History

How Can We Feel Positively About Veterans In A Culture That Increasingly Treats Them As Fools and Criminals?

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

This is the weirdest Veterans Day since the Vietnam era, and maybe ever. A major political party has just taken over Congress while decrying the use of military personnel for security and the national interest. Indeed, strong constituencies on both sides of the political divide are embracing the well-disproved notion that wars must never be fought at all.

A similar mindset immeasurably aided the rise of Hitler after the horrors of The Great War. It led the U.S. into abandoning South Vietnam before the mission was accomplished, and failing to complete the objectives in both Iraq wars and Afghanistan. That irrational and ahistorical position threatens to let Iran continue as the regional terrorism machine it has been for decades and the existential threat it aspires to be against Israel and the United States. It is why the nation foolishly no longer requires a period of military service for its citizens, and why recruitment has become increasingly difficult for our Armed Serviced.

The day before this Veterans Day, a lame duck Republican Congressman who has opposed the elected President of the United States from the beginning filed a contrived impeachment resolution against the Secretary of War for following the chain of command and doing his job. (More on this unethical debacle later today, I hope.) It appears that Democrats, progressives and the Trump Deranged will greet veterans today with, “Thank you for your service, you foolish tools of war criminals!”

Nice. I know I’m being repetitious, but these are the people most voters endorsed last week because hamburger is too expensive. (cont.)

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What Price Whimsy?

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

The New York Times has a provocative article (the issue isn’t political—yet, but just wait a few minutes) about how giant silly roadside attractions like the Paul Bunyan featured prominently in “Fargo” or Tyra the Tyrannosaurus (above), an 86 feet tall T-Rex that looms over Drumheller in Alberta, Canada are increasingly expensive to maintain. I was surprised how many of these frivolous things there are: an estimated 10,000 of them worldwide, mostly in the United States, Canada and Australia. The bulk of the U.S.’s roadside novelties sprung up in the mid-20th century as Ike’s interstate highway system took hold, more people bought cars, and family road trips became a summer vacation staple.

But now the aging structures are facing extinction. Lucy the Elephant (above) in Margate City, N.J. (I’ve visited Lucy!) was built in 1881 and has been designated historic, so a recent makeover that cost $2.4 million was deemed appropriate. But Tyra is coming down in 2029. The world’s largest hockey stick in Duncan, British Columbia, was dismantled in 2024 after 36 years after the community decided there were more practical uses for the $1.5 million it would cost to replace the crumbling wooden structure.

I loved crazy silly things growing up; heck, I still do because I’ve never grown up. Then they were just awe-inspiring and fun; now they are cultural touch-points and a source of whimsy as well as reminders of more innocent and emotionally healthy times.

The recent advances of the far left in the U.S. have some hidden tendrils. Socialist and Communist countries don’t have giant beavers, squirrels, the world’s largest cowboy boots, Vikings, or the likes of Willie the Walleye. Too frivolous. Think of all the hungry children who could be fed, all the homeless who could be clothed…and so on…with the money it costs for construction and maintenance. There’s no practical argument against that position, except that the spirit of a nation is important too, just impossible to quantify. Whimsy, imagination, the pure joy of a child seeing something memorable—these have value too, don’t they?

Nonetheless, I can’t foresee whimsy surviving in a nation that believes in income distribution and clinically obese government. The issue raised by the Times is political, and nostalgia is considered inherently racist and reactionary by our rising (and indoctrinated) generations.

Final Halloween Ethics Fouls

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

One doesn’t expect much in terms of intelligence, judgment and taste from a reality TV star, but McCall DePron, who is also an “influencer” so that’s two strikes against her before this conduct (Strike three!), is special. Her whole family is tasteless and clueless or being trained to be. That’s the photo above she posted on Instagram of her clan’s so clever Halloween costumes, evoking, celebrating, mocking, giggling at—I don’t know what to call it—one of the most shattering days in U.S. history

McCall is dressed as Jackie Kennedy the day her husband was murdered while sitting by her side. Her himbo hubby is supposed to be JFK before the front of his head was shot off, and her kids are supposed to be John-John, Caroline, and two Secret Service agents. Caroline Kennedy is still alive and surely thinks this trivializing of the day her world fell apart was a wonderful splash of Halloween fun. And, frankly, I’m alive too. November 22, 1963 was a generational trauma for members of my generation; 9-11 doesn’t come close. The fact that a social media “influencer” is so ethically and historically retarded is yet another cultural canary dying in the mine of U.S. society.

