Government & Politics

Boy, One Of Our Most Deified Presidents Sure Agreed To Some Bone-Headed Ideas…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

As I have mentioned here many times, there is no way around ranking Franklin Roosevelt as one of our top five Presidents: his handling of World War II from the U.S. perspective and his leadership during the Great Depression, which didn’t so much fix the economic problems as raise the public’s faith in our system of government when it easily could have collapsed, are so important and momentous that all of his missteps and blunders pale by comparison. Nevertheless there were many of these, some quite damning.

I only recently learned about one of them that I somehow had missed all these years—probably because our historians have been and are still overwhelmingly left-biased and inclined towards hagiography where FDR is concerned.

Henry Morgenthau Jr. was Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury from 1934 until FDR’s death. He was a trusted advisor whose scope of interest and influence far exceeded the usual territory of his office. In 1944, Morgenthau got far over his metaphorical skis and proposed a scheme for the post-war world, specifically, as he said, “I want to make Germany so impotent that she cannot forge the tools of war – another world war.”

You know, because that strategy worked out so well the first time, after World War I…

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And As Long As We Are Talking About Doing The Right Things For (Perhaps) the Wrong Reasons: Zuckerberg and Meta

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder and its alter-ego Meta’s chief executive, announced that his flagship social media platform, along with Instagram and Threads, will end its longstanding (and biased, and flawed) fact-checking program, moving instead to a “community notes” system like the one employed by Elon Musk’s reinvention of Twitter.

Good. What took so long?

“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Zuckerberg said. The company’s current fact-checking system had “reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.” “The reality is that this is a trade-off,” he said. “It means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

In truth, anyone should have been able to figure out that Facebook’s “fact checkers” were progressive, dishonest, partisan hacks. The censors included Snopes (EA dossier here) and PolitiFact (even worse dossier here), which Ethics Alarms, among many others, had marked as biased and untrustworthy years ago, indeed well before Facebook turned to them as censors. The truth is that one person’s “bad stuff” is another’s stimulating opinion or analysis. This shouldn’t be a difficult concept, but in the Age of the Great Stupid, it is. The 21st Century Left likes censorship, indeed has relied on it to hold power, and has embraced the practice on college campuses, social media, and in the news. Sad but true.

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Now THIS Is Trump Derangement…

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Maybe it would be therapeutic for January 6 to be officially declared “Trump Derangement Victims Day,” in honor of all the otherwise sane and reasonable Americans who were driven to fear, loathing and madness by the very exitsnace of Donald J. Trump. The villains who spread this destructive contagion are too many to list, although our lame duck, dying brain POTUS just awarded several of them citizen honors. Meanwhile, if we had such a holiday, those unfortunate sufferers could use the day therapeutically, and let all of their hate out like a primal scream.

I came to this conclusion after reading the following yesterday on a legal blog that I usually admire:

“There are arguments to be made that many who participated in the insurrection of January 6, 2021 thought they were being patriots defending a nation from a stolen election, even though it was a nonsensical lie fed to the willingly delusional by an amoral narcissist who wasn’t strong enough to endure the humiliation of failure. There are arguments to be made that some sentences imposed on J6 insurrectionists were excessive, even though capital police were beaten and bloodied. But there are no arguments that January 6th didn’t happen as it was seen, experienced and suffered that day, as Trump gleefully watched. Yet here we are, Trump re-elected and promising to pardon or grant clemency to his Hallelujah chorus. Here we are, Trump re-elected and urging the jailing of the January 6th House commission for prosecuting him too well, pretending that most of his own administration’s testimony against him didn’t exist or was somehow the result of tampering by then-Congresswoman Liz Cheney, of the radically progressive Cheney clan. Here we are, Trump re-elected as the former vice president acknowledges that the president demanded he violate the Constitution or be hung by Trump’s most violent sycophants…As his own Republican toadies scampered for cover and condemned his call to “fight like hell” that brought the worst of his followers to the second storming of the Capital, Trump relished in the glory of people willing to kill, or die, for him, not because he cared a whit for any of them but because he cared too much for himself…if you have chosen fantasy over reality, and want desperately enough to believe in the absurd excuses constructed around January 6th, so be it. Time will judge Trump’s administration. Time will judge Trump, the vulgar, deceitful, amoral, narcissistic ignoramus. But January 6th happened.

