Government & Politics

Ethics Warm-Up, 2/20/2021, Because Everyone Needs To Warm Up: CNN And An Unethical Historian Smear Nikki Haley, Who Had Already Kneecapped Herself

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

suspended-animation

Well, I went ahead and gently set the trap by asking my deranged Facebook friends if they knew that the narrative that Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick had not been killed by beating by the January 6 rioters, had not been “hit with a fire extinguisher,” and had not “died of his wounds” in the riot as reported by the news media long after that story had been debunked, and used as evidence of the “deadly insurrection” by Democrats during the impeachment trial. The response, from a really smart audience including many lawyers, was disappointing if not unexpected. So far, all of the responses tried to avoid the issue. “Are you saying that his stroke (the current cause of death theory) was not brought on by the riot?” No, and since nobody knows what brought on the stroke, one can’t say, and shouldn’t write as news, that it was. I asked about the “killed by the mob” and “died in the line of duty” story. “The park police website says he was killed in the riot!” That’s a novel approach: using an already false report in a biased source to insist that the false report must be true. “But..but…but…but,” “humina humina humina”…”well, what about…”…they just couldn’t admit it. It was a deliberately used false narrative, first without verification and then after the story was proven false, for the purpose of hyping the riot and inflaming public opinion against the President. Nothing about being a Democrat, progressive or a Trump-hater should prevent someone from acknowledging that. Yet they just couldn’t do it. Even the lawyers. Heck, especially the lawyers!

1. No zombie lawyers allowed in Florida. If you think trying to convict Trump after he was no longer President was bad, how about this: Sabrina Starr Spradley, a 41-year-old attorney in private practice in Delray Beach, Florida, was disbarred in December, 2020 though an official death certificate from the Florida Department of Health stated that she died in October of 2019. Nobody told the bar association or the Florida courts.

Continue reading →

“Denial”: An Ethics Movie (Part 1)

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“Denial,” a 2016 British film that I missed (along with most moviegoers in the U.S.), tells, reasonably accurately, the story of a 1996 libel suit brought by David Irving, an anti-Semite, Holocaust-denying British historian, against Deborah E. Lipstadt, author of the 1993 book “Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.” After the suit, her account of the ordeal, “History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier,” formed the source of the screenplay.

Irving brought a lawsuit in Britain against Lipstadt (played by Rachel Weisz), and her publisher, Penguin Books, for calling him a Holocaust denier, a liar, and an anti-Jewish bigot. Irving is a long-time Hitler defender, and claimed there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz. British libel laws, unlike those in the United States, place the burden of proof on the defendant to prove that what was written was justified. Thus Lipstadt’s legal team must focus on proving Irving’s evidence is false, and that he knows it is false. The stakes were suddenly high, for if a court ruled that Irving’s theories had legitimacy, the results would have been catastrophic. For this reason, at least according to the film, a group of Jewish leaders urged Lipstadt to settle the suit before trial.

The movie is now on Amazon Prime. It is not a flamboyant legal drama but an intelligent and clear one (I would love to put it on stage). It also raises important ethics and legal issues, among them:

Continue reading →

Ted Cruz “Scandal” Significance: Another Smoking Gun

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Screen-Shot-2021-02-19-at-9.26.42-AM-e1613750753297

I keep wondering: at what point do even the progressives and Democrats whose political interests the media dishonestly and unethically advance stop and say, “Wait a minute! This just isn’t right. How would I feel if journalists were warping facts and faking news to hurt progressives like me?”

You know, the Golden Rule? That thing? Hello?

The Ted Cruz kerfuffle over his ill-considered decision to flee freezing, energy-starved Texas was all outrage over symbols, not substance. As discussed here, Cruz made a dumb and careless decision that he ought to have known would have negative political consequences, but no one should mistake it for a decision with actual, tangible results. Nor did Cruz breach any ethical duties. Those who think a U.S. Senator has any power to address a state crisis like the one facing Texas just doesn’t know how the government really works.

Unfortunately, that’s about 90% of the public.

The real significance of the Cruz-Cancun “scandal” is how it provides one more smoking gun that the committed apologists for the biased news media can try to ignore, as in “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! It’s another wacko right-wing conspiracy theory.”

While Ted was getting hammered for taking a quickie vacation with his long-suffering family, a real scandal was emerging in New York, where Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo, whom the media worked to absurd degrees to hold up as a hero of the pandemic, was accused of a particularly nasty cover-up. His own aide blew the whistle on him, revealing that the Cuomo administration had hidden the real death toll of the Governor’s disastrous and deadly decision to send Wuhan-infected seniors into nursing homes. Now there is an investigation, and even the possibility of impeachment. It’s a major story—except that it involves a prominent Democrat. Thus it was Republican Ted Cruz’s bad optics that dominated the news coverage last week rather than Cuomo’s genuine, serious, “alleged” misconduct.