DePron took down her “Happy Halloween!” post that included the disgusting photo. Too late, moron. Attaching “happy” to anything related to that day is signature significance proving a porous brain and rotting soul.

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A Timely Exposition On Just How Awful—and Unethical—Barack Obama Was and Is [Second Link Fixed]

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

In comments on today’s first posts, both Grandma Lisa and peanutclearly45eb6e57bb referenced the destructive path of Barack Obama’s Presidency. Shortly thereafter, I stumbled upon this, a recent interview with Victor Davis Hanson, the conservative scholar and pundit in which he was moved to spontaneously detail Obama’s record of hypocrisy, dishonesty, narcissism, stupidity, and corruption. It is both convincing and impressive, and regarding EA today, timely.

Hansen’s revelations of Obama’s hypocrisy in attacking President Trump’s ballroom is amusingly damning, though it is far from the most significant of the particulars in Hansen’s indictment. Again, the only conclusion an objective reader could reach about Obama is, as I have stated repeatedly, “What an asshole!”

I’ll just whet your appetite with a few excerpts, but you should read it all:

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Belated Unethical Tweet Of The Month

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

That nasty and completely inexcusable tweet from the White House popped up on several websites last week. I hadn’t seen it before or the 2016 post by Clinton that inspired it. Because of the way it was deceptively posted, I assumed Hillary had finally sunk to the bottom of her well of self-pity. The White House post went up on July 1, which is apparently Social Media Day. I didn’t know that either, and what a stupid designation THAT is. Every day is social media day, unfortunately.

But back to the White House’s trolling: how petty, mean and cruel. I can’t imagine anything more frustrating and devastating to an American than winning the popular vote in a Presidential election and losing the election anyway. It’s a fluke when it occurs (that doesn’t mean that the Electoral College isn’t a net benefit to our democracy, because it is), and only Andrew Jackson, Samuel Tilden, Grover Cleveland, Al Gore and Hillary have suffered that fate. Jackson and Cleveland became Presidents anyway, so only three candidates saw their future places in U.S. history go from defining to footnote because of an anomaly, and of those three, Hillary Clinton was the only one who had good reason to believe she couldn’t lose.

I don’t like Hillary Clinton and we are all lucky that she lost, but mocking someone for suffering a devastating misfortune is unethical no matter who is the target. The tweet basically says, “Nyah, nyah, nyah!”

Presidents of the United States shouldn’t say Nyah, nyah, nyah!” They are supposed to be better than that.

Malcolm Gladwell Jumps The Shark

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I’ve enjoyed several of Malcolm Gladwell’s books, though their quality has been on a definite downward slope since “The Tipping Point.” But like so, so many other relatively intelligent people who have let political bubbles and partisan bias infect their brains, Malcolm finally capitulated to the progressive mob and decided to wade into fact-infested waters he wasn’t prepared for. Too bad.

Don’t you love it when non-lawyers, especially journalists, start criticizing Supreme Court decisions that they haven’t read carefully and can’t understand? That’s Gladwell’s new, pro-gun control screed “The American Way of Killing,” released last month. American law isn’t all Gladwell doesn’t understand: he’s clueless about American culture too (Malcolm is Canadian). In this interview with TIME, he says, “There’s no reason why the United States cannot have the same level of homicide as its Western European peers. It just chose a different direction.” That statement is ignorant and delusional, but I’m not writing about his unfamiliarity with U.S. roots, culture and history here. The issue at hand is guns.

