Pat Cipollone, one of President Trump’s lawyer, stated that Republicans weren’t allowed to participate in House depositions. This wasn’t true: 47 Republicans who served on the appropriate committees had the right to attend these depositions, and many did attend. Naturally the “Get all Trump allies’ resistance mob regards this an intentional lie, and is demanding that Cipellone be disciplined for professional misconduct.
Wrong.
Writes legal ethics expert Stacie Rosenzweig, “This is almost certainly a lie rather than a misstatement or misapprehension; I can’t imagine a scenario in which a lawyer with a three-decade career and a reputation for being “well-prepared and even-keeled” would simply not know that.” Her logic is exactly upside down: a lawyer that experienced would not deliberately utter a lie in such a high profile forum where it would certainly be noticed, undermining his credibility to no good end. Sure enough, the factcheckers were on his misstatement like a shot.
The lawyer probably made a mistake, contrary to Rosenweig’s unjustfied certitude.This may have occurred because the false claim that the GOP was shut out of the depositions was a frequent right-wing talking point, and he didn’t check it. The assertion was at best tangential to his argument; I guarantee that no bar association would discipline any lawyer by using the argument, “You’re too good and experienced to make a stupid mistake.” Good and experienced lawyers made mistakes, sometimes astonishing ones. Continue reading →
Steve-O-From-NJ authored an epic Comment of the Day, checking in at nearly 1800 words, which may be a record–it will take too long to check. The question is, since it an analysis of the soon-to-be-a-really-bad-memory-that-both-parties-will-constantly -remind- us-of impeachment, or as it is known on Ethics Alarms, Plan S, the Trump Impeachment Ethics Train Wreck, and one more car in the 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck, is this an ethics post?
This was already on my mind, having read today another legal ethics blogger complaining that the impeachment debacle has forced her ethics blog into politics. Yeah, tell me about it.
Yes, it’s an ethics post. The impeachment was the culmination—for now–of what Ethics Alarms has been covering for three years as what I labelled early on as one of the most important and dangerous examples of unethical partisan conduct in decades. Steve-O hits many issues that have been extensively covered here from an ethics perspective, and, frankly, a summary right now is helpful. It also helps lay the foundation for a post I have been working on a while with his phrase–twice!–mixed motives.
After Friday’s vote, it’s all over but the formalities for the third impeachment and the second attempt at a soft coup by Congress against the president. It’s also the least legitimate of the three impeachments plus the one effort that never got to impeachment because the president resigned.
The Radical Republicans tried to push Andrew Johnson out of office because, as a Democrat and a southerner (he was from Tennessee), he was in the way of their harsh program of Reconstruction they wanted to impose on the South after the Civil War, so they essentially took a policy dispute up to eleven. Nixon oversaw criminal activities and lied repeatedly, so his trust was shot and he could no longer lead. Bill Clinton had a sleazy, but probably not impeachable, affair, but then perjured himself, which is a crime, to cover it up, a classic case of the coverup being worse than the act. The best the Democratic Party could come up with on this one was a phone call with, at best, mixed motives.
Nowhere in the Constitution or the other laws of this land does it say that the president or any other official must act totally selflessly at all times in the discharge of his duties, or he risks being impeached and removed from office. Nowhere does it say that, as chief diplomat of the United States, the president is not empowered to engage in political jiujitsu with other governments. Nowhere does it say that, as chief law enforcement officer of the United States, the president is not empowered to look into dealings by others with foreign governments that he has a question about. Most importantly, nowhere does it say that the president, or any other executive official, must defer to Congress, particularly to the House, in all things.
The Founding Fathers were very clear on the concept of separation of powers when they drew up the Constitution. They did not want any one official, or even one institution, making the laws and then prosecuting and punishing anyone accused of breaking the laws. They specifically did not want any of the three branches of government becoming more powerful than the others. That’s why it’s called checks and balances. The nation is still working out how that is supposed to work in every situation, but that’s the basic concept we all learned back around 3rd grade. They built in the power of impeachment to guard against gross abuses by corrupt officials, but they specifically rejected the idea of a parliamentary system where the legislature holds most of the power and can call a vote of no confidence in the government fairly easily.
