History

Unethical Quotes of the Month: President Trump and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

First Trump’s…

Now Jeffries….

“Well, it’s an extraordinary insult, but he continues to repeat it. And what’s so ironic is that Donald Trump is clearly the dumbest person ever to sit at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue…”

Jeffries was talking to the execrable Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNOW so of course there was no push-back. Such a classy exchange between a President and a Congressional leader! “You’re stupid!” “Oh yeah? Well you’re stupider!” I can just imaging Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun talking to each other like that.

Actually I can’t. Those career-long adversaries has respect for the positions they held, our institutions, and, yes, each other. They also understood the importance of civility.

Donald Trump’s penchant for stooping to ad hominem attacks is another one of his obnoxious and self-destructive habits. I wish someone would explain to him that “IQ” does not mean “intelligence” and that it is ignorant, indeed stupid, to think so. I’d bet at some point Trump’s IQ was tested, probably as a kid, registered in the relatively high range, and his parents or teachers told him it meant something. (My father told me that what proved one’s intelligence was what you did, not how you scored on a test.) The President has always been obsessed with ratings, scores and numbers (“Subscriptions way down!). Heck, if I used that to measure the value of my life, I would have killed this blog years ago. Maybe myself too.

You could excuse Trump a bit, especially given his “tit for tat” reflex, for resorting to ad hominem since his political foes constantly use the practice. Trump is fat, he’s orange, his hair is weird, he’s nuts, he’s demented, he’s stupid. It’s still no excuse for him returning fire in kind. Furthermore, it is extremely unlikely that Hakeem Jeffries is “low IQ.” He had an impressive academic record, he was a law review editor in law school and graduated at the top of his class, clerked for a judge and was a corporate litigator before entering politics.

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Once Again Your Host Wrestled His Fingers To The Floor…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Another cherished Facebook friend wrote a few days ago that it was the anniversary of Matthew Shepard’s death (October 6) in Laramie, Wyoming. He was the young gay man who was beaten, tortured, and left to die tied to a split rail fence in 1998. Because gay activism was on the rise, a martyr was useful and the murder was lurid enough to attract eyeballs (“If it bleeds, it leads”), Shepard’s murder immediately was styled as a hate crime. After all, he was gay.

My friend wrote, in part, “We pray for the repose of his soul along with the souls of all those taken from us in prejudice.” But there is no evidence that Shepard’s murder was motivated by his homosexuality, other the fact that he was gay. As with the George Floyd debacle, the event was a gleaming example of presumed prejudice, fed by a powerful minority group that was pushing the “hate crime” concept hard. Eventually Barack Obama signed a federal hate crime law bearing Shepard’s name—of course he did, because that’s our O. But there is more evidence that Shepard’s death was the result of a drug deal gone wrong rather than anti-gay hate. Nevertheless, the story is still framed as a hate crime. Here’s NBC (gee, what a great news department!) stating as fact that Shepard’s death was motivated by homophobia.

My friend is gay, usually rational and always astute. It bothers me to see him spreading urban legends and bad history. But his heartfelt post got all sorts of “care” and “love” imogis, and I didn’t have the heart to spoil a public pandering.

Shepard died horribly, but so do lots of people, and that he’s remembered today because he happened to be a gay crime victim when so many genuine heroes are forgotten bugs me: you know how I am. There is not only a duty to remember but a duty to remember accurately, as well as a duty not to make people more ignorant than they already are.

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Comment of the Day: “Help! My Ethics Conflict…”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

My recent post about an extreme Trump Deranged friend whom I have so far refused to disabuse of the false notion that I am a solid progressive Democrat, in her view the only people worthy of her company, attracted many excellent comments; several are Comment of the Day worthy. I’m giving CD-VAPatriot the honor, in part because I know her, and know how accurate her self-description is. It would be hard to imagine someone less fairly called “immoral” or less deserving of derision from the Trump Deranged.

