Government & Politics

Spygate Spin: “How Can Honest People Still Deny That The News Media Is Spreading Anti-Trump Propaganda As Fact?” Exhibit A

/ Jack Marshall / 54 Comments

My New York Times headline this morning: “Trump Embraces Shadowy Plots, Eroding Trust..Theories from Fringes…Agencies Undermined By Claims of ‘Spygate” and ‘Deep State’

This is no better than, and no less than, actively perpetuating a Big Lie.

I won’t get into the murk of the Deep State for now. However, denying “Spygate” and claiming it is a “fringe” conspiracy theory is flagrantly dishonest, and a low even by the Times’ recent standards. The entire “Obama’s administration didn’t spy on the Trump campaign, like so many examples of political spin and denial, rests on Clintonesque rhetorical deceit” “It depends on what the meaning of spy is.” Really, New York Times? Really, CNN? Really, my furious, Trump-hating, echo-chamber bolstered Facebook friends? Really? That’s your argument?

Pathetic.

Two definitely non-fringe, non-conspiracy theorist, non-Trump flacks clarified this issue for anyone who doesn’t want to be brainwashed by the Times and its chums, who are now especially desperate because they are covering for Obama, whose administration—scandal free, you know!—looks sleezier and more incompetent in the rear view mirror by the day.

Here is Michael Barone, a Republican pundit but no Trump fan:

“F.B.I. Used Informant to Investigate Russia Ties to Campaign, Not to Spy, as Trump Claims,” read the headline on a lengthy New York Times story May 18. “The Justice Department used a suspected informant to probe whether Trump campaign aides were making improper contacts with Russia in 2016,” read a story in the May 21 edition of the Wall Street Journal.

So much for those who dismissed charges of Obama administration infiltration of Donald Trump’s campaign as paranoid fantasy. Defenders of the Obama intelligence and law enforcement apparat have had to fall back on the argument that this infiltration was for Trump’s — and the nation’s — own good.

It’s an argument that evidently didn’t occur to Richard Nixon’s defenders when it became clear that Nixon operatives had burglarized and wiretapped the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in June 1972.

Until 2016, just about everyone agreed that it was a bad thing for government intelligence or law enforcement agencies to spy — er, use informants — on a political campaign, especially one of the opposition party. Liberals were especially suspicious of the FBI and the CIA. Nowadays they say that anyone questioning their good faith is unpatriotic.

The crime at the root of Watergate was an attempt at surveillance of the DNC after George McGovern seemed about to win the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, just as the government misconduct in Russiagate was an attempt at surveillance of the Republican Party’s national campaign after Trump clinched its nomination.

…Both the Watergate wiretap and the Obama appointees’ investigator/spy infiltration were initially inspired amid fears that the upstart opposition might win. The Watergate burglary was planned when Nixon’s re-election was far from assured. A May 1972 Harris Poll showed him with only 48 percent against McGovern. It was only after the Haiphong harbor bombing and Moscow summit in early June made clear that US involvement in Vietnam was ending that Nixon’s numbers surged — just before the June 17 burglary.

In March 2016, it was conventional wisdom that Trump couldn’t be elected president. But his surprising and persistent strength in the Republican primaries left some doubtful, including the FBI lovebirds who instant messaged their desire for an “insurance policy” against that dreaded eventuality.

Their unease may have owed something to their knowledge of how the Obama Justice Department and FBI had fixed the Hillary Clinton emails case. Clinton wasn’t indicted but was left with a disastrously low 32 percent of voters confident of her honesty and trustworthiness.

There are two obvious differences between Watergate and the Obama administration’s infiltration. The Watergate burglars were arrested in flagrante delicto, and their wiretaps never functioned. And neither the FBI nor the CIA fully cooperated with the post-election cover-up.

That’s quite a contrast with the Obama law enforcement and intelligence appointees’ promotion of Christopher Steele’s Clinton campaign-financed dodgy dossier and feeding the mainstream media’s insatiable hunger for Russia collusion stories.

