History

Unethical Quote of the Month: President Joe Biden

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“It’s just completely contrary to everything America is about. We want to tell the truth. We haven’t always done it as a nation. We want to tell the truth.The idea that, you know, a billionaire can buy something and say, ‘By the way, we’re not gonna fact check anything,’ and you know, you have millions of people reading, going online, reading this stuff. Anyway, I think it’s really shameful.”

—-President Joe Biden, attacking Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg decision’s to end its biased, censorious fact-checking system that relied on partisan propaganda operations like PolitiFact and Snopes.

What’s shameful is a President of the United States advocating speech censorship. Like many of Biden’s brain-addled outbursts lately, however, he has committed the cardinal political sin of saying what he and his puppeteers really believe out loud. So now we know, at least those of us who weren’t paying attention before and couldn’t read the metaphorical neon signs flashing before our eyes, Joe Biden and his entire party advocates the censorship of free speech on social media, including opinion, adverse positions and anything that might expose its rotting proto-totalitarian party for the threat to democracy it has become. Thanks, Joe! But it was pretty obvious already.

I’m glad that I have waited to post the resolution of the “Worst President Ever” inquiry until tomorrow, because so much applicable information has been flowing regarding just how awful Joe Biden has been. I think all who have read the series carefully have figured out that the finals are going to come down to Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Woodrow Wilson and Biden, and it doesn’t take a PhD to guess who the last two competitors will be either. Once I thought the ultimate “winner” was clear-cut, but Joe is fighting for the title to the bitter end.

He and his fellow censors circulated lie after lie before and during the Presidential campaign (among them that only Donald Trump lies) yet Biden has the astounding brass to talk about wanting to tell the truth. You know, truth like Biden being sharp as a tack. “Truth” like the border being secure.

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Who Had “Trump Turning Into James K. Polk” On Their 2025 Bingo Card? [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

This is the kind of thing that even die-hard Trump true believers should find, if nothing else, odd.

Although it was barely discussed during the campaign, President-Elect Trump is sparking head-explosions and headlines by talking about expanding American geography and territories. He says he wants to take the Panama Canal back; he says he wants Denmark to hand over Greenland, and he also wants to make Canada a state.

The U.S. hasn’t added any significant geography to its dominion since the Spanish American War, and gave up the Canal Zone to Panama during the Carter Administration. James K. Polk, the Democratic President who came into office as the herald of “Manifest Destiny,” had well-publicized designs on the Oregon territory as well as Mexican holdings from the start of his administration, and was threatening both Great Britain and Mexico to get his way. In the end, Polk got most of the Oregon territory in a compromise deal the English, and although it took a war with Mexico to do it, snatched California and the New Mexico territory. Then Polk retired and promptly died, his mission complete. Whether one ranks him as one of our most successful Presidents depends on how one feels about American imperialism, or perhaps whether one believes that, upon reflection, acquiring California was a mistake.

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Boy, One Of Our Most Deified Presidents Sure Agreed To Some Bone-Headed Ideas…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

As I have mentioned here many times, there is no way around ranking Franklin Roosevelt as one of our top five Presidents: his handling of World War II from the U.S. perspective and his leadership during the Great Depression, which didn’t so much fix the economic problems as raise the public’s faith in our system of government when it easily could have collapsed, are so important and momentous that all of his missteps and blunders pale by comparison. Nevertheless there were many of these, some quite damning.

I only recently learned about one of them that I somehow had missed all these years—probably because our historians have been and are still overwhelmingly left-biased and inclined towards hagiography where FDR is concerned.

Henry Morgenthau Jr. was Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury from 1934 until FDR’s death. He was a trusted advisor whose scope of interest and influence far exceeded the usual territory of his office. In 1944, Morgenthau got far over his metaphorical skis and proposed a scheme for the post-war world, specifically, as he said, “I want to make Germany so impotent that she cannot forge the tools of war – another world war.”