Below is CD-VAPatriot‘s Comment of the Day on the post, “Help! My Ethics Conflict…” for your reading pleasure and edification. But first I would like to recommend that you track down Season 7 of “American Horror Story” on Amazon Prime. This brave, creative, often satirical, subversive, genre-savvy anthology series using a spectacular repertory company took on both political extremes in 2017, and many of its plot points proved disturbingly prophetic. It would not be unfair to say the theme of the season was the horror of Trump Derangement, triggered by the fury of progressives, especially feminists, who were emotionally broken by Hillary’s defeat. (We see a lesbian couple’s marriage deteriorate in part because one partner blames the other for Hillary’s defeat after she voted for Jill Stein. This is even funnier today than it was then.)

I had direct experiences with women exactly like the protagonists in “Cult,” the title of the season’s ten installment tale. They told me, one with tears running down her face, that they were terrified of the impending Trump Presidency, and, of course, the Democratic party exploited that irrational fear. Fear is the sub-theme of the season; ironically, it is the crazed conservative cult leader who preaches the power of fear in promoting political change, but we have seen that it is the political Left that has sown fear most relentlessly since 2017: fear of climate change, fear of the Wuhan virus, fear of AI, fear of “fascism,” fear of “The Handmaiden’s Tale,” fear of law enforcement, and fear of Donald Trump in general. The show makes all extremes of the political spectrum look bad without taking sides, an approach that is difficult, wise and in today’s Hollywood, courageous.

Now here’s CD…

***

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An Offensive Medal of Freedom

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Yecchh.

Not the worst desperate mid-term election tactic President Trump has improvised this year, and definitely not the last, Trump suddenly announced during a Republican National Committee (RNC) campaign rally in San Antonio, Texas this week that he would be awarding former pitcher Roger Clemens the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Clemens was stunned. It is likely that Trump dreamed up the stunt on the spot. Trump may have been rewarding “The Rocket” for his effusive introduction, when he said,

“What a privilege it is for me to intro our great President. A man that loves our country, that puts all of us first, and puts America first. This is what I love. He’s made us better, he’s made us stronger, and more important, because of the border and everything here, he’s made us safer. And don’t forget, this is really important, this man put his life on the line for us. Don’t ever forget that.”

I’m checking: is Clemens, who evolved into a bigger and bigger asshole as his impressive career went on and who is current deemed unworthy of the Hall of Fame because of substantial evidence that his late career resurgence was fueled by banned PEDs (Performance Enhancing Drugs) the worst Medal of Freedom recipient ever? Looking over the list…

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Unethical Quote Of The Month: NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s October 7th Message

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“This day is profoundly painful for so many New Yorkers. It marks three years since the horrific war crimes of October 7. On that day, Hamas killed more than 1,100 Israelis and abducted 251 others. We grieve alongside our many friends and neighbors who still carry that unthinkable loss.

The suffering did not begin nor end that day. It instead continued through the Israeli government’s devastating, ongoing genocide in Gaza, in which it has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians—including more than 21,000 children. Even since the so-called ceasefire, more than 1,400 Palestinians have been killed. That suffering has intensified with every Israeli bomb dropped on ambulances waiting outside hospitals, every drone strike targeting a residential building or journalist, and every shipment of food aid turned away at a border crossing. Many New Yorkers are reckoning with this unbearable grief, and we mourn alongside them – all while knowing that our tax dollars fund these war crimes.Three years later, we must refuse to accept a world in which occupation and apartheid continue, where war crimes are met with impunity, and our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.

To honor the dead, we must fight for a world in which every person can live with freedom, safety, and dignity.”

New York’s anti-Semitic, Islamist Mayor Zohran Mamdani, in his official statement on the anniversary of the unprovoked and ambush Palestinian terrorist attack on Israel that included the murder of unarmed civilians, rapes, infanticide, and the taking of over 200 hostages, mist of whom died.

I could have had a much longer headline, and had to restrain myself to avoid posting one. Anyone who agrees with this vile man is an Ethics Dunce, as is anyone who voted for him or would argue that such votes can be justified. Mandani qualifies for an EA “Incompetent Elected Official” designation, because condemning the victims of terrorism while supposedly memorializing those victims is incompetent and irresponsible, unless one is an Ethics Villain, which Mayor Mamdani certainly is.