Has an outgoing administration ever worked to delegitimize and dislodge its successor like this? We hear many complaints, some justified, about Donald Trump’s departure from standard political norms. But the greater and more dangerous departure from norms may be that of the Obama officials seeking to overturn the results of the 2016 election.

Come on…this is all made up! It didn’t happen! It’s a conspiracy theory from the fringes! The New York Times says so!

Here was prominent White House advisor David Plouffe’s tweet in June of 2016:

Nah, that’s a fake tweet, right? Nothing sinister like this was really being discussed in Obama’s scandal-free White House! It all a paranoid conspiracy theory!

Now here is Andrew McCarthy—a conservative, but apparently there are no liberal journalists with any integrity where Trump is involved–in his article, “The Obama Administration’s Hypocritical Pretext for Spying on the Trump Campaign.” McCarthy is hardly Alex Jones. He is a rigorous analyst who was previously assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. He led the 1995 terrorism prosecution against Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others ultimately convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He knows how to construct a damning case, and wrote in part:

As I argued in my weekend column, it is hard to imagine a more idle question than whether the Obama administration spied on the Trump campaign. Of course it did. If you want to argue the point, imagine what the professors, pundits, and pols would have said had the Bush administration run an informant against three Obama 2008 campaign officials, including the campaign co-chairman; any hair-splitting about whether that technically constituted “spying” would be met by ostracism from polite society.

Verdict: true. Continue reading →

Let’s Play “Fake News, Professional Incompetence, Or Just Plain Stupid”!

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

NEWS FLASH from MSNBC: Most Americans don’t do this…

Hello everybody!

It’s time to play the game show that is sweeping the nation, thanks to the escalating bias and partisan activism of the mainstream news media!

For today’s episode, our question concerns veteran broadcast news reporter Andrea Mitchell, once widely considered a trustworthy professional, now  member of the cabal of hacks that fill up the slanted hours on MSNBC.

Today, pumping for the NFL to turn itself into a weekly infomercial for anti-Trump protests, Black Lives Matter propaganda, and general progressive agenda agitation, Mitchell said this about the NFL’s ban on kneeling during the pre-game playing of the National Anthem:

“The hypocrisy is so profound Take a look at any NFL stadium and people are getting hot dogs, people are getting beers. They’re not standing and saluting the anthem for a large part. They’re not. They’re distracted. They’re fans at an event.”

Of course, as anyone who has ever attended a sporting event knows—and anyone who has any understanding of this nation and its poeple should know anyway–virtually everyone stands, respectfully, hats off, many with hands over their hearts, during the National Anthem at every sporting event, at every level from high school to the pros. What was Mitchell doing? Was she just lying to make her case? Was she stating as fact something she assumed was true but had not bothered to check, a gross  breach of professionalism? Or is Andrea Mitchell just dumb as stuffed cabbage?

So without any further ado,  let’s play “Fake News, Professional Incompetence, Or Just Plain Stupid”!

 

Ethics Warm-Up, Memorial Day, 5/28/18: Things That Don’t Mix

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

1. Let’s start with some non-traditional casting hypocrisy.

  • Example A: In “The Gentleman Caller,” an Off-Broadway drama by Phillip Dawkins, an imagined romantic interlude between famously gay Fifties playwrights Tennessee Williams and William Inge has been cast with a Hispanic, and Hispanic-looking, actor as the very un-Hispanic Williams, and an Asian-American actor as the quite Caucasian Inge. This is self-indulgent grandstanding by the director that doesn’t serve the play—that’s the director’s duty, to serve the play—and the playwright was a fool to allow it. If the drama was just about two gay playwrights, it wouldn’t matter who was cast to portray them, or what the actors looked like. The identity of the writers is important to this  drama, however. You don’t cast a short, bald man as Abraham Lincoln, and you don’t cast a fat, flat-chested woman as Marilyn Monroe unless you are actively trying to sabotage the play. The New York Times critic didn’t have the integrity to point out the reverse-whitewashing casting-–mustn’t criticize fellow social justice warriors, you know!—but the stunt is both incompetent and discriminatory.