They also specifically rejected the idea of one branch of government encroaching on the prerogatives of the others. Congress can pass all the laws it wants, but, unless the president signs them and later enforces them, they mean nothing. Congress can also do all the overseeing it wants, but, its power to demand testimony, documents, or anything else can be checked by the courts. That’s how it works. That’s how it’s supposed to work. Continue reading →
I almost managed to ignore football completely this season, and I’m proud of it. There were few rogue kneelers in the NFL this year, and the New England Patriots, my hometown role models for the Houston Astros, finally bit the dust. Meanwhile, there was little new on the CTE front, not any more is needed to prove that cheering young men in the process of destroying their brains for a handful of well-compensated seasons as football heroes is immoral and unethical. I did recently watch the Netflix documentary, “The Killer Inside,” about Aaron Hernandez, the Patriots star who murdered a friend and perhaps two others. I didn’t know that after his suicide in prison, it was found that Hernandez suffered from CTE, and that his brain was one of the most damaged scientists have ever seen. The documentary also says that the New England Patriots coaching staff saw signs that he was deteriorating and becoming unstable, as well as using drugs, and they made no effort to intervene. After all, he was playing well, and the team was winning.
That’s pro football. To hell with it.
1. “The Chop.” I have written about this perpetually silly issue a lot, and recently, but the New York Times, being the Official Paper of the Woke, has felt it necessary to publish three pieces this week on the the so called “Kansas City Chop,” the tomahawk motion used by Kansas City Chiefs fans (The Chiefs are in the Super Bowl, you know) when cheering on their team. The chop is most identified with the Atlanta Braves (How satisfying it was to watch Jane Fonda dutifully chopping along with then husband Ted Turner when the Braves finally made the world Series in 1991!), but Chiefs fans started copying Braves fans. It is, of course, intended to rally the team, has nothing whatsoever to do with any kind of commentary on Native Americans, those who pretend to be seriously unsettled by what fans of an NFL team do to show their affection for their team are either faking or need psychiatric care. But here’s CNN: Continue reading →
PETA is so tone deaf, so irrational, and so devoid of functioning ethics alarms, it is depressing that the group has so much support. (Here’s an Ethics Alarms compendium of some of their unethical misadventures. ) Currently the group is grandstanding—again–by harassing the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club, arguing that “Phil” should be replaced with an animatronic groundhog. Whatever. (This is Groundhog Day, you know. This is Groundhog Day, you know.) That nonsense, however, has been superseded by the uproar caused by the obnoxious TV ad above.
After it was rejected by the NFL–I don’t know why: I am very much in favor of letting foolish groups expose their foolishness to the nation and pay a bundle for the privilege–PETA released it anyway. As you can see, it shows cute animated animals, including a snake, “taking a knee” like Colin Kaepernick and his acolytes as “The Star Spangled Banner” is hummed in the background. Big mistake.
Heh, heh, heh...
The ad was quickly criticized as stupid, of course, since it is, for the “kneeling” snake and fish. Others called it disrespectful to the United States, the National Anthem and veterans. The Snake Anti-Defamation League sent a venomous letter of protest. OK, that was a joke.
This isn’t: PETA was accused of “appropriating” Kaepernick’s protest against racial injustice and police brutality and attempting to equate black men to animals. This is the group that has argued that the Bill of Rights applies to whales and lower primates, so this shouldn’t be a shock.
The Root took aim and fired: “PETA colonized the Black Lives Matter Movement; disrespected Colin Kaepernick’s protest against injustice, and made a mockery of 400 years of systemic oppression by comparing Black lives to grizzly bears and bald eagles.”
But animals have been abused by humans since the cave men!
Erica Cobb, co-host of Daily Blast LIVE called PETA’s ad “disrespectful,” adding,”Black people already feel like dogs having clean drinking water is more important than black people have clean drinking water.”
The hashtag #PETA is suddenly all over social media, and not in a good way. Anita Sarkeesian, feminist activist, tweeted,
“Not wanting to add more views or attention to PETA but I’m so tired of how consistently their ‘activism’ is deeply oppressive, offensive, and degrading to ACTUAL HUMAN BEINGS. Of course, we shouldn’t be cruel to animals but the real oppression of Black folks is not equivalent.”