Fox News was mean enough to prepare and broadcast the graphic above. It’s accurate; imagine the fun Rush Limbaugh could have had with that. Newsbusters adds some details:

Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Jodi Shaw

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Jody Shaw

Instead of apologizing, instead of prostrating herself and her principles to remains in good graces within an oppressive culture, Jodi Shaw sounded an alarm instead. Now she needs our support, but more than that, she must be seen as a role model for anyone else, of any political stripe or ideological tilt, who believes in the values the United States was founded to nurture.

Shaw has courage. Courage is what is desperately needed, and as has been written here too often already, it is what has so far been lacking.

I first wrote about Shaw, then a Smith College administrator, last December. Shaw, had criticized the college’s critical race theory-based “sensitivity training” required of all staff members and posted her own YouTube videos on the issue. The president of Smith College, Kathleen McCartney, issued a formal statement against Shaw that said in part:

This past week, an employee of the college posted a personal video to express their concerns about the college’s programming to promote racial justice….This employee does not speak for the college or any part of the college. Further, we believe the video mischaracterizes the college’s important, ongoing efforts to build a more equitable and inclusive living, learning and working environment.

You should know that the employee has not violated any college policies by sharing their personal views on a personal channel. The National Labor Relations Act protects employees who engage in concerted activities, including speech, with respect to workplace conditions. All members of any workplace, including Smith College, have the freedom to criticize the policies and practices of their employer.

Nevertheless, I am writing to affirm that the President’s Cabinet and I believe we have a moral responsibility to promote racial justice, equity and inclusion at Smith College. To the people of color in our community, please know our commitment is steadfast. And especially to our students of color, please know we are here for you always.

I learned about the latest chapter in Shaw’s ordeal from another Ethics Hero, Bari Weiss. who resigned as the staff editor for the opinion section of the The New York Times with a searing letter revealing the cultural oppression faced by anyone on that staff who did not conform to the mandatory progressive cant. I wrote at the time, in July of last year, “Maybe Weiss’s bold and unquestionably true letter is the metaphorical slap in the face of the mainstream media that will make journalists realize that they have squandered their credibility.” Boy, I’m a gullible Pollyanna sometimes! The Times has, if anything, gotten worse, and the Left’s institutions have become, if anything, more brazen in their efforts to punish and crush dissenters. But Weiss, like other refugees from the ideological purges like Glenn Greenwald, now has a platform at substack, where you can subscribe to support the rebels. I think of it as the metaphorical hills of Greece, where my relatives waged guerilla war on the invading Nazis in WWII while trying to protect the cradle of Western thought and philosophy.

Weiss introduces Jodi and her moment of truth by writing in part,

Continue reading →

Ethics Observations On Neera Tanden’s Chickens Coming Home To Roost [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Chickens attack

On December 1, 2020, you were able to read here that not-quite-elected-yet President Biden had signaled that he intended to nominate Neera Tanden as his Director of the Office of Management and Budget. That’s an important position that heads a supposedly non-partisan department, and Biden knew that she was about as far from non-partisan as they come:

Tanden was one of numerous Democrats to join the plot in 2016 to encourage electors in the Electoral College to ignore their states’ votes and refuse to elect Trump as President. Tanden endorsed fanatic NeverTrump lawyer Richard Painter’s argument that Trump’s violations of the Emolument Clause disqualified him from being President.Tanden also spread the false but effective conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton lost because of Russian interference, claiming the “Russians did enough damage to affect more than 70k votes in 3 states.” Four days after the 2016 election, Tanden began implying that Russian hackers changed the vote totals.

“This,” I wrote, “is the nominee by an apparent President-elect whose allies are attacking Trump for challenging the current vote totals in court, rather than through rumors and contrived fantasy.”

Biden did in fact nominate Tardren, which rendered this pledge, the cynical, “I’m lying and there’s not a thing you can do about it!” tweet, null and void, as several other Presidential actions have:

Biden tweet4

Tanden is the president of The Center for American Progress, which is one of those public policy research institutes that lies to you in the first sentence of its description, saying it is “non-partisan.” It is a far-left advocacy organization, and if you could find a single Republican on its staff, I’d be gobsmacked. Tanden, however, the organization’s president, doesn’t even pretend to be non-partisan, being addicted to tweeting insults to the non-Democrats only, including Senators. But really, what’s the risk? After all, are Democrats in the Senate going to care that Biden’s nomination of a hyper-partisan to head OMB proves what a joke his pledge to end divisiveness is?