Yikes.

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Ethics Hero: VP Kamala Harris

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Harris has had, in my estimation, several opportunities to earn Ethics Hero status here in the past, and whiffed every time. Yesterday, she achieved that status by the easiest route imaginable: by simply doing her job, indeed one of the very few requirements of a job that has always been under-burdened by official duties.

Vice-President Harris officiated as the two houses of Congress met in joint session to formally count the Electoral College votes for President and certify the results. “The votes for president of the United States are as follows,” Harris declared, as she was bound to, after each state’s totals were read. “Donald J. Trump of the state of Florida has received 312 votes.” When Republican members of Congress rose to their feet to applaud, Harris managed to look non-committal, even if she might have been thinking, “Fuck you all.”

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‘Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!’ An Unethical Quote and an Exposé

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Ethics Alarms made it clear, I hope, that one reason I believed that it was crucial for Donald Trump to win the election was to decisively foil the news media’s attempt to defeat him through relentless unethical journalism. To be honest, I sometimes think, like right now, that this was even more important than rejecting the nascent and sometimes not-so-nascent totalitarianism of the 21st Century Democratic Party and the American Left. It is now clear to even the most die-hard propagandists masquerading as “independent journalists” that the mask is off, the jig is up, and all but the most gullible and ignorant of the American public don’t trust them any more. That’s wonderful, but if reform is on the horizon, it’s barely detectable.

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Unethical Interview Exchange Of The Decade: “Meet the Press” and Senator Schumer

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

And this kind of thing is why I stopped watching Sunday Morning public events shows more than a decade ago. The disgraceful exchange, on “Meet the Press,” which has fallen apart in chunks since its glory days with Tim Russert:

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Political Cartoon Ethics: Talk About Picking The Wrong Hill To Die On!

/ Jack Marshall / 43 Comments

Ann Telnaes, “a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist” (So what?) for The Washington Post, announced that she was resigning after editors rejected a cartoon depicting WaPo’s owner, Jeff Bezos, genuflecting toward a statue of President-elect Donald J. Trump.

On her substack, Telnaes called the newspaper’s decision to kill her cartoon a “game changer” that was “dangerous for a free press.”

Riiight. The cartoon shows Jeff Bezos and other media figures prostrating themselves to Trump, which is not only untrue, it’s juvenile. That cartoon could have been published in a middle school newspaper. The Post has had a succession of knee-jerk, shrill progressive scolds as political cartoonists in an unbroken line since the partisan-biased Herb Block was also a “Pulitzer Prize winner”—- you know, like the Post was for its false reporting on the Russian Collusion hoax. Like Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times were Pulitzered for creating the anti-America propaganda screed called “The 1619 Project.”

Ethics Alarms has long maintained that political cartoons don’t warrant presence on editorial pages because 90% of them or more communicate grade-school level political sophistication through the jaundiced eyes of artists lacking education, perspective and critical thinking skills. That drawing above illustrates the Ethics Alarms position nicely.

Telnaes is throwing a hissy-fit because she isn’t allowed to publish an obnoxious and simple-minded cartoon—it also isn’t remotely funny—attacking her employer with a cheap shot. The Trump-Deranged, progressives and Democrats on the Post—that is, 98% of the staff, were triggered because Bezos chose not to have his paper endorse Kamala Harris, the worst candidate a major party has run for President since, oh, maybe Horace Greeley in 1872, except that Horace was smarter than Kamala and he never waffled on his positions, which were a matter of record.

It would be a different if the cartoon the artist is so determined to see promoted was interesting, trenchant, original or clever, but it isn’t. The baseball equivalent would be a .216 hitting player quitting his team because the manager chose to leave him off the line-up card.

Ethics Quote of the Week: “Victory Girls” Blogger Nina Bookout

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“This sentencing decision by Merchan is, in my opinion, based upon pure spite.”

