Government & Politics

Ethics Quote of the Month: D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“It would be a striking paradox if the President, who alone is vested with the constitutional duty to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,’ were the sole officer capable of defying those laws with impunity…We cannot accept that the office of the Presidency places its former occupants above the law for all time thereafter.”

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, rejecting former President Donald Trump’s bonkers claim that Presidents have absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for acts committed while in office.

The ruling is here.

Seldom has any court appeal in a high profile case had a more obvious and virtually assured resolution. The ethics alarms analysis of this issue was discussed in “Ethics Zugzwang In Trump’s Immunity Appeal,” and in this subsequent post. I hope it’s unnecessary to say that I agree with the D.C. Circuit’s ruling.

I wonder if Trump considered that if he won the appeal, President Biden could order that he and his MAGA supporters could be summarily shot as “clear and present dangers to democracy.” He could order the execution of the Republican contingent in the House, too, to forestall an impeachment.

What a great theory.

It was unethical for Trump and his lawyers to make the argument. If I had been his attorney—and before all the dust settles, Trump might eventually have to retain lawyers as inexperienced in litigation I am, and maybe even me—I would have withdrawn before I’d file such an irresponsible appeal.

Ethics Hero: George Stephanopoulos [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Wow. Didn’t see that Ethics Hero coming at all.

ABC’s ubiquitous news host George Stephanopoulos has a dreadful EA dossier, though it hasn’t filled up lately since I decided around 2016 that none of the Sunday Morning news shows were professional or ethical enough to take time away from my sock drawer. However, this morning he did something bold and necessary. When his guest, Super-Trumper Senator J.D. Vance, made a bonkers and irresponsible case that the President could be justified in defying the Supreme Court, George just cut him off and ended the interview.

Bravo.

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Unethical Headline of the Week: The LA Times

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“How throwing soup at the Mona Lisa can help fight climate change”

You can read this opinion piece if you want, but the headline accurately conveys all you need to know by itself, I hope. The author, an associate professor of environmental studies at USC (so you know the quality of critical thinking and ethical analysis they are teaching there), essentially is making an argument for terrorism, because sometimes it works.

“Objections to acts of climate activism such as the latest food fight at the Louvre are understandable but might miss the point. Protesters’ perceived madness is indeed method,” Shannon Gibson writes. And the method is attracting attention to a cause by disruptive, selfish and destructive acts having no relationship to the goals of the activists. In some respects, violent acts of terrorism are easier to rationalize: at least those seeking a Palestinian state are directing their “method” at those with some direct relationship to the entity the terrorist blame for their plight. Throwing tomato soup at Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” or the Mona Lisa has no such relevance.

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Nick Kristof’s Moral Preening Over Gaza

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof seems like a good man, a decent human being. He reminds me of many of the dedicated liberals I went to law school and college with, always gathering signatures to ban the bomb, end a war, fight pollution, cure cancer, save whales, get universal employment…you know the list. These are the people who tear up when they hear “Imagine.” They were classic liberals before the ethics rot of progressivism, and that’s Kristof too.

Today he issued a characteristic Kristof primal scream about the carnage in Gaza, and if there was ever a “Think of the children!” lament, this is it.

It is the fourth such column by Kristof since the Hamas attack, having earlier submitted “I’m Crying for All the Victims That Are Going to Suffer”, “We Are Overpaying the Price for a Sin We Didn’t Commit“, “We Must Not Kill Gazan Children to Try to Protect Israel’s Children.” The beating and bleeding heart of “What Can We Possibly Say to the Children of Gaza?” or, in another format, We Can’t Justify This Much Suffering, is in these sentences…

Over the years, I’ve covered many bloody wars and written scathingly about how governments in Russia, Sudan and Syria recklessly bombed civilians. This time, it’s different… as a taxpayer, I’m helping to pay for the bombs.

Gaza is also different from Syria and Ukraine, of course, in that Israel did not start this war. Instead, Israel was brutally attacked by Hamas in a rampage of murder, torture and rape. Any government would have struck back, and Hamas maximized the suffering of civilians by using them as human shields.

