Government & Politics

Newt Gingrich and the Import of the Outright Lie

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

So...you like this, Newt fans?

We know politicians and elected officials lie on a regular basis, because the sheer volume of inaccurate, misleading or outright wrong statements they produce is so staggeringly large that there can be no other explanation. Catching one of them in an unequivocal, outright lie, however, is rare. For one thing, partisans and the intellectually lazy have cheapened the accusation of “Liar!” by applying it to situations where lying is not involved. A broken promise, for example, is only a lie if the promisor knew he was going to break it when he made the promise. It is also not a lie when an elected official turns out to be wrong.  A lie is not a statement that turns out to be untrue; it is a statement that the speaker knows is untrue, and is making for the purpose of deceiving others.

Was Barack Obama lying when he claimed, in his 2010 State of the Union, that the Supreme Court had “reversed a century of law to open the floodgates – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections” ? I think so—he’s supposed to be a Constitutional scholar, after all, and should know that, among other things wrong with his statement, foreign corporations were explicitly excluded from the rights affirmed in Citizens United. I can’t prove it though; heaven knows the President has made plenty of other bone-head statements. Similarly, most of the intelligent world believes that Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sex with that woman” bluff was an outright lie, but if Bill really believed, as some have claimed, that fellatio isn’t “sex”..well, his fist-pounding denial was just another Clintonian word-parsing exercise. Journalism is largely at fault for broadening the definition of lie to the point where much of the public can’t distinguish between real lies, the black-hearted variety that should sound ethics alarms and send the citizenry marching on the castle with torches and pitchforks, and the debatable falsehood. In 2010, for example, Politi-Fact called the claim that Obamacare would increase, rather than reduce, the deficit its “Lie of the Year.” It was not a lie at all. Those who maintained that (including me) believed it, and early returns indicate that they may well have been correct. Most of what are called lies in the press are really just exercises in confirmation bias. People see what they want to see, and describe it to back up what they already believe. Just like the news media.

Newt Gingrich, however, now increasingly being recognized as a GOP Bill Clinton without the charm, was just caught in an outright lie. That is meaningful,  and he should not be permitted to escape its implications. Continue reading →

The Runway and The Snowy Owl: An Ethics Conflict Tale

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

“One showed up at the airport in Hawaii, and they shot it,” Denver Holt, director of the Owl Research Institute in Montana, told the New York Times.“It’s the first ever in Hawaii and they shot it!” Holt was expressing his dismay at the sad news that a snowy owl, one of the most magnificent of all American birds, had journeyed from its Arctic home all the way to Hawaii and been shot dead for its effort. He was quoted in a Times story about the sudden, mysterious surge in snowy owl sightings all over the country, giving people a chance to see the huge, white predators in places where they had never appeared before. Like Hawaii.

“Aloha!”

Bang!

Here is a lesson in the value of waiting to get the full story before making assumptions. I saw the Times story, and had sketched out a post on the doomed Hawaii visitor, something about mankind’s unethical impulse to destroy beautiful living things to make beautiful dead things like fur coats, trophies and stuffed snowy owls. But my travel travails made it impossible for me to finish it, and it’s a good thing. Honolulu Civil Beat had the rest of the story. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Sen. Rand Paul

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Sen, Rand Paul, protester.

Sen. Rand Paul, libertarian and Republican U.S. Senator from Kentucky, has a choice: he can be a high elected official of the United States government, or he can engage in civil disobedience. He cannot do both.

Sen. Paul was detained today by the Transportation Security Administration in Nashville, Tenn., after refusing a full body pat-down following an image scan that did not clear him through security. I feel his pain. But a United States Senator must obey the law and cooperate with all lawful activities of the U.S. government and its agencies. If he objects to pat-downs so much, he has the power and influence to wield to try to change procedures and policies. Apparently they were not so burdensome while thousand of other citizens endure them every day.  Now that Sen. Paul is facing a feel-up from a gloved stranger, he is suddenly over-come with principle. Easy for him, too, since unlike us mortals, Senators are exempted by the Constitution from being detained while on the way to work.

For a U. S. Senator to defy a TSA agent who is attempting to keep the skies safe in the manner determined to be appropriate by the U.S government encourages and implicitly endorses defiance by everyone else.  That is a breach of Paul’s duty as a high elected official of the United States.

The Corruption Problem

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“Maybe, just maybe, the legislative and judicial systems have been corrupted, by, dare I say it, corporations?”

—Ethics Alarms commenter and OWS warrior Jeff Field, in his comment regarding the weekend post, The Marianne Gingrich Ethics Train Wreck

I don’t know how Jeff reaches the conclusion that the judicial system has been corrupted by corporations. Judges, unlike legislators, do not grow rich as a result of their inside knowledge and corporate connections. Judges, unlike revolving-door Congressional staffers and lawyers, do not generally come from corporate backgrounds. The fact that a judicial decision benefits the interests of some corporations, and many do not, does not mean that the decision was not just or was influenced by more than persuasive legal arguments. Those who believe that begin with the biased and untenable position that any decision that benefits a corporation must be, by definition, wrong.