You know, because that strategy worked out so well the first time, after World War I…

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Now THIS Is Trump Derangement…

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Maybe it would be therapeutic for January 6 to be officially declared “Trump Derangement Victims Day,” in honor of all the otherwise sane and reasonable Americans who were driven to fear, loathing and madness by the very exitsnace of Donald J. Trump. The villains who spread this destructive contagion are too many to list, although our lame duck, dying brain POTUS just awarded several of them citizen honors. Meanwhile, if we had such a holiday, those unfortunate sufferers could use the day therapeutically, and let all of their hate out like a primal scream.

I came to this conclusion after reading the following yesterday on a legal blog that I usually admire:

“There are arguments to be made that many who participated in the insurrection of January 6, 2021 thought they were being patriots defending a nation from a stolen election, even though it was a nonsensical lie fed to the willingly delusional by an amoral narcissist who wasn’t strong enough to endure the humiliation of failure. There are arguments to be made that some sentences imposed on J6 insurrectionists were excessive, even though capital police were beaten and bloodied. But there are no arguments that January 6th didn’t happen as it was seen, experienced and suffered that day, as Trump gleefully watched. Yet here we are, Trump re-elected and promising to pardon or grant clemency to his Hallelujah chorus. Here we are, Trump re-elected and urging the jailing of the January 6th House commission for prosecuting him too well, pretending that most of his own administration’s testimony against him didn’t exist or was somehow the result of tampering by then-Congresswoman Liz Cheney, of the radically progressive Cheney clan. Here we are, Trump re-elected as the former vice president acknowledges that the president demanded he violate the Constitution or be hung by Trump’s most violent sycophants…As his own Republican toadies scampered for cover and condemned his call to “fight like hell” that brought the worst of his followers to the second storming of the Capital, Trump relished in the glory of people willing to kill, or die, for him, not because he cared a whit for any of them but because he cared too much for himself…if you have chosen fantasy over reality, and want desperately enough to believe in the absurd excuses constructed around January 6th, so be it. Time will judge Trump’s administration. Time will judge Trump, the vulgar, deceitful, amoral, narcissistic ignoramus. But January 6th happened.

Yikes.

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Ethics Hero: VP Kamala Harris

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Harris has had, in my estimation, several opportunities to earn Ethics Hero status here in the past, and whiffed every time. Yesterday, she achieved that status by the easiest route imaginable: by simply doing her job, indeed one of the very few requirements of a job that has always been under-burdened by official duties.

Vice-President Harris officiated as the two houses of Congress met in joint session to formally count the Electoral College votes for President and certify the results. “The votes for president of the United States are as follows,” Harris declared, as she was bound to, after each state’s totals were read. “Donald J. Trump of the state of Florida has received 312 votes.” When Republican members of Congress rose to their feet to applaud, Harris managed to look non-committal, even if she might have been thinking, “Fuck you all.”

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Curmie’s Conjectures: What the Hell Was ESPN Thinking?

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

by Curmie

[My post yesterday about ESPN’s decision to ignore the pre-game events at the Sugar Bowl attracted almost no commentary at all, but it did prompt this installment of Curmie’s Conjectures, which makes it all worthwhile. This is cross-posted on Curmie’s blog; once again, I encourage everyone to visit it regularly. Curmie doesn’t post often, but as Spencer Tracy says of Katherine Hepburn in 1952’s “Pat and Mike,”…what’s there is cherce.” —JM]

There’s a lot of brouhaha at the moment, including Jack’s apt commentary, about ESPN’s coverage of Thursday’s Sugar Bowl game in New Orleans, or rather of the pre-game.  The game was postponed for a day in the wake of the horrific events of early New Year’s morning only a few blocks from the Superdome, where the game was played.

