Government & Politics

Conservative Talk Radio’s Foolish Hypocrisy

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

The ever-reasonable Tammy Bruce

It’s early yet, and in fairness, I can’t say for certain that all the conservative talk radio hosts will be echoing what I’ve heard today from two of them, but if someone offers you that bet, take it. I get to monitor the Right’s talkers when I’m driving around, which is too often, and I will usually get to sample the day’s rantings from Chis Plante, Laura Ingraham, Rush, Hannity, Mark Levin, and when my gag reflex is under control, Michael Savage. Except for Savage, who resides on his own, hateful planet, the others seem to operate off of common talking points, usually cribbed from the Drudge Report. Based on what I heard on Plante’s and Ingraham’s shows, today’s prime topic is yesterday’s shooting at the headquarters of the Family Research Council, and specifically 1) how the media is downplaying it because a conservative group was the target, 2) how nobody is blaming inflammatory anti-conservative rhetoric for the shooting, in contrast to the media reaction to the Tuscon shooting and the recent massacre in the Sikh temple, and 3) how the media should be.

Fascinating. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: Vice-President Biden (No, Not THAT Unethical Quote!)

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

 “I guarantee you, flat guarantee you, there will be no changes in Social Security. I flat guarantee you.”

—-Vice President Joe Biden, in reply to a supporter at a campaign stop in southern Virgina who told him,  “I’m glad you all are not talking about doing anything with Social Security.”

I know this feels like “Pick on Poor Joe Biden Week” at Ethics Alarms, but everyone has a lot of catching up to do in that regard.

The Washington Post picked up on the above quote by Biden, which it made the subject of an editorial and pronounced “depressing.” It is more than depressing, but then, the Post has to protect Democrats even when they prove themselves irresponsible or dishonest, as Biden does with this “guarantee.” As the Post quite accurately points out, Social Security is going broke, its trustees have called for immediate reforms, and the longer the government waits to do what is needed, the harder it is going to be to do it. Biden, however, and presumably his superior, President Obama, apparently believes that either refusing to take the steps that are essential to prevent a Social Security meltdown or lying to the public about the fact that they will have to take them is preferable to the alternative: responsible fiscal policy and governance and leveling with the public. Critics can scream about the broken system, economists can repeat the math, op-ed writers can warn against constantly “kicking the can down the road” until, like Greece and other profligate and incompetent societies, there is no more road, but if our leaders refuse to show political courage and do their duty, the U.S. has a guarantee, all right—a guarantee of future fiscal catastrophe. That’s okey-dokey with politicians like Biden however. He doesn’t need Social Security, and besides, he’ll be happily drooling in Madam Kluck’s Home for the Bewildered by then. Based on his recent conduct, maybe sooner than he thinks. Continue reading →

Ethics Heroes: Doug Wilder and Artur Davis

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

 

Like everyone else, Doug Wilder knows what ““they’re going to put y’all back in chains” meant. Unlike most Democrats, he has the integrity to admit it.

Democratic flacks and media mouthpieces for the Obama campaign have thoroughly disgraced themselves and insulted the intelligence of the American public by twisting words and logic to argue that Joe Biden’s “put y’all back in chains” rhetoric was something other than the divisive race-baiting it was. Eventually, in such episodes of lock-step partisan dissembling, there are a noble and courageous few who refuse to go along, and black leaders Artur Davis, a co-chair of President Obama’s 2008 campaign, and Doug Wilder, the first African-American governor (of Virginia, where Biden made his comments) have stepped to the fore. Continue reading →

Joe Biden’s Ethics Catch-22

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

OK, we get it: he’s an idiot. But why is he Vice-President?

Speaking to a large crowd in Virginia estimated to be about 40% African-American, Vice-President Joe Biden proclaimed that “Romney wants to, he said in the first 100 days, he’s gonna let the big banks again write their own rules — unchain Wall Street. They’re going to put y’all back in chains.”

Telling an audience of blacks that the other Presidential candidate and his party plans to put them back in chains is unequivocally dirty campaigning, race-baiting, divisive, and uncivil, the precise kind of campaigning that Barack Obama swore that he would deliver us from in 2008. Now the Obama campaign, as well as his Administration, has embraced divisiveness as a primary strategy, and outrageous scaremongering with a racial bite is also consistent with the current principle-free attack mode by the Democrats, which has included accusing Mitt Romney of being a felon, a tax-evader and a murderer.

