Government & Politics

Comment of the Day: “Comment of the Day: ‘Unethical (and Stupid) Quote of the Month: Zohran Mamdani’”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Gee, we haven’t had a Comment of the Day on a Comment of the Day for quite while around here. This one was especially satisfying. Reacting to Extradimensional Cephalopod‘s discouraged coda to his COTD on Mayor-to-be Mamdani’s scary-stupid victory rant, Old Bill registered commentary that should have been already featured on or in every legitimate news source. Unfortunately, there are no legitimate news sources, and the fact that OB’s point has been so far almost completely ignored by the Axis media has been making me doubt my own sanity. Am I missing something? How is a President supposed to actually lower grocery prices after inflation he had no responsibility for hit 9% under his predecessor, particularly after less than a year in office? How dare the Democrats choose “affordability” as a rallying cry against Trump when the affordability crash happened on their watch? Do they think the public is that stupid? IS the public that stupid?

Please don’t tell me that you really can fool all of the people all of the time.

It was high time for Old Bill ( we once had several Bills among the commentariate, now all among the missing; maybe they are hanging out with A Friend, Curmie and Charles Green somewhere….) to have another Comment of the Day. He is among the most attentive and prolific commenters Ethics Alarms has, and we should be grateful for him. I certainly am.

Here is Old Bill’s Comment of the Day on “Comment of the Day: “Comment of the Day: ‘Unethical (and Stupid) Quote of the Month: Zohran Mamdani.’” I know its mostly a quote, but it is the right quote, I hadn’t seen it, and maybe you haven’t either.

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“I was hoping from what I’d heard about Mamdani earlier that he was standing up for legitimate concerns of the people regarding the government and the economy.”

This is the “affordability” talking point Dems have surfaced and harped on over the last few months and during the off-year elections. Remember when everything was “income inequality” and everyone pretended they’d read Thomas Piketty’s book.

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“Right To Offend: The Black Comedy Revolution” and the Duty to Remember

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

So much of the nation’s cultural health and societal values rely on our fulfillment of the duty to remember. Thanks to our incompetent and unethical education system and the increasing estrangement of American history from our popular culture, recent generations share so little important historical and cultural touchpoints as Americans that effective cross-generational communication is becoming impossible. Television could be a nostrum for this dangerous phenomenon, if only finding the constructive and informative programming were not a task akin to finding, as the saying goes, a needle in needle stack.

I was thinking about this after I stumbled upon the 2022 Starz documentary, “Right to Offend: The Black Comedy Revolution,” a two-part series that I only saw because I am briefly getting Starz free on DirecTV. I missed it entirely when it was new, and have never read or heard anything about it. I haven’t seen the whole series yet either, and only watched an incomplete stretch of Episode One. But that was enough to trigger several thoughts, and to make me schedule a serious viewing of the whole thing from beginning to end.

Among those revelations,

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A Law Student Production of “Hamlet”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The Georgetown Gilbert and Sullivan Society is the now half-century old theater organization I inadvertently spawned as a first year law student (before they were called “1Ls”) at Georgetown University Law Center. Right now, the group, which calls itself “The only theater group with its own law school,” is nearing an all-time peak in student participation, interest and talent, making this old lawyer-theater guy proud and happy indeed.

Last night I attended closing night of the group’s ambitious, full production of “Hamlet,” which most community theater groups wouldn’t dare attempt. It was a modern dress version (period set “Hamlet’s” are the exception rather than the rule and have been for decades) with an “emo” concept that worked just fine. The student director staged with skill and intelligence, the casting was spot on, and it even gave me some new insights into the work despite having see the play too many times to list. Yes, a woman played the Danish prince, but the 1L actress was excellent, and female Hamlets first appeared in 1899, when the great Sarah Bernhardt played the role.

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Unethical (and Stupid) Quote of the Month: Zohran Mamdani [First in a Long, Long Series…]

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

“We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.”

—Zohran Mamdani‘s marathon victory speech on Election Night, after the Democratic Socialist (that is, Communist) was elected as New York City’s mayor.

A commenter asked my opinion regarding Mamdani’s speech and I demurred, because it was standard commie tripe that I’ve read and heard from everyone from Lenin to Castro, and now this guy. He speaks well, and I’m always in favor of that as a key leadership skill. So did David Koresh. However, as I kept seeing that quote being published by the disgracefully uncritical mainstream media, my inner Popeye scratched to get out (“It’s all I can stands, ’cause I can’t stands no more!”) Who does he think he’s kidding?

Perhaps more importantly, what is the proper reaction to any American who wasn’t raised in a cave who doesn’t hear that insane claim and conclude, “Oh, brother! So much for that guy. He’s either lying, ignorant or a moron”? At very least it’s “RUN AWAY!”