Yet military response is not a binary choice; it exists on a continuum. Israel, traumatized by the attack it suffered, elected to retaliate with 2,000-pound bombs, destroy entire neighborhoods and allow only a trickle of aid into the territory, which is now teetering on the brink of famine. The upshot is that this does not feel like a war on Hamas but rather a war on Gazans.

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There is Hope! Part 2, The Vindication of Waylon Bailey

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Waylon Bailey, the social media-user who was arrested by a Wuhan virus totalitarian idiot for making a joke and initially denied justice by a U.S. District Judge who doesn’t know the law, finally was awarded $205,000 in compensatory and punitive damages by a federal jury. It’s not enough, not even close, and the publicity the episode has received (virtually none) underlines that point.

These are the kinds of cases juries should address with $83 million in damages (just picking a number out of the air, there) to make the next Gestapo-inclined officer who considers punishing a citizen for exercising his constitutional rights think twice, or even three times. At least, however, Waylon Bailey was vindicated by our lately maladjusted justice system.

There is hope.

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I, For One, Am Thrilled That Rep. Ayanna Pressley Isn’t Conceding the “Most Unethical Member of ‘The Squad'” Title Without A Fight…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

This has been a banner few months for “The Squad.” The one male member of the frighteningly incompetent, unethical and offensive band of far Left Democrats of Color disgraced himself by setting off a false fire alarm to try to block a vote in the House and claiming it was an accident, an obvious lie. Rep. Tlaib got herself censored for publicly advocating wiping Israel off the map. Rep. Omar recently proclaimed that her first loyalties were to Somalia rather than her adopted country, the U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, by most estimates the dumbest and least qualified of the gang, is being investigated by the Justice Dept, for misusing campaign funds. AOC, of course, is perpetually ridiculous. Let’s see, what has she done lately? Oh, she’s accusing Israel of “genocide” because it is waging war against the region that launched a surprise terror attack against its civilians, as it should and must. It’s an ignorant and indefensible position, but that’s Rep. Ocasio-Cortez. She’s like that pretty much all the time.

Yet amidst all of this, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass) has been out of the limelight, and not keeping up her end of the bargain in behaving appropriately Squad-like. I’ve been disappointed in her. Fortunately, she came out smokin’ this week, accusing Walgreens of engaging in a “life-threatening act of racial and economic discrimination” in its decision to close one of its branches in Boston’s overwhelmingly black neighborhood of Roxbury. 

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The President’s Deceitful Executive Order

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

If I were maintaining a “lie database” on Joe Biden (like the Washington Post does, among others, on Donald Trump) this would go right on it. And yes, I have not read a single analysis on any source that explains the deceitful quality of the President’s latest executive order. Unlike several of the others, this one is constitutional. It is just completely misleading, and deliberately so.

Yesterday, Biden ordered financial and travel sanctions on Israeli settlers accused of violent attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank. That explanation at the top of the New York Times story cleared up initial confusion on my part. “Biden issues executive order targeting Israeli settlers who attack Palestinians” was the headline at Axios, and similar headlines abound. Huh? Does Biden think that he, like Leonardo DiCaprio, is King of the World? What power does the President of the United States have over citizens of foreign nations who aren’t in the United States? The answer, for those of you praying that J Biden and the Democrats can save democracy from the previous President who abuses presidential power, is none. None. The executive order is grandstanding of the most cynical sort. Biden literally could issue similar fanciful orders “sanctioning” Parisians who annoy visiting Americans by being rude to them with as much effect.

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UPenn’s Anti-Semitic Lecturer

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

That cartoon above, showing apparent Zionists (as in “Jews”) sipping Gazan blood like wine, is probably the most outrageous of political cartoonist Dwayne Booth’s works…I don’t know, maybe this one is..

All a matter of taste, I guess. The ethics question is, now what, if anything?

Booth is a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication having joined the school as an adjunct faculty member in 2015. Political cartooning is certainly a valid courss of study. He currently teaches two classes, but since Hamas’s October 7 terror attack, his off-campus cartooning has become especially controversial.