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Senator Le Pétomane?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

There are so many reasons for Michiganders regardless of party and ideological bent not to vote for Abdul El-Sayed that the revelation that he likes to fart in public seems trivial in comparison. He’s a Communist who lies about his beliefs; he has called for defunding the police and he is anti-Semitic, though to today’s Democrats that’s a good thing. He refused to disavow his pal Hasan Piker, who is a vocal America-hater. Naturally Bernie Sanders, AOC and Obama are supporting El-Sayed.

Now a longtime aid to the Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan has quit and gone rogue, calling his former boss for whom he worked as a bodyguard and a staff assistant a “manufactured man” who has maturity more appropriate to a high school locker room. Jordan Domingue told the media that during El-Sayed’s gubernatorial and Senate campaigns, he realized that the candidate was a “30-year-old leapfrogging into a job he was inexperienced for and only got through connections.”

“Now I’m far from blameless, and will reflect for years how I let myself be captured by loyalty and personality,” Domingue added. “When he acted like an entitled mobster to elected officials in 2017-2018, I excused it as a justified outsider earning their place. When he would say one thing to one group and another thing to a different group hours later, I considered it just the norm or ‘strategic ambiguity’ as he calls it.”

What Domingue really found intolerable, however, was El-Sayed’s affection for openly passing gas in front of staffers. “He would openly do so without warning or embarrassment as his form of stand-up comedy,” Domingue wrote. “To this day for him, the act of farting is easily one of the funniest things a person can do.”

Is that a good reason to vote against him, along with, you know, the fact that El-Sayed is an anti-American lunatic, which doesn’t bother the Mad Left these days? Le Pétomane was the stage name of Joseph Pujol (1857 –1945) who was a professional “fartist.” Not only could he fart at will, he could fart tunes. The Governor in “Blazing Saddles,” played by Mel Brooks, is named in honor of Le Pétomane.

There are lots of reasons to be dubious about this story. For one thing, it has “disgruntled employee” written all over it. For another, it was first reported by The Gateway Pundit, which is on the EA blacklist. I will also point out that supporters of Donald Trump are ethically estopped from assailing a candidate for having a sophomoric sense of humor and running for an office “he was inexperienced for.”

I also note that the levels of dignity and decorum, not to mention maturity, that the public has a right to expect from its elected officials has already been reduced to high school and even elementary school level by such class acts as GOP Rep. Lauren Boberg, Senator Fetterman dressing like gym rat and this…

Nonetheless, thinking that farting intentionally at the workplace is acceptable conduct does raise serious questions about judgment and socialization, if not sanity. And wouldn’t you agree that a superior intentionally farting among staffers in the workplace constitutes creating a “hostile work environment”?

Ethics Lessons From An Epic “That’s Baseball!” Moment in Milwaukee

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

What would have been a go-ahead 2-run homer by the San Diego Padres’ Ty France in the top of the 9th inning in last night’s Padres-Brewers NLDS series opener was foiled by a cable in the retractable roof stadium at America Field Park. The huge fly ball (49 degree launch angle, the steepest ever recorded there) on the way over the fence in fair territory struck a cable and fell straight down into the waiting outfielder’s glove. By the ground rules in force, the ball was in play and it was an out. One batter later, the Brewers had won 3-2.

Batted balls used to hit parts of the roof a lot in the Ray’s awful park in St. Petersburg before its roof was repaired, but that’s because the beams, cables, catwalks and rails were too low (and too many). This had never happened in Milwaukee’s American Family Field to cost a team a home run before, and the former “Miller Park” opened 26 years ago.

Yet the only time a ball about to be a home run hit the roof happened in the 9th inning of a play-off game, saving the home team from a crushing loss! It could have happened in a mid-May game. It could have happened in the third inning of an 8-2 loss. It could have happened when the Brewers were playing an inter-league game against the Angels. The odds were that if the fluke were going to happen at all to any team, it would have happened TO the Brewers, since its their home field. And heck, the retractable roof could have been open, meaning that there wouldn’t have been anything for France’s ball to hit.

