Government & Politics

Friday Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

This is as good a place to note my disgust as any. In an example of life imitating the Babylon Bee, a bipartisan group of House members decided that in these “challenging times” they have nothing better to do than to troll Gov. Kristi Noem, she of the itchy trigger finger, while sucking up to PETA.

Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) announced in a post on Twitter, alias “X,” “In light of recent events, we’re launching the Congressional Dog Lovers Caucus today! This group dedicated to man’s best friend aims to foster bipartisan cooperation and will help put paws over politics.” His post featured photos of Reps. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) and Susan Wild (D-Pa.), alongside Moskowitz, each with a dog.

Mace issued a press release blathering,“While Congress might disagree on everything, we can all agree that dogs are beloved companions, bringing us all so much joy. We started this caucus to champion legislation that protects the rights and well-being of dogs, ensuring they receive the care, respect, and recognition they deserve…In a time of polarization and partisanship, I’m proud to join my colleagues from both sides of the aisle and commit to working on behalf of our pets, who give us so much joy and comfort every day.”

This insulting nonsense, coming on the heels of Congress overwhelmingly passing an anti-hate speech bill that is unconstitutional on its face, raises a genuine question as to whether the nation would be better off with dogs running things in the Capitol instead of these boobs.

The dogs might as well take over the state houses too. The Hill reports that Kristi’s spin on her animal-shooting rampage is now that the dog she shot was a veritable Cujo.

But that’s enough from me: this is your chance to howl…

Letter From Dartmouth’s President: This Is How It’s Done, You Spineless Weenies!

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Dartmouth alumnus Curmie—Can’t you just picture him leading that horse into the Dean’s office?—shared this letter he received as a member of the “Dartmouth community” from the school’s first female president, Dr. Sian Leah Beilock. It stands in stark contrast to the nauseating Columbia letter dissected here, and Emerson College’s president’s equally revolting letter I posted on here.

Yes, it’s more diplomatic than my letter would be, but that’s why I’m not a college president. And yes, Beilock’s use of the breathless “amazing”—apparently now taking over from “awesome”—is a bit disturbing coming from an adult in high places, but never mind. She has rescued some of the tarnished honor of the university presidents’ club.

Stop Making Me Defend RFK Jr.!

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

This has to be one of the most unlikely beneficiaries of the EA “Stop Making Me Defend…” series, though the alums are pretty awful. Biden and Trump lead with the most such posts, of course, with James Carville, both Clintons, Kamala Harris, Bill Maher, Tucker Carlson, NYC’s Eric Adams, Megan Rapinoe (yechhh), even Pete Rose and Louis Farakhan getting their due. RFK Jr., I would argue, is tied with the last miscreant in that list for having imparted no benefits on society whatsoever: at least Pete Rose was a great baseball player.

Third party presidential candidates with name recognition are blights on democracy. Teddy Roosevelt’s run gave us Woodrow Wilson. Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan created the 2000 election debacle. Still, Teddy, Ralph and even Pat had genuine accomplishments on their records other than the fame and influence flowing from the boon of inherited wealth and a cult that worships a surname.

And yet…RFK was just slimed by people even more relentlessly unethical than he is: the Democratic National Committee.

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Ethics and Constitutional Dunces: The 320 House Members (Mostly Republicans) Who Voted for the “Antisemitism Awareness Act”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

You know, or should, that your conduct is unethical and outrageous when it makes Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fl.) look good by comparison Gaetz voted against HR 690, as every member of the House should have since it is throbbingly unconstitutional on its face, no question, no argument, a flat out First Amendment violation. Gaetz told his followers on Twitter/X that he voted against the proposed legislation because it is a “ridiculous hate speech bill.”

“Antisemitism is wrong, but this legislation is written without regard for the Constitution, common sense, or even the common understanding of the meaning of words,” he wrote. Bingo. The bill, in weasel words remarkable even by recent Congressional standards, declares that “anti-Semitism” is a violation of title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (42 U.S.C. 2000d et seq.), and embraces an expansive definition of the term “adopted on May 26, 2016, by the IHRA, of which the United States is a member, which definition has been adopted by the Department of State; and… includes the “[c]ontemporary examples of antisemitism” identified in the IHRA definition.”