Doh! Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) said Friday he will not support Neera Tanden’s nomination for director of the Office of Management and Budget, citing her “overtly partisan statements.” Now THAT’s an understatement. Tanden deleted more than 1,000 insulting tweets ahead of her nomination, but the internet is forever, so Senator Rob Portman (R-Ohio) read some of the juicy ones on the Senate floor. “You wrote that Susan Collins is ‘the worst,’ that Tom Cotton is a fraud, that vampires have more heart than Ted Cruz, you called Leader McConnell ‘Moscow Mitch’ and Voldemort,” Portman said.

Manchin said in a statement that should doom Tanden, since the Democrats can’t afford any defections in the evenly divided Senate,

“I have carefully reviewed Neera Tanden’s public statements and tweets that were personally directed towards my colleagues on both sides of the aisle from Senator Sanders to Senator McConnell and others. I believe her overtly partisan statements will have a toxic and detrimental impact on the important working relationship between members of Congress and the next director of the Office of Management and Budget. For this reason, I cannot support her nomination.”

Observations:

Continue reading →

Ethics Inquiry: Did Sen. Cruz Do Anything Wrong?

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

Cruz trip

As Bill Clinton might say (and probably has, maybe more than once), it depends on what your definition of “wrong” is.

Millions of Texans were left without electricity this week in the middle of the state’s power crisis following a massive winter storm. The Senator’s wife Heidi sent text messages to friends and neighbors complaining that their home was “FREEZING,” and that she wanted the family to escape on the 17th to someplace warmer, at least until Sunday. The mission, if her husband chose to accept it: get to the luxury Ritz-Carlton in sunny Cancún, Mexico. The destination is apparently a family favorite. The GOP Senator did accept, and the Freezing Cruzes fled Houston, hopping an afternoon flight. The consensus of the news media, the commentariat and social media was that…

In fact, you would think Cruz had been caught having a secret romantic rendezvous with a goat. Incriminating photos of Cruz and his wife boarding the flight launched a full-fledged scandal. How dare he flee a crisis when his state was in misery? Ted responded by playing the Parent Card, explaining he had flown to Mexico “to be a good dad” and to chaperone his daughters and their friends, and he promised he was coming back yesterday, which he did.

When he returned, Cruz admitted that his family trip had been a mistake. That is undeniable.

But was it unethical? Was it wrong?

Continue reading →

Your Deranged Friends Don’t Care That They Are Being Lied To About The “Insurrection,” But You Have An Obligation To Tell Them Anyway

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

tie guy

In “Journalism Ethics/Legal Ethics/Government Ethics Rot: The Democrats And Journalists Tried To Convict Donald Trump With Fake News,” Ethics Alarms covered the fact, and it is a fact, not an opinion, that the mainstream media and Democrats—the AUC, essentially—deliberately lied to the public in order to appeal to emotion and hype the significance of the January 6 riot. It appears that they were caught at the last second, which is why the decision to call witnesses was suddenly and mysteriously reversed in favor of a vote the Democrats knew they were going to lose.

I think it’s an important post about an important story, but very few people have read it (it’s been viewed 5 times today), or know that contrary to the assertions of President Biden and others, nobody was killed by the rioters, and a park police officer did not “give his life in defense of democracy.” There have been very few news stories pointing out that the Times quietly changed its false story that launched this myth, or that the Democrats deliberately entered it as false evidence in the impeachment trial.

When Ethics Alarms becomes a primary source of news that supposed journalists refuse to cover, we are in big, big trouble, especially since fewer people appear to be coming here (theories abound).

Glenn Greenwald, the primary beacon of that post, is doing what he can to spread the word of just how dastardly the AUC has been in spreading disinformation about the riot. He, as you know if you have been reading here, lost his job at his own journalism organization when it refused to allow him to spill the beans about the Hunter Biden scandal. In his latest post, Greenwlad revealed that the Brian Sicknick falsehood was far from the only example. [I will mention again here that everyone who wants to fight against the increasingly tight noose biased journalism has around the neck of our republic should subscribe to Greenwald’s feed at substack. Do it here.]

For example, we have another false story peddled by the Times and repeated up and down the news media. Here’s Greenwald:

Continue reading →

Midnight Ethics Terrors, 2/17/21: Trump Attacks! Fake Law! Fake News! Fake Science!