Yet the media line on the Biden speech is that “Republicans” have screamed foul. A Vice-President of the United States, running for re-election with an African-American President, telling black Americans that the opposition plans to put them back in chains? Why are just Republicans screaming foul? Why isn’t every decent Democrat, progressive, reporter, pundit and member of the public screaming foul? Is this really what they all consider appropriate, honest, respectful and civil campaigning for the highest offices in the land, by one of the occupants of those offices? Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Was CNN’s Soledad O’Brien Unethical to Crib From A Liberal Blog, or Just Unlucky To Get Caught?

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Conservative media sources are calling CNN’s Soledad O’Brien biased and unobjective (Soledad O’Brien? Biased? Nawwwww!) because a CNN cameraman inadvertently caught her cribbing from the leftward blog “Talking Points Memo” for ammunition as she questioned  Virginia House of Delegates Republican member Barbara Comstock regarding new-GOP Veep nominee Paul Ryan’s budget proposals. The blog post she was reading from was called “The Myth of Paul Ryan The Bipartisan Leader.” At one point, O’Brien claimed to be reading a release from Senator Wyden’s (D-OR) office, but  she was actually reading an excerpt from the blog that included a quote from Wyden. Newsbusters, the conservative counterpart to the Left’s Media Matters, regards this is a real gotcha!, concrete proof of  the unethical coordination between the mainstream media, progressive attack blogs, and the Democratic party.

Your Ethics Quiz for today: Was O’Brien’s use of the Talking Points piece to debate Comstock unethical journalism? Continue reading →

The Swiftboating of Mitt Romney, Part II: When “Balanced” is Biased

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

“Did you hear? Mitt Romney killed his wife. At least, that’s what they’re saying…”

I was intrigued to see how my home town paper, The Washington Post, dealt with the latest lower-than-low and Nixonian attack on Romney from Team Obama, the “Mitt Romney killed my wife” ad.

If you have been asleep this week or just in the bathroom vomiting over what “Hope and Change” mutates into when it’s time to pay the piper, the TV ad by pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA Action features Joe Soptic, a steelworker who claims that Romney is responsible for the death of his wife, because Romney’s company, Bain Capital, shut down his steel plant.  The facts of Soptic’s case, however, are not in dispute: Mitt Romney left Bain in 1999 to work on the Olympics.  Jonathan Lavine, now a top Obama campaign fundraiser, was running the company when it closed the GST Steel plant where Soptic worked in 2001. Soptic was, he now admits, offered a buy-out by Bain, but declined it. He then took another job but declined to purchase his employer’s insurance plan. Soptic’s wife had her own health insurance plan through 2003. In 2006, seven years after Romney gave up the management of Bain, Soptic’s wife was diagnosed with very late-stage cancer, after being misdiagnosed earlier, and died shortly thereafter.

Based on this, Joe Soptic alleges that Mitt Romney killed his wife. He is either lying, or he is nuts. But the point is that he is willing to say it on camera, and has a sad face. That is enough, you see, to justify calling Mitt Romney a murderer. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Day: Slate’s David Weigel

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“The Washington Post condemned Reid for “smear tactics not unlike those of Joseph McCarthy,” which makes sense if you think that refusing to release your tax returns is like being unfairly accused of membership in the Communist Party. It’s a nice idea, that the majority leader of the United States Senate should operate under some rules of decorum about truth, even if it is only randomly applied.”

—-Slate’s David Weigel, in a post dismissing Harry Reid’s Big Lie attack on Mitt Romney as “politics as usual.”

Somewhere at the bottom of the journalism barrel you may see David Weigel, mangling ethics

David Weigel is a Democratic flack posing as a political reporter, and my standards for his writing is low—but not this low.

The Post’s quite correct condemnation of Reid does not, as Weigel disingenuously suggests, amount to saying that “refusing to release your tax returns is like being unfairly accused of membership in the Communist Party.” It amounts to saying that publicly accusing a political adversary of evading his taxes for ten years using nothing more than hearsay from anonymous, dubious and unrevealed sources is like accusing a political adversary of belonging to the Communist party using similar tactics. Romney’s choice not to release his taxes doesn’t justify or excuse Reid’s smear, any more than McCarthy’s victims’ associating with Americans who exercised their Constitutional rights by espousing Communist sympathies justified McCarthy’s smear. Weigel is using a false and flawed analogy to excuse the inexcusable, because, like Reid, he’s on Team Obama. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: The American Bar Association

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments


This week, the American Bar Association House of Delegates passed Resolution 100.