So let me put that dubious assertion aside as the result of excessive reformer’s zeal and crusader’s license, and deal with the general proposition that corporations corrupt the legislative system, and society generally. Well, sure they do, but the statement is misleading, and, I would argue, meaningless because it places disproportional importance on the corrupting influence of this one, admittedly important, societal force.

Yes, corporations can be corrupting influences. So can government, and the lure of public office. The news media is a corrupting influence on the legislature, and upon society generally. Religion corrupts; as does popular culture, with its celebration of empty celebrity, glamor and wealth. Non-profits and charities are corrupted by their tunnel vision of specific worthy objectives to the neglect of others; the civil rights movement corrupts, as does feminism and all other advocacy efforts, which often, if not usually, succumb to an “ends justify the means” ethic, which is unethical. Indeed, freedom corrupts, as does dependence. Cynicism corrupts, and corrupts with a vengeance. Ignorance corrupts; so does the belief, however well-supported, that one knows it all. Ideological certitude and inflexibility corrupts.

Education, and the cost of it, corrupts. Sports, both professional and collegiate, corrupt people, students, and institutions. Science corrupts; technology corrupts. Heaven knows, the internet corrupts. Leisure and success; triumph and defeat; wealth and poverty, love and hate, desperation, patriotism; kindness, loyalty, sex, lust; intellectual superiority, beauty, physical prowess, passion. Talent corrupts. Kindness and sympathy too.

Self-righteousness. Fear. Worry. Envy. Stupidity. Zealotry.

And, as we all know, power and the love of money.

All of these and more corrupt human beings and the institutions, organizations and governments that they make up. If individuals are corruptible, something will corrupt them, as sure as the sun rises and the quinces ripen. To focus upon any one of the limitless and abundant sources of corruption and to say, “This, above all, is the cause of our problems” is naive and unfair. By all means, we must seek ways to limit the opportunities for corruption and the damage it can do, but we must also recognize that the ability to corrupt does not mean that something or someone does not or cannot contribute much good to society as well. Heroes can corrupt, as we saw in the tragedy of Joe Paterno, but we need heroes. Leaders can corrupt, and often do, but we still need leaders.

Ultimately,  the best way to stop people and things from corrupting us is to understand what corruption is and how easy it is to be corrupted. Our inoculation is ethics, understanding right and wrong and how to recognize both, and learning to recognize when we are biased, conflicted, or being guided by non-ethical or unethical motivations. Shifting the blame for corruption away from ourselves is comforting, but intimately counter-productive. We have the power to resist corruption, just as it is within out power to select public servants who are not likely to be corrupted. It is our responsibility to do so.

 

Better Late Than Never Dept.: Rep. Giffords Finally Does The Right Thing

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

That's the Democratic Congresswoman from Arizona in the center.

Ethics Alarms first stated that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was seriously disabled and needed to resign from the house on January 17, 2011. I wrote:

“Almost no medical experts foresee a woman with such massive head injuries being able to return to work within a year, if she can return at all. She only has a two-year term. Is it fair to the people of Arizona, not to mention the country, to have a member of Congress who is unable to work during the days ahead, which are critical to the nation on so many fronts?”

Although the answer to this question was obvious at the time, Rep. Giffords did not resign. I returned to the topic in March, June, September and November, but not only did the Giffords camp and Democrats continue to ignore the issue, the media largely did as well. Never mind that during a contentious and important year of critical legislative issues, one Congressional District in Arizona was essentially unrepresented.

Today, finally, Rep. Giffords announced that she had resigned, more than a year after being shot in the head. Her friend, Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, told the press that her friend’s recovery was likely to take years, not months. WOW! That’s a bulletin! Who had any idea that the Congresswoman was that seriously injured? Continue reading →

The Marianne Gingrich Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Ugh. What a mess.

The ethics miscreants:

Marianne Gingrich: Seething with hate for Newt, she decided to try to metaphorically stick a shiv in his back by airing dirty laundry from their marriage right before the South Carolina primary, a do-or-die for him. Her interview with ABC was unfair and an act of pure revenge. You couldn’t call it whistle-blowing, since anyone who doesn’t already know what a likely sociopath Gingrich is has been watching too many re-runs of “NCIS.” Gingrich’s character, or lack of it, was established and in the books by 1998. Marianne should have not had to say a word, but everything she did say, she had said before, in an interview in 2010 in Esquire. Continue reading →

Stephen Colbert’s Comedy Terrorism

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

This was a lesson for me. I fell into the trap of looking past unique unethical conduct because it resembled harmless conduct I had seen many times before, a close cousin of using “everybody does it” to excuse and invalidate the inexcusable. Thank goodness Washington Post columnist Colbert King was paying attention.