But no. The first and only time, this particular stroke of bad luck (well, good luck for the Brewers) happened on national TV, in a critical game. Meanwhile the Brewers, who had the best record in baseball, are trying to finally get back to the World Series for the first time since 1982.

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Ethics Verdicts: 1) The American Left Is Now Substantially Anti-Semitic and 2) Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism. Part Two: For Jews, Zionism=Survival

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

[Part I is here.]

Let’s see: what happened in the World of Jew Hate in the past 24 hours? Admittedly, this will only cover stories that leftist mainstream media hasn’t successfully embargoed: it is fine for the Democratic Party to be anti-Semitic, see, it’s just a bad look if the positions and conduct are expressly anti-Semitic right before an election, except to Muslim voters, of course.

I see…

  • Jordan Bardella, a top figure in the French far right and Marine Le Pen’s top aide, authored antisemitic social media messages from 2013 to 2015. He had vehemently denied this.
  • Italy’s Democratic Party refused to take part in a parliamentary committee vote on a bill opposing antisemitism,…
  • Die Linke, Germany’s rising populist-left party, won 26% in elections to Berlin’s House of Representatives, its best performance ever. Meanwhile, a branch of Die Linke in Berlin recently welcomed Macklemore, the anti-Semitic rapper, and on election night a Die Linke MP was photographed with a representative of a pro-Palestinian group with terrorist connections.
  • Canada is experiencing a surge of Jew hate. The Jerusalem Post reports “a significant rise in antisemitism, threats, and violence against Jews and Jewish institutions…In 2025, 788 hate crimes targeting Jews were reported to police across Canada. Jews accounted for approximately 71 percent of all police reported hate crimes motivated by religion. .. During the most recent Rosh Hashanah, mezuzahs were torn from the doors of Jewish students’ rooms at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. Days later, an armed man arrived at the Sons of Jacob Synagogue in Belleville while worshippers were inside on Yom Kippur. A police officer protecting the synagogue was seriously wounded.

In the U.S.—remember, we’re just talking about today’s news—

  • The University of California petitioned a court to kick out the Justice Department’s lawsuit accusing UCLA of tolerating antisemitic harassment while seeking repayment of $2 billion in research grants. UC calls the case “political coercion” (how dare the government restrict a university’s right to allow the persecution of Jewish students on campus?) and argues that UCLA has made substantial changes since August of 2024, when a court ruled that “Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith” and ordered the university to guarantee equal access to campus. A battle between anti-Israel students and counter-protesters was allowed to proceed without significant action by campus police.
  • Close to me in Alexandria, a group of rabbis accused Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland of normalizing anti-Semitism. In a letter this week to the district’s [completely Democrat] leadership, they wrote in part, “Over the last three years, we have been on the front lines of the current crisis of skyrocketing school-based antisemitism. We meet regularly with students who are hurt and confused and parents who are angry that their children are experiencing harassment, isolation, and threats to their fundamental physical and emotional safety. We are alarmed that the lack of a meaningful response by MCPS has led to an increase in the normalization of antisemitic attitudes, language and behaviors in our schools.” Montgomery County is the most progressive and Democrat-dominated district in one of the most Democrat-dominated states in the nation.
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Ethics Quiz: Botched Executions

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

At Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, 49-year-old condemned inmate Christa Pike got two full doses of pentobarbital when one was supposed be sufficient to kill her. The second was administered into her bloodstream after the first didn’t work, following state protocols. But she still maintained a distinct heartbeat, and began snoring.

There were no rules in Tennessee for what should happen when a prisoner survives both lethal injections, because it’s not supposed to happen and had never happened before.

The microphones were shut off and viewing curtains were drawn. Attending medical staff then entered the execution chamber to evaluate vital signals, confirm the presence of a heartbeat, and determine whether there as acute respiratory distress. Defense attorneys recorded the information to file an emergency motion with a federal court citing evidence that their client survived and suffered unconstitutional pain, citing the 8th Amendment against “cruel and unusual” punishment. Pike was disconnected from the IV lines, her condition stabilized, and she was transferred by secure transport to an off-site civilian medical facility.