PETA, not surprisingly since nobody associated with the group seems to have any properly functioning ethics alarms, then started blocking critics on Twitter, but not before trying the Rationalizations known as The Unethical Role Model (#32) and The Hillary Inoculation, or “If he/she doesn’t care, why should anyone else?” (#42) by trotting out Kaepernick himself to say that he doesn’t mind the ad. (Hmmm…should I add a Rationalization called “The Idiot’s Endorsement”?)
It’s not just the impeachment..apparently prosecutors are beginning to adopt the Democratic Party’s theory that it is appropriate to force a trial when there is no chance at conviction just to stigmatize the accused. This is a clear breach of prosecutor ethics, but ethics schmethics, the ends justify the means, right?
The area in which this despicable strategy is surfacing is—and this should be no surprise—the realm of #Me Too. In Maine, Natasha Irving , who is the top prosecutor for Knox, Lincoln, Sagadahoc and Waldo counties, wants to reform how the legal system prosecutes sexual assault cases, believing all women so those who come forward know they’ll be “supported.” This means, according to Irving, that prosecutors shouldn’t decline to prosecute a sexual assault case just because they “think it’s too hard to prove.”
“Individually, I think that response is very damaging to a survivor,” she says. “If they weren’t believed initially, they don’t have faith that they’re going to be believed if they come forward again. Or that they somehow will be put on trial for what happened instead of the perpetrator. There’s a lot of shame and blame that the victims often carry.”
Yes, that’s a problem. A greater problem is prosecutors bring cases to trial when the don’t have enough evidence to prove the defendant guilty. Then they are just counting on an incompetent jury, which isn’t that much of a longshot. The attitude Irving is endorsing is how black men end up in prison for murders they didn’t commit. Continue reading →
I just wrote the longest reply to a Facebook friend I have ever authored, not counting pasting in Ethics Alarms columns. He’s a fair and smart man, but he’s in the performing arts, which means he’s surrounded by knee-jerk progressives who think Robert De Nero and Meryl Streep are persuasive political commentators and who cheered when the cast of “Hamilton” ambushed Pence. In his post, he opined that historians would condemn ” spineless, groveling, boot-licking Republican Senators who covered their ears and willfully chose not to hear from fact-witnesses like John Bolton.” He said he was sure “the truth will come out” concerning Trump’s “corrupt motives and his misuse of presidential power,” but that “giving a pass” to an “unstable, narcisisstic” President “convinced that he is above the law” was very dangerous. And so on–this is the standard mainstream media babble. I decided to write a detailed rebuttal, because I know my friend is an ethical and perceptive person, and view his acceptance of this false narrative issuing from the Left as evidence that he is the victim of propaganda. I think what might have tipped the scales for me was one of his friends citing with approval James Comey’s vomit-inducing op ed, yesterday, sanctimoniously telling us that despite the recent failure of the soft coup attempt he helped to advance, “we’ll be all right.” Gag, Ack, Yecch!
Here is what I wrote:
It pains me to see you fall into this intellectual trap, [my friend] though it is not your fault. Propaganda works, after all, and 90% of the reporting and punditry you get about the impeachment is incompetent and shockingly partisan. In fact, as with the illegal attempted impeachment of Andrew Johnson, Republican Senators are saving the Constitution and the Separation of Powers by blocking a precedent that would have reduced elections to just a temporary democratic moment until the opposing party could figure out some way to reverse hem. Few if any of the GOP Senators care for the President any more than you do (or I, for that matter), but Presidents were not intended to be impeached because Congress decides they are assholes, and that’s all that is being attempted here.Continue reading →
The good news: Other Bill’s get well bouquet (above) from the Commentariat to the fallen “Mrs. Ethics Alarms” is still thriving!
1. Humbly grateful...for all the gracious notes of forgiveness for the “Unethical Quote Of The Century” fiasco, explicated here in the early morning hours. Imagine: with all the hysterical, dishonest, apocalyptic declarations flying around the airwaves, news media and web, I managed to write about one that was never said.