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One Non-Profit With Integrity, Another Without

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

First, on the ethical side…we have The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which picked up the metaphorical baton on non-partisan defense of freedom of speech after the ACLU threw their mission away and became just another lackey for the Democratic Party.

A federal district court today dismissed with prejudice the lawsuit against Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer stemming from her late and spectacularly wrong poll before the 2024 election showing Donald Trump losing reliably Republican Iowa to Kamala Harris. The lawsuit, brought by a subscriber to The Des Moines Register and structured as a class action asserted claims under Iowa’s Consumer Fraud Act was fraud and attempted election interference. It was a stupid lawsuit, so Selzer, represented pro bono by FIRE, which explained that commentary about a political election, including polls, are protected speech. The court agreed that “polls are a mere snapshot of a dynamic and changing electorate” and “the results of an opinion poll are not an actionable false representation merely because the anticipated results differ from what eventually occurred.” The court also held the plaintiff had “no factual allegations” to support his fraud claim, instead “invok[ing] mere buzzwords and speculation” to support his claims.

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Ethical or Unethical Quote? President Trump on Nancy Pelosi:

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments


“Nancy Pelosi, the old and broken political hack who Impeached me twice and lost, is finally calling it ‘quits.’ She illegally made a fortune in the Stock Market, ripped off the American Public, and was a disaster for America. I’m glad to see the stench of Nancy Pelosi go!!!”

—President Donald Trump on Truth Social today, responding to the news that Ethics Villain Nancy Pelosi will not run for another term. (What do you really think, Mr. President?)

I was going to frame this as an Ethics Quiz, but thought better of it. Of course a U.S President shouldn’t stoop to this kind of rhetoric, even if everyone else is, about him. “Old and broken,” “hack” and “stench” cross the line into ad hominem, but then that’s Trump, unfortunately. The sentiment, however is deserved, which is why EA designated Pelosi as an Ethics Villain. She has been an unequivocally destructive force on the U.S. scene, from her irresponsible and unethical ushering of Obamacare through to passage without letting it be thoroughly vetted, to her ruinous impeachments (we no longer have a non-partisan impeachment option, thanks to her precedents) to her disgusting performance during Trump’s final State of the Union address in his last term, to the rigged “J-6” hearings. Trump is also correct about her insider trading, though she has the defense of “Everybody does it,” just not as effectively as she did.

Yes, Trump’s message is typical “tit-for-tat” after she called him a “vile creature” and the “worst thing on the face of the earth,” to which “hack” and “stench” seem mild insults in comparison. President still have an obligation to eschew such name-calling and “take the high road,” a principle that Trump either rejects or refuses to acknowledge.

On the other hand, as Captain Hook would never say, everything Trump said is true. So there’s that… Ann Althouse wrote that she was impressed that Trump didn’t slip any sexist rhetoric into his message.

And that, my friends, is called damning with faint praise.

Back Off, Progressives: Dwight David Eisenhower Was An Excellent President In His Time.

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Which is, after all, the only time that matters.…at the time.

I just wrote a long rebuttal to a recently Trump Deranged friend of impressive mind and credentials, who decided to go after, of all people, President Dwight Eisenhower for a speech in which he extolled moral values because, my friend’s Facebook post declared, “in real life the years of Eisenhower’s administration—essentially all of the 1950s—did not even come close to measuring up to the tenets of social, racial, ethnic and sexual justice and economic equity that most of us today believe are the standards of a just society.”

“That is an important reminder for all of us us that times do change,” he continued, “and that as right-thinking as Eisenhower’s words seem on the surface, they were spoken by the leader of a society that was very repressive in many ways—economically, socially, racially, sexually and otherwise.” This, to use the vernacular, pissed me off greatly. Ike has gone higher in my estimation of him as President the more I read about him and especially the more I watch other President struggle with the job he seemed to do effortlessly. (Of course, Ike may be the only one of our Presidents for whom the office could be considered a step down in difficulty and responsibility, after overseeing the Allied effort to save the world in World War II.)

Here, with minor edits to protect the guilty, is what I posted in response to that slap at Ike:

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But this is the purest form of Presentism, and a grossly unfair assessment of Ike, one of our most under-rated and effective Presidents. It is always easy to go back and condemn figures of the past who did not have the benefit of many decades of accumulated experience and wisdom; easy and wrong. It is by this standard that we saw efforts in demented regions like San Francisco (and our own) to strip historical honors from, among others, the Founders, because they were not sufficiently psychic to reject their society’s and culture’s mistaken beliefs, such as the inherent inferiority of other races to theirs.

