Government & Politics

Ethics Dunce (And A Tie For Worst Apology Of The Week): Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO)

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

One of Donald Trump’s proteges, Rep. Lauren Boebert, behaved so outrageously at a a Denver theater last week during a performance of the Broadway musical “Beetlejuice,” that she was asked to leave by the theater managers. She was loud, sang along with the performers in places, got in arguments with audience members, was ostentatiously groped by her male companion, and perhaps most objectionably, vaped during the performance, which is what you see her (in the middle of the frame, second from the aisle) in the act of doing—see the little puff?— in the security camera shot above. She also took a selfie during the second act. As she and her date were ushered out, the distinguished member of Congress actually uttered the magic phrase I regard as signature significance for an insufferable celebrity jerk, “Do you know who I am?” and threatened consequences for the staff.

That’s not all. She had her office deny that she had been vaping, not realizing that security cameras memorialized it. And still that’s not all. Here is her head-exploding “apology” for acting like a 17-year old raised in a barn who had never been at a live theater show in her life:

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Pro Ethics Tip To Trump: If You Can’t Learn The Golden Rule, At Least Be Cognizant Of The Glass House Problem…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Donald Trump was on thin ice making fun of Chris Christy’s weight, but he just proved that he had better eschew impugning Joe Biden’s age-related cognitive decline as well.

Addressing the Pray Vote Stand summit in Washington, Trump said, “We have a man who is totally corrupt and the worst president in the history of our country, who is cognitively impaired, in no condition to lead, and is now in charge of dealing with Russia and possible nuclear war. Just think of it. We would be in World War II very quickly if we’re going to be relying on this man, and far more devastating than any war.”

Oopsie! Trump presumably meant (I hope!) World War III, not the conflict that ended in 1945. That was a Bidenesque gaffe, and the equivalent of a pundit making a grammatical error while writing about how current high school grads can’t write. And that wasn’t all. Later in the same speech, Trump started confusing Biden with Barack Obama.

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Is It Unethical To Laugh, Mock And Applaud As “Sanctuary Cities” Define The Bard’s Phrase “Hoist With His Own Petard”?

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

No, of course not. In fact, it’s mandatory, necessary, and appropriate. Everyone knew, or should have know, that the progressive, woke, Democratic grandstanders who undermined U.S. sovereignty and the rule of law by announcing that their cities would not cooperate in the enforcement of immigration laws were irresponsible fool, indeed (sorry) destructive assholes all along. (Anyone who voted for such officials are also irresponsible assholes, just to get the accountability aligned,) Now, however, we know that they know they are assholes, and have to behave in a manner that exposes to all what assholes they are. This is great.

The utter hypocrisy of mayors and governors declaring their love for illegal immigrants as long as most of them arrived and stayed in cities along the Southern borders was exposed when governors of states overrun by what the news media calls “migrants” to hide their problematic and illegal features have sent busloads and plane-loads of the them to cities like New York City, Chicago and Washington, D.C. Suddenly, the “sanctuaries,” which were so compassionate and welcoming as long as there were few negative consequences of their facile lip-service were not so understanding.

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A “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Addendum To The Democratic Porn-For-Pay Virginia House Candidate Story

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Several news media sources have now reported that the Associated Press was informed about Susanna Gibson and her husband selling sexual perversions-on-demand via videos on the public porn site Chaturbate. A candidate for a state legislature seeking compensation for letting an audience see her urinate, perhaps on said husband (just to pick one possible videoed activity) is obviously both newsworthy and of legitimate interest to voters (despite the absurd line of defense now taken by Gibson, her defenders and her party), but the AP’s editors deliberately refused to report on it. Instead, the AP alerted Gibson that the secret of the videos was out, so she could take them down, which she did. This was on September 5.

The outlet then waited until September 12, after the scandal had been reported by others, including the Washington Post, to report it as news. Nice.

Observations:

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Don’t Kid Yourself: This Unethical Quote Of The Month From MSNBC’s Dean Obeidallah Is More Indicative Of Where The Left Is Headed That You’d Like To Think…

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

“I think Donald Trump MUST die in prison…because either we’re going to protect the Democratic Republic or we’re going to allow people, in this case Trump to chip away at our democracy and chip away at what we believe in these institutions.”

That was Dean Obeidallah, long an extreme deranged leftist featured on the air and on the web by MSNBC (because extreme deranged leftists are the only alleged journalists and pundits that MSNBC deems worthy of a public platform), confirming again the totalitarian impulses of Democrats and the progressives of 2023. In an interview with Mediaite’s most left-biased reporter, Obeidallah ranted in part,

Trump MUST die in prison because I don’t care if he was 45 years old, you should get life in prison if you attempt a coup, and there should be no chance of parole. I don’t care who it is….That’s why I’m so passionate about, like with every fiber of my being, that Donald Trump has to live out his natural days, his last days of natural life in a prison cell…….And people accuse me like, oh, you say things that get people riled up like, nope, I or get what you said. I get organically riled up about this because I believe in this system. And, and if you don’t believe in it, so be it. But if you believe in it, I don’t think there’s any conclusion could bring that. Donald Trump has to end up in a prison cell and live his last days out in that prison cell.