The measure reads:

RESOLVED, That the American Bar Association urges all state, territorial, and local legislative bodies and governmental agencies to adopt comprehensive breed-neutral dangerous dog/reckless owner laws that ensure due process protections for owners, encourage responsible pet ownership and focus on the behavior of both dog owners and dogs, and to repeal any breed discriminatory or breed specific provisions.

Translation: stop discriminating against pit bulls and all the dogs that look like pit bulls, might be pit bulls, or that people who don’t know anything about dogs might think are pit bulls, as well as the dogs’ owners. It’s not fair, it’s unethical, and it’s un-American. Or, as Elise Van Kavage, chair of the Animal Law Committee of the Tort, Trial & Insurance Practice Section, put it, “People love their pets, no matter what their appearance,” she said. “This is America. Responsible pet owners should be allowed to own whatever breed they want.” Continue reading →

Integrity Failure: Rubio and Obama Show How Unserious Our Leaders Are About Taxes

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“The Hopeless Dawn” by Frank Bramley (1888) This is what this story makes me feel like….

If you pay attention, and most American won’t, the evidence that our elected leaders are not serious about being consistent, responsible, or even governing competently is delivered every day in packages large and small. The most recent depressing example was the bi-partisan tag-team of Sen. Marco Rubio and President Obama backing tax-exempt status for medal-winners on the U.S. Olympic team.

Sen. Rubio concocted his Olympic Tax Elimination Act on the theory that “athletes representing our nation overseas in the Olympics shouldn’t have to worry about an extra tax bill waiting for them back at home.” This is spin and nonsense. There is no “extra tax bill,” any more than there is an “extra tax bill” when your boss gives you a bonus for job well done. It’s just a regular, old-fashioned,  tax bill for income, that’s all. Medal-winning Olympic athletes get bonus payments from the U.S. Olympic team. Is their income—that’s what it is, just income—-somehow less fair to tax than your income? No, of course not. Rubio’s  “representing our nation overseas” justification for special treatment is naked and offensive pandering. How about people who represent our nation here, in the United States? They don’t get to travel to London, all expenses paid, like the pampered athletes—why are they less deserving of a tax break? Or why isn’t Rubio arguing, then, that all federal employees who work abroad shouldn’t be taxed? What is his logic, exactly? Continue reading →

Quest for Fairness: What Will It Take For America To Treat Blacks Like Regular Human Beings?

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

“Look, a monkey! Must be racist.”

Two recent incidents at the London Olympics—really, really stupid incidents—-caused me to wonder anew what it must be like to be black in this country, and to despair. I’m not referring to discrimination, exactly.  I think a better term would be  “unhealthy obsession.” To be black in America is to be automatically a subject of controversy and conflict, and I assume this is a crushing, almost irreducible burden that makes daily life, happiness and sanity infinitely more difficult for African-Americans than for any other  group. It appears that the culture, the media, the public, interest groups and government just won’t ever leave them alone to just live.

Here is U.S.tennis star Serena Williams, and she has just won a Gold Medal in singles tennis. Williams, whose passion and effervescence is almost as attractive as her athleticism, does a little happy dance. Not too much of one—nobody could accuse her of preening or taunting like NFL players after a touchdown. And yet she is criticized anyway, by Fox Sports among others, because what looked like just a happy dance to me was really a version of the “Crip Walk,” a hip-hop move adopted by the notorious L.A. street gang, the Crips, about 40 years ago. Since Serena is black, some saw this as a poorly-timed reference to drug-dealing killers, or even glorification of gang culture. Three seconds of a little jig, and suddenly the Olympics is the site of a race incident—and this is an ethics alarm that should never have gone off.

Or should it? The “Crip Walk” is considered so provocative in some neighborhoods that schools have banned it. From that perspective, maybe critics have a point; it might have been irresponsible for an African-American athlete from L.A. to do the move.  Williams—I love you, Serena!—brushed off the controversy by saying, simply, “I don’t care.” Still, a pure moment of an athlete’s joy in victory was marred, because the victor happened to be black. Continue reading →