2. Ann Althouse on “rigged.” The politically neutral bloggress gave me a much needed laugh with this: Responding to the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank’s unhingery in “The Senate impeachment trial was rigged!,” Ann wrote,
Yeah, it was rigged. Everything is rigged. The election was rigged. Trump isn’t really President. The impeachment trial was rigged. The acquittal won’t count as an acquittal. If Trump wins reelection, it will be because it was rigged. It’s all rigged. The Constitution itself is rigged. What’s with that 2/3 vote requirement? Rigged. Electoral college? Rigged! Life itself is rigged!…
Bingo. Do all the people screaming about the decision not to allow witnesses remember that the Clinton impeachment trial has no witnesses, and neither Republican nor Democrats complained? The ones who do are hypocrites, the ones who don’t. most. I think, are inexcusably ignorant. I’m not certain the Democrats really wanted witnesses, since their alleged “bombshell” witness, John Bolton, was not going to testify that he knew the reason Trump was pushing for a Ukrainian investigation was to “rig” the election, and the GOP was going to demand to question Biden and son. as well as the “whistleblower.” I suspect that the Democrats assumed that calling witnesses would be voted down, giving them a theme that Republicans were covering up for Trump. Or maybe not. Nothing about the Plan S impeachment sham makes sense. However, the screaming at the sky over a result that was inevitable and widely known to be so years ago was also inevitable, and, one would think, embarrassing. Continue reading →
Last evening, I posted an Unethical Quote allegedly made by Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer that “Donald Trump’s impeachment acquittal will be meaningless because we never accepted the results of the 2016 election in the first place. Anyone who accepts an acquittal is a danger to our democracy.” I originally titled it the Unethical Quote of the Day, and later, as I read it again while responding to the predictable shocked comments, I upgraded the comment to Unethical Quote of the Century, a designation I was prepared to defend.
This morning, momentarily awake and planning to go back to sleep, I decided to check the Ethics Alarms comments, and saw this, from frequent commenter Here’s Johnny.
Re: Unethical quote: I would think that, for the unethical quote of the century, I would be able to find a few references to it in the news media. My best Google search efforts have turned up reports from Ethics Alarms and The Sacramento Brie. The Brie does not appear to be a legitimate news site, and their reference to this quote appears to show a Fox News screen grab. Searching at Fox News did not turn up the quote. The quote does not appear in the Senate Democrats text of Schumer’s comments at the press conference where he supposedly made the comment. So, what is going on here? Is there evidence that Schumer actually said what is in the quote? I could not find it.
This was disturbing. The post had no link, which is unusual, and I couldn’t tracj down where I got it from, though I believe the pointer came from a Trump Deranged friend on Facebook who quoted it approvingly. I’ve checked my browser history to no avail. After reading HJ’s comment, I listened to every YouTube clip I could find from Schumer yesterday. He made a number of disingenuous and hyperbolic statements about a trial with no witnesses not being a trial (The Clinton impeachment had no witnesses, and Democrats seemed to be happy with that), but nothing as outrageous as the alleged quote I posted.
Like Johnny, I cannot believe that if Schumer said something that irresponsible, it wouldn’t have been widely reported. Thus I am suspending the post pending verification, and as of this moment, assume that it was false. I also deleted the tweet that the blog generates for every post. I will continue to look for the quote and the source, and to identify exactly how this happened.
To some extent I know the latter: the news media and other Democrats have been foaming at the mouth for days, and many of the quotes are no less head-exploding than Schumer’s, except that they were not made by the leader of the party in the Senate. Assuming that there was no such Schumer quote, I was bitten by fake news that triggered confirmation bias. I have written for years that the Democrats/”resistance”/ mainstream media alliance have denied the legitimacy of President Trump’s election, and that conclusion is objectively unavoidable. Though I was stunned to see Schumer say so out loud, it was not as if what the quote indicated was out of line with reality. The second part, about “the danger to democracy,” echoed many of the irresponsible statements made by Rep. Schiff and others during the House impeachment managers’ presentation, and similar rhetoric by pundits and other Democrats. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), for example, tweeted yesterday,
“The Senate’s abdication of responsibility to the rule of law represents a much deeper threat to our democracy, our institutions, and our republic. The GOP knows that its agenda is incompatible with democracy, so their larger project is to dismantle it.”