In those three dots, Obeidallah claimed that the riot at the Capitol was an “attempted coup,” which is legal, factual and linguistical nonsense, and that’s what he thinks Donald Trump should be locked up for without a chance of parole. I’ve instructed my family that if I ever say anything that stupid in private they should bash in my head with a brick, and Obeidallah is paid by MSNBC for to give that level of ignorant, hysterical, inflammatory and irresponsible commentary over the air. I guess I owe Tucker Carlson a mea culpa: I thought he was too much of a demagogue to be allowed on TV. Continue reading →

The Democrat Porn Star Virginia Legislature Candidate Renders The “Ethics Dunce” Designation Obsolete: “The Naked Porn-Performing Political Candidate Principle” Perhaps?

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I don’t know what you call this, but whatever it is, “ethics dunce” just isn’t enough.

That’s Susanna Gibson above with her husband (I don’t know where those annoying stars came from) performing on a porn website while she was already running as a candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates. The 40-year-old Democrat, along with her lawyer husband, have been appearing in flagrante delicto on an X-rated website, and offering to perform sundry sex acts in front of the camera, including those involving violence and bodily excretions, in exchange for money—not that there’s anything wrong with that.

But after the conservative Washington Free Beacon was tipped off to this rare proclivity on the part of a political candidate and wrote about it, Gibson announced that she was shocked—shocked!—that anyone would feel that a candidate for the legislature soliciting money for sex acts was something the public had a right to know about. She found a lawyer willing to try to use Maryland’s “revenge porn” law to punish such people. Daniel P. Watkins of the Meier Watkins Phillips Pusch firm, argues that “it’s illegal and it’s disgusting to disseminate this kind of material”and says that he is “working closely with the F.B.I. and local prosecutors to bring the wrongdoers to justice.”

Sure, Danny, good luck with that! It’s a ridiculous idea for a law suit, but ya never know, so it slips under the wire as “ethical,” though any lawyer bringing such a suit should have to wear a bag on his head.

Ugh. Where to begin?

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That Bomb “Finger Gun” Should Have Never Been Made At All: How Did We End Up With “Finger Gun 4”??

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

The first stunned Ethics Alarms story about a cabal of idiots with education degrees persecuting a little boy for making a crude imaginary gun out of his fingers was in 2013, just as the Post Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck got rolling and the anti-gun hysterics were going off the rails (to which they, obviously, have never quite returned). I wrote of the first incident, which was in Montgomery County,

The NBC story concentrates on  “whether the boy understands the implications of the gesture.” What implications of the gesture? That he is about to shoot bullets out of his finger? That he intends to kill someone with all the firepower an unarmed 6-year-old can muster? That he is making a mimed reference to a Connecticut school massacre he probably doesn’t know a thing about? Why should it matter what his “intent is? It’s a hand gesture! It isn’t vulgar or threatening except to silly phobics in the school system.

I concluded that it was child abuse by the school, and that “such irrational fearfulness, bad judgment, panic, disregard for the sensibilities of the young, lack of proportion and brain dysfunction forfeits all right to trust, and such fools must not be allowed to have power over young bodies and minds.”

But the finger gun lunatics struck again the next year, as Ohio crazies punished a 10-year-old boy for wielding an imaginary gun without a license. This time I figured out what was really going on—political and cultural woke indoctrination— writing in part,

The radical gun-hating progressives who disproportionately occupy administrative positions in the schools are willing to endure some ridicule as well as to victimize some children if it helps make guns and gun-related play less attractive, thus pointing to a Nirvana where the NRA is a shadow of its former self, and the only ones who own guns are criminals, the police and the government….Is public school political indoctrination more sinister than the proliferation incompetent teachers and administrators? Yes.

I also should have realized that this was the dawning of The Great Stupid.

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It Only Took Nearly Three Years And 9-11 Exploitation, But CNN Finally Treats A President Biden Lie The Way It Treated President Trump’s

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

This is progress, I suppose, and it doesn’t auger well for President Biden’s 2024 campaign if the most Democratic propaganda-minded members of the mainstream media (like CNN) starts actually critiquing his persistently embarrassing performance as President. Some of the usual suspects mentioned Biden’s increasingly typical imaginary story, but most buried it in their news report. MSNBC was one of the few that did headline the lie, but did so to explain that Biden did visit the site of the tragedy nine days later (the White House “explanation”) so don’t be so nit-picky. It also had Lawrence O’Donnell engage in a bit of obvious whataboutism, as he ignored Biden’s falsehood but ranted about “Donald Trump’s most vile lie about 9/11” that he “lost hundreds of friends” on 9/11. Otherwise, Biden’s false claim was highlighted by the New York Post, the National Review, Fox News (of course), and other conservative media, plus the least biased and most reliable (but still left-leaning) of the fact-checking services, Fact-check.org.