—-Nina Bookout, one of several conservative female pundits who populate the “Victory Girls” blog, correctly assessing the planned conclusion of one of the many contrived “lawfare” cases against Donald Trump that ultimately failed at their mission, which was to stop him from returning to the White House even at the price of emulating totalitarian regimes.

Gee, ya think, Nina?

There has been a lot of spite emanating from the Angry (and justly humiliated) Left lately, with Biden giving civilian honors to the likes of Liz Cheney, Hillary Clinton, and George Soros. The latter, among other revolting uses of his billions, funded anti-Israel/pro-Palestinian/pro-Hamas/pro-terrorism demonstrations on college campuses. Bookout’s particular focus regarding spite is New York’s Judge Merchan ruling last week that President-Elect Trump will be sentenced on January 10, less the two week from his swearing in as POTUS. Merchan also made it clear that the sentence will include no jail time, an “unconditional discharge,” which is what New York criminal courts call a non-jail and non-probation sentence that carries no other obligations.

The objective, Bookout surmises, is so the resistance, Democrats and the corrupted mainstream media (the cabal that Ethics Alarms refers to with the term, “The Axis of Unethical Conduct, or “Axis” for short) can continue to deride Trump as a “convicted felon” and the “first U.S. President to be convicted of a felony.”

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Tales of the King’s Pass

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

During the baseball off-season the MLB channel on DirecTV has a lot of dead time to fill between the periodic announcements of trades, free agent signings and post-season awards and honors. Lately it has been re-running an old Bob Castas show called “Studio 42” (that’s Jackie Robinson’s number) where the perpetually boyish-looking baseball commentator, who now really is Old Bob, interviews retired players and managers about significant games and moments in their careers.

In an episode I happened across this morning after my dog woke me up and then stole the bed as soon as I got out of it, Costas’s guest was the late, great manager Whitey Herzog, like so many successful baseball managers, a mediocre-to-poor player in his Major League career. Whitey told a story that is as good an example of the King’s Pass, #11 on the Rationalization List, as there is.

He said that in one game between the old Washington Senators (the first Senators, the team that moved to Minnesota and became the Twins) and the Red Sox in Boston, Ted Williams had drawn a walk on a 3-2 pitch right down the middle of the plate that the umpire had called a ball. Williams was famous for his plate discipline and above-average eyesight, and umpires frequently let him, opposing players complained, call his own balls and strikes because unpires acknowledged that he was better at it than they were. Herzog came to bat late in the same contest having walked four times and with a chance to set a record by getting five bases-on-balls in a single game. He told Costas that the umpire called him out on strikes on a 3-2 pitch in the dirt.

“I turned around and said to the ump, ‘You give Williams five strikes and give me only two. It should be the other way around!'”

This struck me particularly squarely because I had been thinking about the Judicial Conference declining to take any action against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who has been the subject of a Senate Judiciary inquiry ever since ProPublica revealed that the Justice had neglected to report around half a million in luxury travel and gifts as legally required by the Ethics in Government Act of 1978.

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Ethics at Half-Mast

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Former President Jimmy Carter died on December 29, so according to traditional protocol, U.S. flags are to fly at half-mast until sunset on Tuesday, January 28, 2025, in his honor. This means that the flags will be signifying national sorrow on January 20, when Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 47th President of the United States when the nation, also according to tradition, is supposed to embrace our peaceful transfer of power, our unique system of government, the glorious history of the United States of America, and the hope that should accompany each new Chief Executive into the office where Washington, Lincoln and the rest served our nation.

I’m sure the Axis news media will engage in an orgy of smug satisfaction at the symbolism of the flags signifying mourning upon the return to power of Donald J. Trump. I am similarly certain the the Trump Deranged will similarly puff up their little chests with pride at the condign justice the circumstances have imposed on the MAGA celebrants. Meanwhile, Trump is ticked-off and, being Trump, unable to restrain himself from saying so. On Truth Social, his now superfluous social media platform created when the censors at Twitter silenced his account, the President-Elect whined,

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