The IHRA definition includes examples of pure speech, and I would expect any junior in high school to know that these cannot be criminalized:

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Ethics Dunce: Emerson College President Jay Bernhardt

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Bernhardt isn’t the only noodle-spined, terrorism-enabling fool running an American college or university right now, but he’s as good a representative as any. I’m familiar with Emerson (most people weren’t before its students started demonstrating for more Jew killing as if there hadn’t too much of that already) because it resides in my old stomping ground of Boston, and my aunt Bea, 97-years-old and still as progressive as they come, graduated from there.

Over 100 Emerson students were arrested in downtown Boston’s Boylston Place alleyway in an early morning confrontation with Boston police last week. The students were illegally participating in an encampment protest by the student organization Students for Justice in Palestine. They also fought with police as the cops tried to do their jobs. But in his letter of three days ago, Emerson College President Jay Bernhardt said that he will urge the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office to drop all charges. Four Boston police officers were injured during the confrontation, one seriously. Never mind, though. These are only adults who can vote, buy liquor and and otherwise have full privileges of citizenship, and they violated the law in support of terrorists. Their hearts were in the right place. They meant well. Anybody can make a mistake. For a full list of the inexcusable rationalizations being used to let these idiots escape accountability for their ignorant, illegal and violent actions, see here, at the Ethics Alarms Rationalizations List. I’m guessing at least 40 of them apply, maybe more.

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Hamas-Israel War Ethics Train Wreck Update: A Case Study in How a News Aggregator Forfeits Trust

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The escalation overnight in the anti-Israel, pro-Jew-killing demonstrations at Columbia University, temporarily at the top of the campus progressives-showing-their-true-stripes and “Oops, I guess we indoctrinated these gullible kids a little too much!” hit parades, was the breaking news I woke up to at 5 am when Spuds asked to go out. I have some ethics observations about this whole disturbing development (the Gaza support on campuses, not Spuds’ bathroom habits), which the Biden administration deserves to have hung around its neck like a stinking dead albatross for signaling that the U.S. sympathizes with terrorists just so it might pick up some Muslim votes in Michigan. In the process of researching that post, I encountered the reason for this one.

Deciding that the immediacy of the 1968 flashbacks justified bumping another post that I have almost completed, I checked the usually reliable news aggregating site Memeorandum (Ann Althouse’s favorite!) to find some early reports and commentary on the student terrorism fans at Columbia taking over Hamilton Hall. And I found…nothing. The top stories as of this moment [remember, by the time you read this, the list may have changed]:

#1: The Kristi Noem dog story! You see, that’s a top story because it reflects poorly on Republicans.

#2 according to the site is an FBI report that crime in the U.S. is really decreasing under Biden—as if there is any reason to trust the FBI any more, and as everyone I know in Northern Virginia is terrified to go into D.C. This is second on the list because it is going to take a huge “It isn’t what it is” push to convince voters that all of those chains moving out of inner cities because of runaway shoplifting are really doing it because they are racist.

#3? Another hit on a Republican, this time from that paragon of objectivity, Rolling Stone.

Coming in at #4…well, I don’t have to belabor the point. There are seventeen more “top stories,” including one about India operating a spy ring in Australia, and the drama at Columbia isn’t anywhere to be found.

Eureka! Now I know that whoever is running this news aggregator site is manipulating the news and trying to mislead the public in support of Joe Biden and the Democrats. Similarly, we have learned that the eruption of anti-Israel, anti-Semitic passion across the nation is just one more example of what a terrible, weak, foolish POTUS Joe Biden is, and how ethically corrupt his party and its supporters have become.

Here’s a third: journalism in this culture is untrustworthy and a metaphorical dagger in the back of democracy….but we knew that.

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“Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” For Some Strange Reason, Sayeth the NYT, Trump Doesn’t Trust Our Intelligence Agencies…

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Wow, what could possibly account for that? The man is paranoid!