I must confess, because I have watched way too much TV, a Western I must have seen when I was about 10 had me believing that when a condemned prisoner survives an execution, such as a hanging, the prisoner is deemed to have completed his sentence and goes free. My father had confirmed this, saying that the real punishment in capital cases was the waiting and anticipation. The dying part was a breeze, or was supposed to be. (Last words of British acting legend, 19th-century actor Edmund Kean: “Dying is easy; comedy is hard.”)

Well, that legend is not true; that has never been the case in the U.S., and it has rarely been the practice anywhere. Wikipedia has a just-updated list of botched executions going back to 1540. It’s a long (and probably incomplete) list, but there are only two examples where the condemned was set free, and only three where the death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, none since 1885.

That last lucky guy was John Henry George “Babbacombe” Lee (1864 –1945), an Englishman famous for surviving three attempts to hang him in 1885. He had been convicted of murder. Lee was eventually released and supported himself by touring and speaking about his strange life. There have been several books about Lee including “The Man They Could Not Hang” (Holgate and Waugh, 2005) and a silent film. He’s buried at Forest Home Cemetery, Milwaukee.

So that’s what happens when you survive an execution. You end up in Milwaukee….

But I digress. The issue at hand is what is the ethical, fair and responsible way to handle such situations.

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Ethics Verdicts: 1) The American Left Is Now Substantially Anti-Semitic and 2) Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism. Part One: The Democrats Embrace Jew Hate

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Funny, when Democrats ran in 2024 on the assertion that electing Donald Trump would turn the U.S. into Nazi Germany, I didn’t realize that the Left’s response to Trump’s election would be to embrace the most universally acknowledged evil of Hitler’s regime.

In case you haven’t noticed (and why haven’t you, if not?), the evidence of metastasizing anti-Semitism world-wide and in the U.S. as we approach the mid-terms it is alarming, or should be. Yesterday we learned that there was a nearly successful 9-11 style attack on Tel Aviv, foilded by the passengers. Anti-white racist director Spike Lee (everybody loves Spike Lee!) got in a confrontation at Yankee Stadium with a fan who told him “Fuck Palestine!” The acclaimed director of “Do the Right Thing” has revealed himself as a big booster of Hamas, along with a lot of prominent Hollywood progressives like Mark Ruffalo, Susan Saranden, Emma Stone and Tilda Swinton. In a sane America, such anti-Semites would fear that expressing vile views would kill their careers, but, NPR tells us, the nation is “divided.” You know: let Israel be wiped off the map vs. let Jews live.

Huh. Tough choice; let me think.

The international community is substantially anti-Semitic as the United Nations has been demonstrating for a long time, but that condition has worsened substantially since Europe allowed its nations to be overrun with Muslims. And, of course, progressives perpetually argue that the U.S. needs to be more like the rest of the world. The U.N. has consistently condemned Israel as it has fought for its existence in Gaza and Iran. Here is the list of nations whose delegates walked out on Netanyahu’s speech to the General Assembly

  • Egypt
  • Jordan
  • Lebanon
  • Syria
  • Iraq
  • Saudi Arabia
  • Palestine
  • Qatar
  • Kuwait
  • Oman
  • Yemen
  • Sudan
  • Tunisia
  • Algeria
  • Libya
  • Mauritania
  • Somalia
  • Comoros
  • Turkiye (Turkey)
  • Iran
  • Pakistan
  • Afghanistan
  • Bangladesh
  • Indonesia
  • Malaysia
  • Brunei Darussalam
  • Maldives
  • Myanmar
  • North Korea
  • Turkmenistan
  • Uzbekistan
  • South Africa
  • Senegal
  • Djibouti
  • Nigeria
  • Angola
  • Republic of the Congo and Democratic Republic of the Congo
  • Spain
  • Brazil
  • Peru
  • Bahamas
  • Antigua and Barbuda
  • Botswana
  • Ghana
  • Cabo Verde

Nice!

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