Booth publishes political cartoons under the pen name “Mr. Fish.” One of his classes teaches students the political cartooning art by exploring “the purpose and significance of image-based communication as an unparalleled propagator of both noble and nefarious ideas,” according to Penn’s website. “Work presented will be chosen for its unique ability to demonstrate the inflammatory effect of weaponized visual jokes, uncensored commentary, and critical thinking on a society so often perplexed by artistic free expression and radicalized creative candor.”

You can see more of Booth’s anti-Israel cartoons here. As far as I can determine, there is not sufficient basis for disciplining him or ending his association with the school. Political cartooning, though I personally view it as a crude, over-rated and deceitful form of editorial, is by nature extreme in device and approach. Booth’s own political opinions and obvious anger at Israel that he expresses as “Mr. Fish” or on social media are not relevant to his value teaching the political cartooning craft, and would seem to be squarely within the margins of both academic freedom and the first Amendment, provided that his commentary in class and on campus are not directed at Jewish students.

However, if a school, like the University of Pennsylvania, decided that, at a time when there are unusual tensions around the Gaza-Israel conflict its lecturer should cool his public fervor or consider another teaching position elsewhere, that would be a fully ethically defensible position. He’s right at the line now.

He might even have crossed it.

Add Two Unethical and Irresponsible Progressive Policies Together And This Is the Result

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Great—even a dyed-in-the-wool conservative gadfly like Ian Miles Chong is adopting coded woke-speak now. Those aren’t migrants, kicking and beating on NYC police. They are illegal immigrants.Darwin Andres Gomez Izquiel, 19, Kelvin Servat Arocha, 19, Juarez Wilson, 21, Yorman Reveron, 24, and Jhoan Boada, 22, were chased down, arrested, and charged with assault. They they were released without bail, because, as we know, the criminal justice system is racist letting criminal go while depending on an honor system to get them before a judge or jury is the sensitive policy. Illegal immigrants have demonstrated that they have no respect for our laws, and ny attacking cops, these illegals have demonstrated that they have no intention of being law abiding citizens. Writes fire-breathing conservative columnist Athena Thorne in response to that video:

“In New York City, Biden and Mayorkas’s legacy plays out daily. Asylum scammers continue to romp around the Big, Rotten Apple, merrily shoplifting businesses into oblivion, burning down buildings with their off-brand lithium-ion batteries, and mowing down New Yorkers with their e-bikes and uninsured vehicles in hit-and-run incidents. Lawlessness breeds lawlessness. And we taxpayers have the privilege of bankrolling all of it.

At the beginning of her column, she describes the video as “Trump’s latest campaign ad.”

It’s hard for me to see how she’s wrong. When people vote for the almost incredibly flawed Donald Trump, they are voting against scenes like what we see above.

“Indictment: The McMartin Trial,” An Ethics Movie That Seems Disturbingly Relevant Today

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

How I missed the 1995 HBO film “Indictment: the McMartin Trial” for almost 30 years, I don’t know, but I did. The Oliver Stone produced legal drama about the insane events surrounding what turned out to be the start of a nation-wide freak-out over supposed Satan worship and widespread child abuse at day-care centers is unusually accurate for a docudrama. For this reason it is also infuriating. How could this have happened even once?

In August of 1983, the mother of a 2-year-old boy phoned the Manhattan Beach (California) Police Dept. claiming that her son had been sexually abused at the family-run McMartin Pre-School. That accusation prompted a series of sensational and inflammatory reports from an unscrupulous broadcast journalist (or “journalist,” for short) at WABC-TV. It also prompted the police to contact other parents with children at the school to ask if their children had been molested. Those children were, in turn, interviewed by a crusading social worker named Kee MacFarlane, who used controversial techniques to persuade the young children that they had seen and experienced terrible things, escalating from sexual abuse to having to witness ritual rapes and human sacrifices. (This was one of the seminal cases in the psychiatry profession’s “implanted memories” scandal.)

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