The good news, I suppose, is that the Palmetto State Armory decided to take down its webpage advertising the “You lie!” etched rifle component, in belated recognition of the fact that promoting such a product after the Tucson shootings would be irresponsible and in terrible taste. Continue reading
Government & Politics
Ethics Hero: John Green
Appearing on the Today Show, John Green and his wife Roxanna were asked about their feelings about the tragic death of their daughter Christina, age nine, at the hands of Tucson shooter Jared Loughner.
John Green, grieving father, replied:
“This shouldn’t happen in this country, or anywhere else, but in a free society, we’re going to be subject to people like this. I prefer this to the alternative.”
With his last six words, he established himself as superior in mind, principles and character to all of the unscrupulous commentators and devious politicians who have attempted to use this terrible tragedy to stifle dissent.
John Green leaves all of us wondering if we could summon such perspective, rationality and nobility under similar circumstances.
Ethics Dunce: Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.)
I know that Ethics Alarms has been a bit relentless regarding the accusations and the innuendos against Sarah Palin and others in the wake of the Arizona shooting, but it is an unusually widespread out-break of unfair conduct, and the Ethics Dunces are coming in waves, and from all sides and sectors.
We have a sheriff on the scene, Clarence Dupnik, who seems determined to create the assassin’s defense for him, by claiming, in the face of much evidence to the contrary, that he was driven to violence by inflammatory political rhetoric. Watch Loughner’s crack criminal defense team run with that. We have the nation’s supposedly premiere news source, the New York Times, running a revolting editorial describing Loughner’s attack as political, when this is clearly not true. (An excellent condemnation of the Times piece by James Taranto can and should be read here). Not to be outdone, Rep. James Clyburn (S.C.), the third-ranking House Democrat, took the same low road. Referencing defeated G.O.P. Senate candidate Sharron Angle’s justly criticized “Second Amendment solution” statement from the campaign (it probably, and justly, lost her the election), Clyburn tied it to Jared Loughner’s attack. Continue reading
Ethics Final For Barack Obama
Is President Obama the fair, ethical, unifying, anti-partisan president of all the people that he promised to be in 2008, or is he a Machiavellian, undercover Chicago pol, willing and ready to use divisiveness and deceit to enhance his power, silence critics and advance his agenda? During the past two years, there has been ample evidence supporting both descriptions, but his address in Arizona Wednesday could settle the issue. If the President emulates his Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton, using the massacre in Arizona as a political wedge the way Clinton used the Oklahoma City bombing—if he adopts the philosophy of former Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emmanuel that one should never waste a crisis—then we will know the dispiriting truth about Barack Obama. Continue reading
On the Post-Shooting Finger-Pointing Apology Watch
It may be that the first apology for the partisan rush to lay twenty shootings and five deaths at the doorstep of the Tea Party, Sarah Palin, and conservatives came from Arizona Daily Star’s cartoonist, Dave Fitzsimmons, and the paper itself in an editorial today. It began with a statement from the cartoonist, and continued: Continue reading
Partisan Opportunism: The Media and the Arizona Massacre:
The shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, a Federal judge, and 18 others yesterday has exposed media bias and unfairness at its despicable worst. That so many reporters, commentators and bloggers learned of Arizona parking lot carnage and immediately thought, “Wow, what a chance this is to pin everything on Sarah Palin and the Tea Party!” speaks volumes about the ethics and integrity of America’s journalists. The Daily Beast, for example, began a column this way:
“No motives have emerged from today’s senseless shooting in Tucson, but Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords has a long history of being targeted by the Tea Party—sometimes in violent terms.”
Is there a shred, an inkling, a hint or a clue anywhere that the man who did the shooting had anything whatsoever to do with the Tea Party? No. Is there anything at all linking Tea Party rhetoric to his motives for the shooting? No. So how can this paragraph be explained? Easy. The Daily Beast doesn’t like the Tea Party movement, and saw this horrific shooting as an opportunity to discredit it. Continue reading
Comment of the Day: “Mr. Madison, Meet Mr. Twain”
The Comment of the Day is from Tom Fuller, regarding “Mr. Madison, Meet Mr. Twain”: Continue reading
Health Care Reform: Capitol Hill Illusions, Delusions and Lies
The biggest political lie of 2010 is off to a flying start in 2011. As the new Republican House majority sets out to “repeal” the new health care law, Democrats are waving a report from the Congressional Budget Office that the media describes as stating that such an act would actually add to the deficit, because the CBO has calculated that the law, as it stands, will reduce the federal deficit by about 270 million dollars.
But wait a minute! What CBO is really saying is that if the assumptions and projections incorporated into the law are accurate, then the law will cut the deficit. The Congressional Budget Office is not allowed to challenge the assumptions written into a law, only to calculate what a law will cost according to those assumptions. This also means that the CBO will not assume that the costs of implementing the many administrative measures in the law will rise—as the costs of all major federal programs inevitably do. Speaker John Boehner has stated that he doesn’t believe that anyone in Washington, including the Democrats, really believes that the new law will reduce the deficit. Ezra Klein, the Washington Post’s mouthpiece of the Left, claims that the Republicans actually know the law will lower the deficit. Who’s lying? Or perhaps a better question is, what constitutes a lie in such a convoluted context? Continue reading
Mr. Madison, Meet Mr. Twain
Whitewashing America’s past doesn’t honor it, burnish it, or repair it. All it accomplishes is making present-day Americans ignorant, naive, cocky and shallow. American society deserves respect for recognizing its ethical and moral errors and misconceptions, debating them, and remarkably often, fixing them. This is another reason why the new volume of Mark Twain masterpieces omitting his pointed use of the word “nigger” does damage to history and culture. It is also the reason why the Republican-led reading of the Constitution should have included all of the Constitution, including the document’s initial support of slavery.
Ethics Dunces: Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) and Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick (R-PA)
Let us, in this case, emphasize the most important word, shall we? The Congressmen in question are Ethics DUNCES . As in dolts, fools, idiots, clods, slackers, meat-heads, dummies, dim-wits, lame-brains and bozos. Get out your thesauruses, because they deserve all the abuse we can heap on them. Continue reading