I missed “Campaign Puts Trump and the Spy Agencies on a Collision Course” in the Times two weeks ago. Fortunately a non-Ethics Alarms-reading friend sent me this column by the usually astute and trustworthy Holman Jenkins at the Wall Street Journal. (Aside: I continue to wonder why so few of my friends and long-time associates read this blog, and none of my family members. It must be me, or as one friend who does read Ethics Alarms once said in a moment of self-doubt, “All my best friends hate me.”) His assessment of the significance of the piece tracks exactly with mine, and he seems to be coming from a similar point of view: he doesn’t have any illusions about Donald Trump, but he still finds the Times’ dishonest and biased coverage of him since Trump’s election despicable. Except this one initial arch comment—Gee, imagine not trusting intelligence agencies!—I’ll leave the commentary to Jenkins with a few footnotes from me:

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Addendum to “The Supreme Court, the ‘Suicide Pact,’ and Ethics Zugzwang”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Thinking about that last post and the issues it raises as I was walking Spuds in the rain just now took me to an epiphany, and an embarrassingly late one.

Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon was more important and crucial than I realized then. It was only one gutsy and maybe prescient act in an otherwise short and undistinguished Presidency, but it delayed the current crisis for half a century.

The conventional wisdom is that Nixon would have been prosecuted for his Watergate involvement, and that the event would have been a divisive and traumatic spectacle that a nation just getting past the Vietnam debacle could ill afford. That wasn’t what was going to happen, though, I now realize. (And I have never read or heard anyone acknowledge this.)

Had he been charged with any crime, Nixon would have immediately claimed immunity just as Trump is now. For the rest of his life, Nixon routinely said that “if the President does it, it’s not illegal.” What would the Supreme Court have ruled in 1975? Here is the Court then:

Chief Justice Warren Burger
William J. Brennan
Potter Stewart
Byron White
Thurgood Marshall
Harry Blackmun
Lewis F. Powell
William H. Rehnquist

The only two reliable liberals on the Court were Marshall and Brennan, but the conservatives were more moderate and less doctrinaire than today’s SCOTUS majority. I have no idea what that group would have done with the immunity issue, and I’m glad we didn’t have to find out.

Thanks, Jerry.

Well, So Much For the PETA Vote!

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

To many analysts, South Dakota governor Krtisti Noem checked all the right boxes to be Donald Trump’s running mate. She’s a hard-right conservative, a successful and popular governor, an effective speaker, attractive, and a woman. (I must interject here that I find it just a bit hypocritical that the GOP, as it derides and condemns the diversity fad as it makes tribal membership more important than merit, skill, competence and experience, that Trump is almost certainly going to choose a woman or a black man as his VP. The least he could do to defy the Left is pick a Jew…). Noem seemed to be leading the race to be Trump’s second-in-command, in the view of many experts.

And then, as Frank and Nancy would say, she went and spoiled it all by saying something stupid like ‘I shot my dog because I couldn’t be bothered to train it.’

“Ethics Dunce” doesn’t adequately describe what Noem’s new book “No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward,” which will be released in May, reveals about her. Yes, she’s notably missing some key ethics alarms and some pretty basic ones at that, like “Be kind to animals, because they are innocents,” one of my late wife’s mantras. Noem is also, however, lacking in basic understanding of public sensibilities and has the political instincts of a Kamikaze pilot.

“I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story here,” Noem wrote after detailing the horrible story of how she lured “Cricket,” a 14-month old wire-haired pointer, to a gravel pit and shot her because the dog had failed her first pheasant hunting attempt. This wasn’t “Old Yeller”: Cricket wasn’t sick, or dangerous, or old. Cricket, as Noem’s account makes clear, just hadn’t been trained….you know, like Joe Biden’s “bad” German Shepherd, Commander.

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Dispatches From the Great Stupid: NPR Unmasked (Cont.)

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I know I should be writing about the college campuses revealing to administrators and faculty that they have successfully indoctrinated their students into being anti-Semites, bigots, and fascists while remaining ignorant of history and ethics. I’m really tired today, however, and for a while, at least, I’m going to indulge myself elaborating on an earlier ethics mess: the revelation that National Public Radio has become a malign force in American culture, and will lie, obfuscate and spin to disguise its true nature and objectives.

I found two notes worth pondering. From the Times (I’m not making this up)—

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