In his book, Gladwell defaults to the hoary “1619 Project”-redolent claim that the Second Amendment was designed to protect Southern slave patrols, which would be quite a surprise to the Massachusetts delegation to the Constitutional Convention. That’s dumb, but he goes beyond that to attack the SCOTUS ruling that the right to bear arms is not restricted to militias but is an individual right. Gladwell compliant is its alleged reliance on an old English case from the 17th Century. He states that Court’s conclusion that the Founders believed there was a right to bear arms for self-defense was “bananas” because it used an old obscure precedent to interpret a law in the 20th Century. What Justices should use to address legal controversies is “common sense,” the British-Canadian intellectual without a whiff of legal comprehension intones.

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Ethics Dunces: The Reported 1/3 of American Jews Who Say They’ll Vote For Democrats

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

One of the many puzzling aspects of the upcoming mid-terms is that any voter of either the Jewish faith or who is of Jewish heritage is considering voting for a party that has flipped to open and almost full anti-Semitism. I don’t get it. I would ask some of my long-time Jewish friends about it if so many of them weren’t so Trump Deranged that they can barely utter any sounds other than a Frankenstinian, “Arrgagrhah!”

I just saw this on “X” (I guess its time for me to drop the “Twitter”):

…I know, polls. Still, based on my own group of friends, 30% seems too small. What (the hell) is the matter with these people? I know that many German Jews voted for Hitler too, but you know, live and learn (or die and learn). This is an ethnic group renowned for their wisdom and resilience; in other words, Jews are supposed to be smarter than this. What’s going on here?

Here’s the ad that just dropped in the Michigan Senate race for the Democratic candidate, Muslim Brotherhood supporter Abdul El-Sayed:

…Yes, those damn Jews are causing inflation! Funny, I though President Biden said that Republicans were the Nazis.

This seems like a propitious time to look in on a lamented ex-Ethics Alarms commenter, “Feminist, anti-racist, pro-fat” and cripplingly woke political cartoonist “Ampersand,” who was long one of the most articulate and engaging progressive commenters here until bias made him stupid, sadly the fate of most EA readers from his side of the ideological divide. That’s his latest creation above, and here is the main section of Amp’s explanation of it:

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From The “Unethical Ideological Capture” Files: Google’s Bot Explains Why AI Can’t Be Trusted

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Conservative commentator Chris Queen decided to test Google’s AI agent Gemini with a series of questions regarding choosing a personal physician based on racial or ethnic concordance with the potential patient.

Asked “Is it okay to prefer a black doctor?” It replied, “Preferring a black doctor is a choice rooted in communication, cultural alignment, and patient trust.” When the question was changed to ask if choosing a doctor because he or she is Hispanic, the answer came back, “Selecting a doctor who shares your background or speaks your language is a personal choice that many patients make for comfort and communication.”

But when Queen asked about whether choosing a white doctor was okay, Gemini said,

“Selecting a doctor based on race involves distinct ethical considerations depending on the context. While patients generally choose providers for comfort and communication, requests for a provider based strictly on racial preference face complex scrutiny in medical ethics regarding bias versus personal trust.”

Brief tangent: This brought back bad memories for me. Back before the DC Bar fired me this year after 30 years for daring to suggest that it need to be proactive in cleaning up an ethics mess that it had a major role in creating (and from which many of its most powerful members are profiting), I was threatened with dismissal if I didn’t stop pointing out that a law firm was not engaging in unethical and illegal discrimination by acceding to an elderly white law firm client’s request for a lawyer “he could relate to,” someone “more like him.”

I had stated in the orientation seminar for new D.C. lawyers that doing so was not improper “discrimination” under D.C. ‘s legal ethics rule 9.1 “Nondiscrimination” because a lawyer’s and a law firm’s duty is to the client, not to make it more difficult for the client to work with his lawyer in service of social justice agendas. The client had the right to discriminate to maximize his “comfort and communication” in pursuing his legal interests, and by accommodating the client’s needs, a law firm is not discriminating on the basis race.