If a director cast an Irish-American and an Italian-American as James Baldwin and Richard Wright in a similar play, he would be excoriated, and rightly so.

  • Example B. Jim Parsons, best known as aging nerd Sheldon in “Big Bang Theory” and now starring on Broadway in the ensemble revival of “The Boys in the Band,” told the New York Times in an interview that the producer insisted that everyone in the cast be gay. Nice. Gay actors have been insisting forever that their sexuality was no bar to their playing straight characters—this is true, if they are any good as actors—but apparently reverse discrimination is fine.  It’s not fine. It’s bigotry.

When my late, lamented theater company revived that play almost 20 years ago, the director, John Moran, himself gay, insisted that the sexual orientation of the actors who auditioned would play no part in his casting decisions, and it did not. I think most of the all-male cast was not gay, but all of them were (and are) excellent.

One of my favorite Clarence Darrow quotes is, “I’m for the underdog. He needs friends a damn sight more than the other fellow. The best fun in life is to fight for the underdog…If the underdog got on top he would probably be just as rotten as the upper dog, but in the meantime I am for him.”

Things that don’t mix: Anti-discrimination rhetoric and discrimination

2. Another “good illegal immigrant” story. Guatemalan woman Gomez Gonzalez was shot to death in a border incident as she tried to enter the U.S. illegally. The episode is under investigation, and the facts are murky: the border patrol claims that she was in a crowd of people trying to cross the border illegally that became threatening and violent.  Here is how CNN begins its account of the controversy:

“Claudia Patricia Gomez Gonzalez traveled 1,500 miles to the United States, hoping to find a job and a better future. Shortly after she set foot in Texas, a Border Patrol agent shot and killed her.”

No bias there! It is absolutely irrelevant to the legal and ethical issues here why Gonzalez was entering the country illegally. She did not deserve to be shot under any circumstances, and she was no more justified in violating our immigration laws whether her objective was to find a “better future” or to open a meth lab. The news media insists on sentimentalizing what is a black and white issue of sovereignty, law-breaking and enforcement, with the intent of confusing the public and demonizing opponents of illegal immigration.

Things that don’t mix: Lawbreaking and status as a virtuous martyr

Continue reading →

More False Alarm Over The “The Glass Ceiling”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Every time the New York Times Business Section writers raise alarms over gender discrimination in the workplace, they set the credibility of the issue back a few years.

I have no doubt that women are discriminated against and suffer gender bias at all levels of the workplace. I also know that that such discrimination is obviously hyped, exaggerated, and misrepresented by activists and the news media. How many legitimate public issues are there like that? [Let’s start a list!] Regardless of the answer, when an article about a legitimate problem makes an intelligent reader roll his or her eyes, that issue’s credibility suffers.

This article was titled, The Number of Women at the Top Is Falling: the already small pool of female CEOs decreased by 25% in the past year.

“Oh-oh,” I thought when I read the headline. Since Hillary lost and a non-pro-woman administration along with Republicans is in power, companies feel at liberty to dump their female CEOs who they thought would garner them favor with policy-makers! What was your first thought? 25% is a lot, and doesn’t sound benign. Imagine if, say, 25% of black executives were gone after a single year. Wouldn’t Congress be investigating?

“For many years, it seemed as if the share of women at the top of corporate America would slowly increase over time,” the article says in its third paragraph. “But the number of women leading companies in the Fortune 500 had grown to 6.4 percent last year, a record high, from 2.6 percent a decade earlier.”