So why is the photo for this piece of a baseball game?  Allow me to explain.  I have been a fan of the New York Mets since 1962, the year of the team’s inception.  I can tell you with certainty that the biggest home run in Mets history had nothing to do with their World Series championship years of 1969 or 1986.  It was Mike Piazza’s two-run, come-from-behind, homer in the bottom of the 8th inning in Shea Stadium on September 21, 2001.  That’s what you see above.

It was the game-winning hit and it came against the best team in the division, the arch-rival Atlanta Braves.  Vastly more importantly, it was during the first major league game to be played in New York after the attacks of 9/11.  And, for the first time in a week and a half, the locals had something to be happy about.  That night, anyone who wasn’t a Braves fan per se (and probably a fair number who were) needed that home run.  Not just Mets fans.  Not just New Yorkers.  Americans.

We’d been told the everything was going to be OK, but we needed more.  David Letterman going back on the air helped, but everything was still somber.  The Bush jokes that would cement the resolve—you don’t joke about the President if your country is in crisis—were to come later.  But first, there was Mike Piazza.  Sometimes, sports matter.

In the winter of 1980, I lived in a small town in rural Kentucky.  I remember watching the “Miracle on Ice” Olympic hockey game on the TV.  After the incredible upset of the powerhouse Soviet team by a bunch of American college kids, after the most famous line of Al Michaels’s career—“Do you believe in miracles?  Yes!”—there was a lot of noise outside, loud enough to be not merely audible but intrusive in my second-floor apartment.

Outside, there was a string of cars with horns blaring; their windows were down (even in Kentucky it can get a little nippy in February), with a bunch of mostly teenagers leaning out and chanting “USA!  USA! USA!”  I’m willing to bet that I was one of fewer than a dozen people in the entire town who’d ever seen a hockey game live, but here were these kids who didn’t know a poke check from a blue line getting excited about the Olympic semi-final.

In the midst of the Iranian hostage situation, with the country only showing the slightest signs of emerging from the energy crisis (is it any wonder the incumbent President was routed in the election a few months later?), we—again, all of us—needed something to grab ahold of, something to suggest that we’d weather the storm. There have, of course, been other moments that transcended sports: Jesse Owens dominating at the Berlin Olympics in 1936, Joe Louis knocking out Max Schmeling in the first round, Billy Miles appearing from nowhere to win the 10,000m in the Tokyo Olympics; we might even add Spiff Sedrick’s improbable sprint to glory in the women’s rugby 7s in this year’s Olympics. But this year’s Sugar Bowl was most like that baseball game in September of 2001: what made it special wasn’t who won, or what political statement could be wrangled out of the victory, but the mere fact that the game went on was a sign of determination and perhaps a little bit of defiance.  If you’re a Georgia fan, you’re disappointed that your team lost, but you were reminded before kickoff that there are more important things than football games. 

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Before We Close the Book On Jimmy Carter…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“Cynical Publius,” a practicing lawyer and retired Army colonel who writes under that name at The Federalist, couldn’t stand the Carter record airbrushing flooding in the media yesterday and was moved to post this on his lively Twitter/”X” account:

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Silly Ethics Dunce: NBC Sports

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

It almost seems absurd to mention this trivial ethics misdemeanor when discussing a soulless, greedy TV network that happily promotes a sport that sends young men onto its fields to maim their brains so team owners and sponsors can make millions. Yet somehow this level of moronic rote wokeness deserves our attention.

Here is part of what the election last month was a reaction against. Let’s hope NBC and the equally disgusting National Football League are tardy enough reading the metaphorical room that they both lose audiences, popularity and millions. I know it won’t happen. But I’m a dreamer…

Jayden Daniels, the quarterback of the Washington Commanders, set a record last night as he led his politically correctly named team into the NFL play-offs while breaking the old record for most rushing yards by a rookie quarterback. A Washington QB had held the previous record too: Robert Griffin III ran for 815 yards in his rookie year (2012), and Daniels topped him with 830.