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Encore: “Regarding ‘Athlete A’….”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

[I watched “Athlete A,” the infuriating Netflix documentary for the second time, and completely forgot that I had written about it here when it first came out. (I’m sure glad I checked.) It is gratifying, I guess that most of what I was prepared to write today was what I wrote in 2020. I was not, however, emphatic enough about the implications of the multi-level failures of ethics decency, responsibility and accountability that allowed this disaster to occur. For in addition to Larry Nassar, the sick, manipulative doctor who used his position to sexually molest hundreds of young girls for more than 20 years, this mass crime was inflicted by stunning corruption and cruelty by key officials in the U.S. Olympic Committee, gymnastic coaches, Michigan State officials (where Nassar worked when he wasn’t sexual assaulting female gymnasts) and—is this even shocking any more?—the FBI. Then there are the parents of the gymnasts, who shipped their daughters off to be cared for by strangers who often abused them.

I suppose this story bothered me more this week than it did in 2020 because we have finally learned the truth about the Russian collusion hoax, the multi-level failure of integrity and trust that marred the 2020 election, and the horrific betrayal by so many institutions that inflicted the pandemic lockdown on us with the incursion on basic liberties that it involved, the discovery that schools are secretly pushing their students into life-altering gender confusion, while Big Tech and social media platforms conspire with the government to censor speech. I confess that I am less inclined to look at the Larry Nassar scandal as an anomaly today than three years ago. Now I am thinking: if we can’t trust our institutions to have sufficient ethics alarms that their leaders and key personnel choose the health and welfare of young girls over power, profit and selfish personal agendas, how can we trust them at all?]

Athlete A,” the Netflix documentary that tells the awful story of USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar’s decades of sexually abusing young female gymnasts—perhaps as many as 500 of them—, how he was allowed to continue his crimes after complaints from parents and others, and the young women who finally sent him to prison with their testimony, is both disturbing and depressing. I watched it last night with my wife, who was horrified that she didn’t know the Nassar story.

Ethics Alarms wasn’t as much help as it should have been. Its first full post about the scandal was this one, which, in grand Ethics Alarms tradition, slammed the ethics of the judge who sentenced Nassar to 60 years in prison, essentially a “Stop making me defend Dr. Nassar!” post. I’ll stand by that post forever, but it didn’t help readers who are link averse to know the full extent of Nassar’s hobby of plunging his fingers and hands into the vaginas and anuses of trusting young girls while telling them that it was “therapy.”

The second full post, in August of last year,  was more informative regarding Nassar, but again, it was about the aftermath of his crimes, not the crimes themselves. That post  focused on the the Senate hearings following the July 30 release of the report of an 18-month Senate investigation  that found that the U.S. Olympic Committee and others failed to protect young female athletes from Nassar’s probing hands, detailing “widespread failure by the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee (the “Committee”) and other institutions to keep athletes safe.”  Then there was this: Continue reading →

The Nation’s Moral, Legal And Ethical Incoherence On Abortion, In Two Articles

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

In the first, “In Post-Roe America, Nikki Haley Seeks a New Path on Abortion for G.O.P.,” we learn that

“We need to stop demonizing this issue,” Haley said at the first Republican debate. “It’s personal for every woman and man. Now, it’s been put in the hands of the people. That’s great.”

No, it’s not just “personal.” It is societal. Moral and ethical principles exist, and they aren’t principles if any individual can reject or ignore them as everyone shrugs and says, “OK! Different strokes for different folks!” That’s how we end up with mobs shoplifting at Walmart with no consequences. Is theft right, fair, acceptable and ethical, or is it wrong and damaging to society and humanity? Is that a hard question? No?

Great! Now lets do killing growing human beings.

The Times, naturally, quickly establishes itself as a flack for “choice,” writing about Haley’s search for “an anti-abortion message that doesn’t alienate moderate Republicans and swing voters,” because, presumably, anyone who isn’t a radical, extremist Republican will be alienated by advocating anti-abortion policies that treat abortions as they should be treated: legalized killings of human beings. Those who won’t recognize abortions as what abortions are—the word “kill” doesn’t appear anywhere in the Times news story, nor is there any reference to ending a life or lives—either haven’t thought very deeply about the matter, don’t want to, or won’t admit to themselves what the issue is. For example,

Molly Murphy, a Democratic pollster, doubted whether Ms. Haley could square her “respectful and middle-ground, compromise approach” with a decade-long record of “actually not doing that when in office.” Republicans, she said, have far to go before voters will give them the benefit of the doubt on the issue. “Those candidates trying to walk back their previous positions on abortion look incredibly political and non-trustworthy,” Ms. Murphy said. “Their credibility is so low on this issue that voters just fundamentally believe Republicans want to ban abortion.”

Ethically and morally, how is legalizing abortions when the birth doesn’t genuinely imperil the life of the mother a “respectful and middle-ground” or “compromise” approach that can pass any ethical system without setting off sirens? Kant held that using another’s life as a means to an end was per se unethical. “Reciprocity” fails, obviously: would abortion advocates be supportive of their own mothers aborting them because their births would be inconvenient and a career handicap? Or are a half-million aborted babies every year in the U.S. just the price of equal opportunity? The ends justifies the means: brutal utilitarianism.

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