“But this year, the number of female chief executives declined 25 percent, according to Fortune’s 2018 list, which was published Monday. There are now 24 women, down from 32. Twelve left their jobs — most recently, Denise Morrison of Campbell Soup Company, who abruptly announced her retirement Friday — and four joined the list”

What happened to the women? “Four said they were retiring; four left after their companies were acquired; two took new jobs, and two were replaced after calls for change from investors.” In other words, of the twelve, only two clearly left when they didn’t want to. There is nothing ominous about that. In fact, the 25% decline appears to be nothing but a statistical anomaly in a small sample size, as in “not worth a huge article in the Times Business Section to make women and feminists upset,”  or in my terms, manipulated, agenda-driven, misleading news that isn’t news at all.

Also called..well, you know.

More from the article: Continue reading →

Sunday Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 5/27/18: On Bullies, Dogs, Signs, Cheats, And The Worst WWII Movie Ever

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Good morning.

1. BOY, is that a lazy and inaccurate movie! As usual, they are playing every war movie they can dig up on Memorial Day weekend. I just watched the tail end of  “The Battle of the Bulge,” the 1965 Cinerama Hollywood portrayal of the decisive 1944 WWII battle in the Ardennes that reminds me of my dad, buried in Arlington National Cemetery, more than any other war film, and not because it was in that battle that my father earned his Silver Star. No, the film reminds me of Dad because he hated it so much. He regarded it as an insult to the veterans who fought the battle, and  a cretinous distortion of history in every way. His name for the movie was “How Henry Fonda Won the Second World War.”

The most striking of the endless misrepresentations in the movie is the absence of snow. The battle’s major feature was that it was fought in freezing, winter conditions, on snow covered terrain sometimes up to two feet deep. Some battle scenes are shown being fought on flat and bare plain, about as distinct from the mountainous, thickly forested territory where the actual battle took place as one could imagine. My father also started complaining during the film, loudly, about the use of modern American tanks to portray the German Tiger tanks.

Former President (and, of course, former Allied Commander) Eisenhower came out of retirement to hold a press conference to denouncing “The Battle of the Bulge” for  its gross  inaccuracies. THAT made my father happy.

2. Funny! But…no, it’s just funny. Scott Campbell, the owner of the Pell City Fitness gym in Pell City, Alabama,  put up a sign that says “tired of being fat and ugly? Just be ugly!” City officials told him to take down the sign or be fined, saying it is too big and needs a permit, but other business owners told the local news media that they have never heard of the ordinance the city is citing being enforced. The suspicion is that Campbell is being singled out because some have complained that the sign is “insensitive.” No, it’s just funny…

This is the ethical problem with excessively restrictive laws, rules and regulations that are not consistently enforced. Prosecution can be used for ideological and partisan discrimination. Not only is the sign benign, it is not even original: that same language is on fitness company ads all over the country. So far, it looks like the community is supporting Pell and that the city will back down, but this is Alabama. Call me pessimistic, but I doubt the sign would be allowed to stand for long in Washington State or California if an ordinance could be found to justify pulling it down.

The First Amendment dies in increments. Continue reading →

Saturday Afternoon Ethics Stimulus, 5/26/2018: The Sad Part Is That None Of This Is A Surprise

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Happy Memorial Day Weekend!

1.  From the “Bias makes you UNBELIEVABLY stupid, especially, apparently, if you’re a journalist” files: Ann Althouse posted this screen shot of memeorandum, an excellent  news aggregator page:

I wrote earlier about how many of the anti-Trump mob, in the news media and out of it, appeared to be actively rooting for the President’s diplomatic efforts with North Korea to fail, and how his Negotiation 101 move of symbolically walking away from the planned summit would probably be misunderstood and misinterpreted because of the current toxic combination of bias and ignorance, but this is ridiculous. Writes Althouse—who despite multiple polite requests refuses to put Ethics Alarms in her links despite its covering a lot of parallel territory, despite the many frivolous or largely inactive blogs she does link to, and despite the multiple plugs and links I give her, but hey, I’m not bitter— Continue reading →

KABOOM! Harvard’s Class Of 2003’s Reunion Attack On Jared Kushner

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

I was going to write about this depressing and disgusting episode from the anti-Trump derangement parade yesterday, but I thought I could keep my head from exploding if I waited a bit. No such luck.