So NBC quickly put that graphic up that you see above, but not before blotting out the name of Griffin’s team when he was playing…the REDSKINS!

NBC had to protect the delicate sensibilities of Sunday night football fans who thrill to see players break bones and crack skulls, making sure that their viewers wouldn’t suffer psychic trauma by being reminded that the Commanders once had a racist name, or so the Mad Left decreed. Thus it made sense to a news organization that it should misrepresent history, tamper with evidence and sacrifice truth to satisfy progressive crazies—you know, like it has done regularly for years now—and as PBS was doing tonight until I couldn’t stand watching any more, running a documentary about what a great President Jimmy Carter was.

Nah, airbrushing away a team name on a jersey is petty censorship. I know it. I also know that a news organization that will bother lying about something nobody cares about won’t blink at lying when it advances its own interests.

Addendum to “The Jimmy Carter Assessment”: Bless Those Libertarians’ Hearts!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Libertarians contribute significantly to civic policy discourse by staking out an extreme position that serves as useful ballast against extreme statists from the other side of the spectrum. I often use Reason, which I used to subscribe to in its print format, for ethics topics. Unfortunately, libertarians constantly erode their credibility by taking absurd positions, arguing for open borders, wanting to legalize heroin, and mu particular favorite, arguing that the U.S. should have sat out World War II.

Today the libertarians, or at least too many of them (one would be too many) are arguing that Jimmy Carter was an excellent President. Yes, I am really reading that. Here is Reason quoting Gene Healy, a vice president at the Cato Institute, with favor:

“Abroad, he favored diplomacy over war, garnering the least bloody record of any post–World War II president. So what if he didn’t look tough, or even particularly competent, as he did it? A clear-eyed look at the Carter record reveals something surprising: This bumbling, brittle, unloveable man was, by the standards that ought to matter, our best modern president.”

Because, you see, the standards that “ought to matter” mean that reducing the American Presidency in influence, prestige and power is a good thing. So what if Americans have no respect for the office or the man holding it? So what if the new template for future leaders is fecklessness and apathy? What “matters” is that if chaos reigns all over the globe, the United States canconfidently eschew all responsibility because no one we care about gets hurt.

Heck, if diminishing the Presidency is an accomplishment, Joe Biden must stand as one of the all-time greats!

I have tried arguing with libertarians periodically over the years, and found them to be cultists, like climate change fanatics, abortion activists and the Trump Deranged. Reality doesn’t impose on their beliefs at all, at least not the libertarians who have swallowed the whole philosophical enchilada. It is useful to have vocal individuals who express principled objections to government over-reach, but when they declare weak leaders good leaders and praise passivity as an absolute virtue, such voices disqualify themselves as serious advocates.

In short, if Jimmy Carter was our best modern President, I’m Woody Woodpecker.

The Jimmy Carter Assessment [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Jimmy Carter, the 39th President, finally died at the age of 100 in, of course, Plains, Georgia, which no one ever heard of before he arrived on the national scene. Ethics Alarms last discussed Carter here, in the fifth chapter of its inquiry to name the Worst President Ever. Carter made the final field that was announced this month, along with Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Woodrow Wilson, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and, last but not least, Joe Biden.

I doubt there are many strong arguments that can be made to assert that Carter doesn’t belong there, just as there is little doubt that he doesn’t deserve the booby prize. Carter’s Presidency stands as testimony to the foolishness of the belief that good intentions mitigate failure. Carter supporters’ argument for his Presidency ultimate devolves into rationalizations such as #3A,  The Road To Hell, or “I meant well,” #14, Self-validating Virtue, #38, The Miscreant’s Mulligan or “Give him/her/them/me a break!,” #18, Hamm’s Excuse, or “It wasn’t my fault,”and the dreaded #22, Comparative Virtue, or “It’s not the worst thing.” Given its crippling leftward bias, the mainstream media is tying itself into knots today to make Carter out to be something he was not, an effective President.

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