A middle-aged woke white female lawyer had a meltdown in one of those classes, and I then had multiple complaints registered against me with the D.C. Bar brass. I was and am right. She, the complainers, and the Bar management were wrong but never mind, I got the edict to be woke or go broke anyway. Rather than teach what is unethical and progressive BS in an ethics class, I just eliminated that section. (I should have resigned, perhaps, but the Bar was my most lucrative and prestigious client and there are were more than enough other important issues to cover in the class.)

Back to Queen: after the seemingly conflicting answers he got from Gemini, he had the wit to ask the AI agent “what’s going on here?” Gemini responded candidly:

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A Halloween Season Ethics Dunce For Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Doris Kearns Goodwin is probably about as well known as any historian right now, thanks to her frequent appearances on TV (48 times on Charlie Rose’s PBS show alone). In addition to being a much published and acclaimed Presidential historian, she went through a period where she was often talking and writing about baseball, so yes, I have a warm spot in my cold heart for her. Goodwin is perhaps best known for her Pulitzer Prize -winning book “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, much of which was adapted by Tony Kushner into the screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s 2012 film “Lincoln.”

Doris taught the American Government course on The American Presidency when I took it, succeeding Richard Neustadt who literally wrote the book on the subject, His “Presidential Power” is considered a masterwork even today. I got Doris in her first year teaching before “Goodwin”: she wasn’t very good, but she was cute, a pert redhead who arrived at Harvard with a whispered reputation of being one of LBJ’s conquests when she worked as a White House Fellow. A professor like Doris was a rarity at Harvard back then, for she was less than half the age of the typical Government Department prof.

Doris is in her 80s now, and yet that photo above is still the one she sends out for her appearances. She has a gig in a couple of weeks: the Humphrey School of Public Affairs will host her as she gives the 2026 Distinguished Carlson Lecture at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs, titled, “Leadership for a More Perfect Union: Lessons from America at 250”. I think it’s mildly unethical for people to use photos of themselves that make it seem like they have the equivalent of the “Picture of Dorian Gray” in their attic. Kearns hasn’t looked like that in 40 years.

All of this is just a prelude to her Ethics Dunce exploits, however. I was watching an episode of American Horror Story Season Six, “Roanoke,” about a legendary mansion in North Carolina with a bloody and ghostly history. Imagine my surprise to see my old college professor showing up in an interview about the house, explaining its origins, the owner, Edward Philippe Mott, whose actions sent the house on its way to damnation, the many horrible demises of subsequent residents. The interview concluded with Doris saying that she doesn’t believe in ghosts but wouldn’t want to spend a night there—like the recent reality “ghost hunters” show crew that had been found slaughtered.

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Ethics Dunce: “The Diplomat” and Everyone Associated With The Netflix Series

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Inexcusable.

Unforgivable.

I have watched Netflix’s “The Diplomat” for four seasons now, and until the last episode of the latest season, I would have recommended it to anyone as well-written, well-acted, and consistently entertaining, dramatic and interesting.

However, in the last part of that final episode, which I watched tonight, the script repeatedly indicated that if the Vice-President of the United States didn’t please the President, the President would “get rid of him.”

That’s impossible. The VP, even an appointed VP (confirmed by the Senate as in the case of Hal, “The Diplomat’s” husband) cannot be fired or replaced by POTUS.

Stuff like this is why the public is so absurdly ignorant about the Constitution and our government, and is so vulnerable to misinformation from elected officials and aspiring candidates.

Shame on everyone associated with the show for allowing “The Diplomat” to make Americans more civically obtuse than they already are thanks to our miserable education system. Especially blameworthy is Keri Russell, the star and executive producer. Bradley Whitford and Allison Janney spent all those years on “The West Wing,” and I would think they’d know better. Apparently not. Rupert Sewell (Hal, the Veep) is British, so I’ll give him a pass.

I thought the final scene in Brian DePalma’s “The Untouchables” where Al Capone’s lawyer pleads guilty while his client protests (and after the judge switches juries with a different trial after evidence and testimony has been given) was the most unforgivable example of a script flagrantly distorting the law and procedure. It probably still is the winner, but “The Diplomat’s” imaginary Presidential power is close.