behind the death of Michael Jackson and people around him.

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An “Enemy of the People” Indictment

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Over at PJ Media, conservative writer David Strom provides a vivid overview of just how complicit the mainstream media has been in assisting Democrats and the White House as they deceived the public, both to elect Joe Biden President and protect him from suspicions that he was not able to do his job. “A Short History of the Coverup” should have been published in the New York Times; if that paper were a serious pursuer of ethical journalism and “all the news that’s fit to print,” it would make a thorough investigation of this scandal its top priority. It didn’t and it won’t, however, because that would involve implicating itself.

Strom writes at one point, “We can’t let them off the hook. We need America to face the fact that the media really IS the ‘enemy of the people.’ I hated that phrase in 2020; I think it is 100% true now. I was wrong.” Good for him; at least he admits it. This comment of Trump’s, one of his most important, is regularly used by the “Trump is Hitler” chorus to show that he’s an enemy of democracy. To the contrary: the enemy of democracy’s enemy is democracy’s friend. Ethics Alarms flagged Trump’s undiplomatic remark as spot on immediately, I will point out, patting myself heartily on the back.

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7/11 Convenient Ethics Notes…[Updated As The Evening Unfolds]

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

1. It is now 7:15 pm, E.S.T. as I write this. The “big boy” news conference , we were told, would begin at 6:30. Wouldn’t you think the President, or whoever pulls his strings, would make sure he was ready to go on time? I have images of make-up artists, doctors with needles and last minute electronic devices being planted. Doesn’t everybody?

2. Oh yeah, this is a good sign: Speaking at the NATO summit in Washington, D.C. today, President Biden introduced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky by saying, “And now, I want to hand it over to the president of Ukraine, who has as much courage as he has determination. Ladies and gentlemen, President Putin.”

3. Landing very briefly on Fox News during “The Five,” I heard a black reporter I’ve never see before express annoyance that Kamala Harris is being called a “DEI Vice-President.” When a member of the panel asked, “Why was she chosen then?” He answered immediately,”Because she was qualified!” Shameless. Biden made it clear from the beginning that he was going to nominate an African-American woman. There were even three widely publicized finalists: the indefensible Stacy Abrams, the ridiculously unqualified Cory Bush, and Harris, who might have been the best of the three, which is like saying Moe was the smartest Stooge. How do members of the Axis media get away with lying like that, openly, in defiance of known facts, on national TV? Are they depending on public amnesia? Stupidity? The fact that Democrats will accept outright dishonesty if that’s what it takes to win?

4. Biden finally arrived and immediately launched into a Trump bashing campaign speech. Has a President ever begun a press conference that way before? It’s cheating, a bait-and-switch. Biden is exploiting the network coverage to get a purely partisan speech broadcast, one that he is reading off a teleprompter. Republicans should demand equal time.

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