 I’ve studied Eisenhower’s own writings and those about him. His vision of the Presidency was that his job was to protect and preserve the culture, not change it; that the culture would evolve and change in its own time, when society was ready for it. As a result, Eisenhower led a United States that honored and trusted its institutions at a level that seems astonishing today. He had a great part in that.

Nobody accused him of being a “king,” but in Boston, even then a bulwark of the Democratic Party, kids listened to “Hail to the Chief” on the most popular children’s show (creepily titled “Big Brother”!) as a photo of Ike appeared (the one above, in fact) on the screen and we “toasted” the President of the United States with a glass of milk. The Horror.

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NYT Subscriptions Surge, Meaning That Journalism’s One-Way Bias and Ethics Rot Is Not Going Away Soon

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

In a post yesterday, I wrote, in the final note on the ethical implications of this week’s election results,

“None of this would have unfolded in quite the same way, I am certain, without a corrupt journalism sector that has totally abdicated the duty of its profession in favor of partisan propaganda. I am more convinced than ever that the Republic will not function efficiently or engender responsible citizenship until there is news media commitment to fair, objective, responsible, unbiased and honest communication to the public of what it needs to know to make intelligent decisions about their governance. There has been some progress toward that end this year, but not nearly enough.”

Well, evoking William Barrett Travis when Santa Anna demanded the surrender of the Alamo, the New York Times “answered with a cannon shot.”

“The Times’s Profit Jumps With 460,000 More Subscribers” the headline today reads. “The Times now has 12.33 million total subscribers to all of its products. It has said it is aiming for 15 million by the end of 2027.” The article (gift link!), which you can read yourself if you have the stomach for it, has lots of other good news for the Times bottom line,

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Ethics Alarms Threads of the Year: Reparations and Guaranteed Minimum Income

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Well, I’m defeated! Two rich and lively threads this week have produced more Comment of the Day-worthy commentary and more essays worthy of guest columns than I can possibly do justice to without them swallowing the blog.

I’m sorry. For the first time ever, I am reduced to linking to the post that sprung these exchanges, and sending interested readers to them rather than my reposting them all.

The first: Friday Open Forum, Halloween Edition. Last week’s open forum was especially lively with many topics covered, but the epic thread, started by Extradimenensional Cephalopod, began with “Premise: The United States institutes a universal basic income of $1000 per person per month, except for people who opt to remain in existing welfare programs.” Many engaged, including Sarah B, AM Golden, Old Bill, CEES VAN BARNEVELDT and Michael Ejercito.

The second: Unethical Quote of the Month: Un-Named California Lawyer. The most prolix combatants in the discussion of slavery reparations are jdkazoo123 and Chris Marschner, but there is enlightening commentary by many others as well.

Ethics Alarms thanks and salutes everyone involved in both of these discussions. They are exactly what I hoped to inspire when I started Ethics Alarms.

President Donald Trump Can’t Even Be An Ethics Hero Properly…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Yesterday, at the last possible minute, President Trump endorsed Andrew Cuomo in a typically antic Truth Social post. From that perspective, it’s an act of ethical heroism. He’s doing something that is not in his best interests or those of his party. Trump clearly loves New York City even though it doesn’t love him. He is choosing the future welfare of the city’s mostly Democratic residents over what will benefit his party, the Republican Party, by throwing the weight and prestige of his office behind a Democrat (running as an Independent, but never mind) rather than the GOP spoiler, Curtis Sliwa.

Kudos for the President. Making sure as few people as possible vote for Sliwa, who is on the way to becoming New York City’s Harold Staasen, is contrary to principles of party loyalty but the right thing to do. Trump’s endorsement:

“If Communist Candidate Zohran Mamdani wins the Election for Mayor of New York City, it is highly unlikely that I will be contributing Federal Funds, other than the very minimum as required, to my beloved first home, because of the fact that, as a Communist, this once great City has ZERO chance of success, or even survival! It can only get worse with a Communist at the helm, and I don’t want to send, as President, good money after bad. It is my obligation to run the Nation, and it is my strong conviction that New York City will be a Complete and Total Economic and Social Disaster should Mamdani win. A vote for Curtis Sliwa (who looks much better without the beret!) is a vote for Mamdani. Whether you personally like Andrew Cuomo or not, you really have no choice. You must vote for him, and hope he does a fantastic job. He is capable of it, Mamdani is not!”

Trump being Trump and reflexively perverse, he just had to do the right thing in the worst possible way, threatening the city and its residents in the process. Thus did he cross over the line from endorsing a candidate (normal, ethical) to threatening the city if it doesn’t do what he wants. That’s election interference, because he is applying coercion, or what feels like it.

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