That statement is as inflammatory and absurd as the alleged Schumer tweet, but not as shocking because OAC is, after all, an idiot. Schumer, however, is not.
I cannot apologize sufficiently for this. My attention has been even more divided than usual this past week—that’s not an excuse, but a partial explanation—and I’ve been bouncing around two computers and two many news sources to count, and, apparently, keep proper track of. I should never post a story or commentary with out verified links to the source, and, frankly, I don’t know why I didn’t this time.
Facebook is unreliable; I know that. There were plenty of aspects of the quote that should have set off my own ethics alarms, but I let my emotions take over: the quote really infuriated me, because as I suggested by noting the Schumer was “playing with fire,” that kind of rhetoric—and there has been a lot of it— rips at the connective tissue that holds this republic together. However, publishing unverified inflammatory rhetoric is just as wrong as saying such things.
Readers here have to be able to trust me; an ethics blog without trust is like a—oh, you can make up your own metaphor, I’m too upset to be clever—and this time I failed their, your, trust by not following my own procedures, and apparently being fooled because I didn’t heed my most important rule, to avoid bias making me stupid. I apologize to everyone reading this, everyone who passed along what appears to be Ethics Alarms fake news, and everyone who might have been misled by the fact that the invalid quote was passed along. I apologize to the commenters whose reactions are vanishing with the essay: I’m so sorry. I wasted your time. I also apologize to Senator Schumer.
I am going to have to do better, and I will.
I could say that I hope I can find that the quote was accurate after all, but I don’t. I am relieved that it appears to have been fabricated. I felt, when I read it, and foolishly believed it, that this was a tipping point, and a dangerous one.
Now, before I go back to bed and dream of self-flagellation, I am going to add the portion of the banned post that I know was accurate, because it had value. Indeed, another reason I accepted the quote impulsively, I think, is that it gave me a pwoerful lead-in to content I had already written. That will teach me.
I hope.
Here’s the remaining section of the now zapped post, and one more time, I am so sorry: Continue reading →
I usually cover this interesting poll when it comes out in early January; somehow I missed it this year., and am getting it in right under the January wire. The results don’t change much from year to year, as you will see, and this year was no different.
As the have for many years now, nurses, once again, top the list. Continue reading →
Between the nauseating impeachment charade and baseball’s cheating scandal (and the largely ethically ignorant commentary regarding it), the bias of the mainsteam media reaching critical mass in episodes likethisand the Don Lemon panel’s mean girls mockery of those dumber than dumb Trump supporters, mounting evidence that Democrats are going nuts based on the rise of a superannuated Communism fan in the race for the party’s Presidential nomination, and, of course, my wife doing a face-plant into some asphalt, it was a not a happy 31 days at The House of Ethics.
Amazingly, it has been a very good month for the President, becoming the first POTUS to unequivocally endorse the anti-abortion movement by appearing at the March for Life, cutting a partial deal with China, ridding the world of Qasem Soleimani (and in doing so, prompting his domestic foes, including the news media, to publicly sympathize with a terrorist and a nation that habitually calls for America’s destruction), releasing a Mid-East peace plan that is garnering support everywhere but from Iran, the Palestinians, and, of course, the U.S. media, and seeing economic figures so good even the New York Times has been forced to acknowledge them, all while being called every name in the book and an existential threat to democracy on C-Span by the Democratic House impeachment managers.
1. “Dolemite Is My Name” We finally watched “Dolemite Is My Name,” (on Netflix), Eddie Murphy’s homage to comic Rudy Ray Moore and his 70s Blaxploitation film “Dolemite.” So much for my proud claims of cultural literacy: I never heard of Moore or his film, which is apparently a genre classic. Moore is regarded as the Father of Rap; how did I miss this for so long? Murphy’s movie tells the mostly true story about how a group of complete novices, led by Moore, made an exuberantly idiotic movie (faithful to Moore’s formula for success with black audiences: “Titties, funny, and Kung-Fu”) for $100,000 that grossed 10 million.
The movie is fun as a black version of “Ed Wood” (same screenwriters, I discovered later) and won some awards. For it to be make any 2019 Ten Best lists, however, is blatant race pandering by critics. Continue reading →
As the have for many years now, nurses, once again, top the list. 