In King’s column today, he catalogues the activities of Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert’s faux presidential run. I had already commented on Colbert’s gag earlier this week, but the target of my criticism was George Stephanopoulos, who devoted a ridiculous amount of time to a pointless interview with the comedian at the expense of real news. I assumed Colbert was just another in a long line of comedians who have used a presidential election year as a prop, and thus harmless….and I stopped paying attention to his antics. But as King ( his first name is pronounced KOHL-bert; the comedian’s name is Kohl-BARE) points out, Colbert has moved beyond satire into something akin to comedy terrorism, actively attempting to warp and influence the presidential selection process for laughs, and casualties be damned. King writes: Continue reading →

Occupy Brain Pans

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Allow me to translate: "Duh!"

The latest, dumbest and most telling of the endless Occupy group protests occurs today, as 111 Occupy Wall Street spin-offs across the country engage in “Occupy the Courts,” a protest to mark two years since the 2010 landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which held that the government cannot ban organizational spending on political campaigns. Move to Amend, the group that is sponsoring the protests, says that the goal is to build support for a constitutional amendment that would abolish corporate constitutional rights, such as the right to free speech, and declaring that political campaign spending is not a form of speech protected by the First Amendment.

If I were optimistic and naive, I would assume that this nonsense would finally shame the imprudent members of the media, Democratic Party and Obama administration who cynically hitched their wagons to the Occupy Wall Street anvil, hoping that eventually the groups would do or say something that justified all the attention and expense lavished on them. Instead, the Occupy movement has featured rapes, robberies, beatings, riots, obscenity, anti-Semites, homeless hangers-on, demonstrators defecating on cars, a woman placing her baby on railroad tracks, another child being abandoned to shiver in a tent, a pseudo-bomb being thrown at the White House, a demonstrator shooting a rifle at the White House, violated permits, squalor, disease and rats….all while the news media showed its stripes by maintaining with a straight face that this display was no different or worse than the comparatively dignified, focused and streamlined Tea Party demonstrations. Nonetheless, the facilitators of this embarrassment in the annals of civil protest seem determined to keep the faith until it blows up into a genuine tragedy or slinks away. If Occupy the Courts won’t convince the pols and journalists that they made an epic mistake, nothing will. But at least it settles the matter. These people have no idea, none, what they are doing. Continue reading →

Republican Nomination Ethics Points, 1/18/2012

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I’m sitting here watching the GOP Final Four debate. Here are some brief ethics observation on a lively day in the race:

  • At the opening gun, Newt Gingrich gave a bravura performance of indignation personified when moderator John King asked him about the looming ABC interview of his ex-wife, Marianne, in which she impugns Newt’s character and claims that he asked her to agree to an “open marriage.” He told King it was a despicable question and said that the issue was not worthy of mention. Good act, but of course the question of character is relevant, and of course Gingrich, who has none, wouldn’t think so. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Greta Van Susteren

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Newt: ” Honey, I’m divorcing you to marry the woman I’ve been cheating on you with for the last 6 years.” Marianne: “Fine. Just wait til you run for President. I’ll be ready.”

Newt Gingrich’s second (of three) wife, Marianne Gingrich, has said in the past that she had it within her power to  end her ex-husband’s career with a single interview. This is not as remarkable as it sounds; just consider how many political spouses past and present have or had that power regarding their own power partners. Let’s see: Eleanor Roosevelt…Jackie Kennedy…Coretta Scott King…Lady Bird Johnson….Pat Nixon…Hillery Clinton, of course…Bill Clinton…Laura Bush…Tipper Gore. That’s just for starters. I have no doubt that Marianne Gingrich might be able to tell tales that would make any of these women feel fortunate by comparison, but on the other hand, what could she say that would be a surprise? Anyone who doesn’t know by now that Newt is about as miserable an excuse for a human being as one can be and avoid being shot or imprisoned hasn’t been paying attention.

This is the problem, however. People don’t pay attention, and have the memories of Eric Holder under Congressional questioning about Fast and Furious. After Gingrich’s deft response to Juan Williams’ accusatory race-baiting question at the last South Carolina debate sparked a standing ovation, you would have thought that he was the new star on the scene to hear callers on conservative talk-radio rave.* Yes, yes, Gingrich is smart and articulate. So were Richard Nixon, Tom DeLay, Huey Long and Joe McCarthy. So were Professor Moriarty and Goldfinger. We know Newt is smart; we also should know other things about him by now, like the fact that he’s an untrustworthy narcissist and a cur.

Apparently Marianne Gingrich has decided to do America a favor and to remind amnesiac Republicans once and for all who they were cheering this week. She has taped a two-hour spill-the-dirt interview with ABC News. The Gingrich camp is in a panic, and supposedly there is an ethics debate at ABC about whether the interview should air before the critical South Carolina primary, possibly Newt’s last chance to stop the Mitt Romney juggernaut, or after. Fox host and legal analyst Greta Van Susteren comes down on the side of holding the interview in the can until Monday. On her blog, she writes: Continue reading →