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

nightterrors-orig-crop

Okay, I started this at midnight, then got the night terrors, and waited until (almost) daylight to finish…

1. Who didn’t see this coming? Yesterday, Donald Trump unloaded with both metaphorical barrels on Mich McConnell as no President, former or otherwise, has ever attacked his party’s Senate leader before. McConnell asked for it, got it, and deserved it. His post impeachment trial acquittal was a foolish attempt to turn the President’s vindication into a defeat, and a pretty transparent example of the “now that the guy who was never one of us is out of power, we can strike at him with impunity” syndrome. Is McConnell really that deluded and incompetent? He must be. He apparently doesn’t understand the cognitive dissonance scale. Amazing. See, Mitch, nobody really likes you. You have the charisma of a scrub brush. As controversial as Trump is, he’s so much higher than you on the scale…

Cognitive Dissonance

… that attacking him just drags you lower still. Don’t you get that? Now Trump has double the effect. Some prime excerpts:

Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Ethics Quote Of The Month (Yes, It’s More Impeachment Analysis, And I’m Sick Of It Too, But This Is Important): Professor Jonathan Turley”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Sentence first

Here is Aaron Paschall’s Comment of the Day (he gets extra credit for the “Alice in Wonderland” quote) on the post, “Ethics Quote Of The Month (Yes, It’s More Impeachment Analysis, And I’m Sick Of It Too, But This Is Important): Professor Jonathan Turley”:

“Sentence first, verdict afterward!”

The nitpicking of “’Legally, due process only applies to life, liberty, and property,” she lectured. “A job is none of those.’” honestly terrifies me. This is the consequent of thought processes like the argument against Justice Kavanaugh: “It isn’t a ‘trial,’ it’s a job interview. Due process doesn’t apply outside a court of law.” Or the one which we see now extolled in defense of Facebook/Twitter bans: “Private companies can ban whoever they like – the government isn’t doing a thing. Freedom of speech has no bearing outside of the government.” In attacking Trump and more than Trump, they’ve whittled away virtually all defenses or niceties like fairness, decency, moderation, humility, justice, the benefit of the doubt and a million more. How they can bear to stand on such a barren plain of life and declare it rich and good is beyond me.

In C.S. Lewis’ “The Silver Chair,” Puddleglum the Marshwiggle was a gloomy sort. Near the end of their adventure, he and his comrades found themselves deep underground, with a fire emitting thick, bewildering fumes. The villain of the piece encouraged them to give up, that the surface world they were trying to escape to didn’t even exist – it was a figment of their imaginations. The sun, the sky, the wind – illusions, and one she was trying to save them from expending their lives in fruitless search of. At the last moment, when nearly everyone was convinced, Puddleglum stamps his foot into the center of the fire, putting it out – and filling the room with the scent of burnt Marshwiggle, which was not nearly so nice. And he addressed the witch with what is one of my favorite quotes ever:

Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Month (Yes, It’s More Impeachment Analysis, And I’m Sick Of It Too, But This Is Important): Professor Jonathan Turley

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Shredding-the-Constitution

..Even with acquittal all but ensured, there was no room for constitutional niceties like free speech or due process. There was only one issue — the same one that has driven our media and politics for four years: Trump. Through that time, some of us have objected that extreme legal interpretations and biased coverage destroy our legal and journalistic values.

—-George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley, constitutional law expert, on the conduct of the Democrats before and during the just-completed second Trump impeachment trial.

This statement, as well as the rest of his article for The Hill yesterday, was not only astute (though Turley’s observations should have been obvious) but personally welcome, in part because it tracked exactly with what I have been writing here for four years, but  in no small part because I was almost finished with a post making the same points. For Turley to make them is, of course, better, since a lot more people, though not nearly enough, pay attention to what he says. It was especially welcome because not one but two friends (among others) had made fatuous and indefensible assertions about the impeachment in the past two days, inspiring me to start that now redundant post.

My theme was going to be about how their now completely unhinged, Ahab-like mania to destroy the former President had led them to deny the importance of what once were accepted by liberals and conservatives alike—but especially liberals before their rebranding as “progressives”—as crucial, indispensable, core American values relating to personal liberty and government interference with it. The rationalizations employed in this scary process are stunning.

Prime among them as been 2020’s rationalization of the year: “It isn’t what it is,” #64. As I noted in the previous post, a Facebook friend (whom I strongly suspect was one of the self-exiled progressive Ethics Alarms commenters) wrote on the platform to the usual acclaim of  “likes” and “loves” that the 57 Senators who voted for this corrupt impeachment were voting “for democracy.” They were in fact doing the opposite, and in many ways, as Turley’s article explains (though again, it should be obvious.) Then, in a discussion with a more rational friend, another lawyer, about how the House impeachment had deliberately bypassed due process, I was told that there is no right of due process in an impeachment proceeding, nor should the prohibition of ex post facto laws and bills of attainder apply. Here was a lawyer making technical arguments against ethics. “Legally, due process only applies to life, liberty, and property,” she lectured. “A job is none of those.”

I could rebut that, but the point is that both the Declaration and the Constitution mark out basic values of our society, not just laws, but ethical values. “Due process” means fairness, and this lawyer, an alleged progressive, was arguing that the government doesn’t have to be fair while depriving the public of an elected official and that elected official of his job, and that individual of his ability to seek that job or another one. This is what hate and arrogance have done to the Left.

Continue reading →