As some of you know, I come from a Harvard family. My Dad went there on the GI Bill; my mother was working as the Dean’s secretary when she and my Dad met. I attended the College, and so did my sister. Long after we had left, my mother was still working in the administration, ultimately as Asst. Dean of Housing. I was raised about 15 minutes from Harvard Square. I ushered at the football games when I was in high school. Many of my best and oldest friends are Harvard grads; I loved the place. It was a terrific place to go to school. This story, however, makes me deeply ashamed, and demonstrates, not for the first time in recent decades, how poorly the university’s leadership has upheld the core values of America’s oldest institution of learning, opting instead for partisan politics and divisiveness.

Since the 19th century, Harvard has invited alumni in reunion years—that is, ever five years—to write personal updates about their lives, and have it published free of charge by the University and mailed to all class members.The crimson covered paperback is called the Red Book. I have read more of them than I can count, between my father and myself. Here’s one of my father’s:

Continue reading →

The News Media-“Resistance” Alliance On Ugly Display In The “Spygate” Spin

/ Jack Marshall / 72 Comments

The revelation that there was a mole, Stefan Halper, planted in his campaign by the FBI, prompted President Donald Trump to demand an investigation into whether the FBI or Justice Department infiltrated his campaign for political purposes.  The “resistance” and the mainstream news media have been in panic mode ever since, and have been actively bad at it. Heaven forbid that journalists could admit that when they mocked the President for suggesting that his campaign was surveilled, they were wrong and he was right.

Scott Adams neatly exposed the hypocrisy and dishonesty, tweeting,

“Four things to understand about SPYGATE: 1) There was no spy in the Trump campaign. 2) The spying that did NOT happen was totally justified. 3) It would be bad for national security to identify the spy who doesn’t exist. 4) His name is Stefan.”

Ann Althouse deserves applause for her analysis as well:

James Clapper was on “The View” yesterday and it went like this:

BEHAR: “So I ask you, was the FBI spying on Trump’s campaign?”

CLAPPER: “No, they were not. They were spying on, a term I don’t particularly like, but on what the Russians were doing. Trying to understand were the Russians infiltrating, trying to gain access, trying to gain leverage or influence which is what they do.”

BEHAR: “Well, why doesn’t [Trump] like that? He should be happy.”

CLAPPER: “He should be.”

Well, Trump seems happy that the word “spying” slipped out of Clapper as he was talking about what the FBI was doing. Clapper obviously knew he slipped, since he immediately tried to (subtly) erase it.

Trump displayed his happiness by tweeting: “‘Trump should be happy that the FBI was SPYING on his campaign’ No, James Clapper, I am not happy. Spying on a campaign would be illegal, and a scandal to boot!” And, talking to reporters: “I mean if you look at Clapper … he sort of admitted that they had spies in the campaign yesterday inadvertently. I hope it’s not true, but it looks like it is.”

Then Ann dissected CNN toady Chris Cillizza’s embarrassing attempt to cover for Trump foe Clapper—which, you know, is not the job of a real journalist, only that of a biased hack: Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 5/24/2018: ‘Can’t We All Get Along? Nah…’ Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Good morning!

1. What? Negotiation competence? Boy, we haven’t seen THAT for a while. President Trump just pulled out of the scheduled summit with North Korea, a public lesson in Negotiation 101. If only Barack Obama had taken the Art of the Deal seminar before capitulating to Cuba and Iran. the letter the current elected President just sent to North Korea could not be more obvious in its devices, but I guarantee you that my negotiations professor at law school, Dean Adrian Fisher, one of the negotiators of the SALT treaty, would have approved. Here’s the letter, released this morning.

This is another ethics test, by the way. Take note of who criticizes the President for this, for they  will be revealing themselves as either reflex-Trrump haters or the kind of people used car dealers love to see walking in the door.

2. “A Nation of Assholes” update. It is now beyond dispute that the concept was right but that I badly misjudged the population that I thought would be primarily affected. My theory in the 2015 essay was that that having an ethics-challenged boor like Donald Trump as President would degrade the ethical standards of the public through the “rotting fish head” process: people follow the leader. Well, that has happened too, but the worst asshole transformation has beset progressives and “the resistance.,” as their behavior gets worse by the hour. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 5/16/ 2018: The Fake Moussaka Edition”

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

I fear that a theme on Ethics Alarms over the next few days is going to be the awful conduct and deteriorating ethical standards of the Trump-hating left. This situation is not really debatable, and flagging it from an ethical perspective should not be regarded as a partisan or an ideological act. It is, though: I have the emails, comments and Facebook insults to prove it. Why aren’t progressives and Democrats properly outraged? Why don’t they find this conduct by their apparently unhinged compatriots as repulsive as I find it—as repulsive as it is? I don’t understand it. When they are confronted, and I have confronted many, they have no answer, no reason. Just rationalizations, or more often, just emotional outbursts. Today a Facebook friend, and a real friend too, an actor and, I am pretty sure, a Communist, wrote in Facebook that he would rather have Harry and Megan running the country, because republican democracy wasn’t working out so well. He wasn’t kidding, either, and nobody in the progressive Facebook echo chamber challenged him. People are going insane, and they are rotting from the inside out.

Steve-O-wrote this in response to Item #1 in the 5/16 Warm-up. That section was about all the Democrats and pundits actively cheering for the North Korea talks to collapse, because they are so filled with hate that they want Trump to fail even when his successes would be good for the country and the world. That is, in a word, diseased. And that is what the “resistance” has devolved into in less than two years. I could not be more disappointed in my fellow citizens. I thought they were better–fairer, smarter, more patriotic, with a firmer hold on the values they claimed to possess—than this.

They’re not.

Here is Steve-O-in-NJ’s Comment of the Day on the post,Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 5/16/ 2018: The Fake Moussaka Edition:

David Gergen once said that those who dislike and criticize this nation, particularly blacks who don’t celebrate July 4 because they are still bitter about their history aren’t unpatriotic, they just practice “a different form of patriotism.” He also said that Jeremiah Wright might well love this country more than conventional patriots, but just believe we have fallen short of our ideals. The concept of “matriotism,” a sort of pacifistic yin to patriotism’s yang, was floated for a while, but never really caught on.

The fact of the matter is that a lot of us on the right loathed Obama and loathed his policies, but we never let that turn into us hating our own country, and we never stood against our own servicemen, even when Clinton wasted our efforts in the Balkans and Obama led from behind to topple Gadaffi…without a clue of what to do afterwards. We (except a few crackpots) also never talked of taking up arms against our own elected officials, nor rioting. Guess who put mobs in the street before the War on Terror and rioted the day Trump was sworn in, the duly elected president? Hint: it wasn’t the right.

The fact of the matter is that the left is a strange mix of the ultra-violent (the Black Panthers, antifa) and the ultra-disloyal (the National Lawyers’ Guild, the Peace and Freedom Party) held together by a few charismatic folks who want ultimate power and don’t give a damn how they get it. The only problem is that the right is in the way, and after Vietnam the right has pretty much a lock on the flag and conventional patriotism, which the average Joe still reveres. Like it or not, Donald Trump has become identified with the flag, strong law enforcement, a strong military, and other conventional symbols of pride in this nation. That’s still pretty powerful. Worse still, under Trump the economy is doing better, people have more money in their paychecks, and overall things seem to be looking back up after years of looking down. Continue reading →