History

The Big Lies Of The “Resistance”: A Directory, Updated (11/29/2023)

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

[When I wrote the previous post adding Big Lie #10 to this compendium, I decided to read the whole thing again. That occasioned numerous updates (and repaired typos, of course.). I found it worth reading again; heck, I wrote it, and I had forgotten most of it. So I’m re-posting the revised version now…]

Introduction

The “Big Lie” strategy of public opinion manipulation, most infamously championed by Adolf Hitler and his propaganda master Joseph Goebbels, has, in sinister fashion, become a routine and ubiquitous component of the Left’s efforts to remove President Donald J. Trump from office without having to defeat him at the polls, and subsequently after his defeat, to attempt to prevent him from defeating a hopelessly inept failed successor. One of the most publicized Big Lies, that Trump had “colluded” with the Russian government to “steal” the Presidential election from Hillary Clinton was eventually exposed as such by the results of the Mueller investigation, the discrediting of the Steele Dossier, and the revelation that Democrats (like Adam Schiff) and the mainstream news media deliberately misled the public. and Democrats, with blazing speed, replaced it with another Big Lie that there was a “Constitutional crisis.” I could have added that one to the list, I suppose, but the list of Big Lies is dauntingly long already, and this one is really just a hybrid of the Big Lies below.

Becoming addicted to relying on Big Lies as a political strategy is not the sign of ethical political parties, movements, or ideologies. Perhaps there is a useful distinction between Big Lies and “false narratives,” but I can’t define one. Both are intentional falsehoods designed to frame events in a confounding and deceptive manner, so public policy debates either begin with them as assumptions, thus warping the discussion, or they result in permanent bias, distrust and suspicion of the lie/narrative’s target. For simplicity’s sake, because I believe it is fair to do so, and also because “Big Lie” more accurately reflects just how unethical the tactic is, that is the term I will use.

Big Lie #1. “Trump is just a reality TV star.”

This is #1 because it began at the very start of Trump’s candidacy. It’s pure deceit: technically accurate in part but completely misleading. Ronald Reagan was subjected to a similar Big Lie when Democrats strategically tried to denigrate his legitimacy by  referring to him as just an actor, conveniently ignoring the fact that he had served as Governor of the largest state in the nation for eight years, and had split his time between acting and politics for many years before that, gradually becoming more involved in politics and public policy. (Reagan once expressed faux puzzlement about the denigration of his acting background, saying that he thought acting was an invaluable skill in politics. He was right, of course.)

In Trump’s case, the disinformation was even more misleading, He was a successful international businessman and entrepreneur in real estate, hotels and casinos, and it was that experience, not his successful, late career foray into “The Apprentice” (as a branding exercise, and a brilliant one), that was the basis of his claim to the Presidency.

The “reality star” smear still appears in attack pieces, even though it makes even less sense for a man who has been President for four years. The tactic is ethically indefensible . It is not only dishonest, intentionally distorting the President’s legitimate executive experience and success,  expertise and credentials, it is also an ad hominem attack. Reality TV primarily consists of modern freak shows allowing viewers to look down on assorted lower class drunks, vulgarians, has-been, exhibitionists,  idiots and freaks. Class bigotry has always been a core part of the NeverTrump cabal, with elitist snobs like Bill Kristol, Mitt Romney, the Bushes, and George Will revealing that they would rather capitulate to the Leftist ideology they have spent their professional lives opposing (well, not Mitt in all cases) than accept being on the same team as a common vulgarian like Donald Trump. Continue reading →

You Know The Headline On The Previous Post? Forget It. Denver Just Proved That The Great Stupid Has Civilization By The Throat [Revised]

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

Well that was certainly a short-lived ray of hope! Just as some states are realizing that one idiotic woke education policy is ruinous and needs to be reversed, Denver has come up with something infinitely worse.

Get ready for “language justice.”

The Denver school district is adopting a “language justice” policy as a “long term goal.” This astoundingly stupid movement encourages non-English speaking conceivably to the extent of allowing students to use their native language in school. Teaching English to non-English speakers, you see, is oppressive and rooted in racism.

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Post-Thanksgiving Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 11/24/2023: Who Expected Anti-Semitism And Trump-Derangement To Translate Into Anti-Thanksgiving Assaults?

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

As usual now, much of the mainstream media spent Thanksgiving and the days leading up to the holiday exploiting the opportunity to bash the tradition, the holiday, and the United States. There was special urgency this time: the negative emphasis on the unique American holiday was galvanized by the anti-Jewish/anti-Israel/pro-Hamas narrative a disturbing proportion of the American Left has embraced in its opposition of Israel defending its right to exist.

“De-colonization” is the 2023 buzzword. “Native Americans=blacks, Palestinians, and other victims whites and the United States. And, again as usual, we were told that it was our duty to ruin a warm, family-oriented, non-partisan tradition by using it to harangue other family members about the evils of Israel, the Supreme Court, Republicans and Donald Trump.

The Left’s growing anti-Thanksgiving tradition also seemed to gain intensity because of the widespread panic over polls showing Trump increasing his lead in voter support over the President as the 2024 election gets closer. Here’s a nice, unbiased cartoon from the Boston Globe, for example, simultaneously equating Trump with those evil colonizing Pilgrims and the turkey with foolish Americans who don’t know enough to avoid voting for a dangerous leader:

It was called “the Last Thanksgiving.” I really question this strategy. The Left is gambling that being the party of anti-Americanism is a winning approach. In fact, they are somehow turning Donald Trump into Ronald Reagan, the leader who saw the U.S. as a “shining city on the hill.” That seems especially foolish framing when Biden’s weak Presidency is already reminiscent of Jimmy Carter’s, complete with American hostages being held by radical Islamist terrorists. Good plan!

Here are some highlights of the anti-Thanksgiving craziness:

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The Worst President Ever? Part 5.

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

One might view posting this today, on the anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, as being in questionable taste. I would argue that it is the perfect day to consider the legacy of President #35, John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1961-1963).

For JFK was saved from historical infamy by moral luck, once for certain, and maybe twice. The first was during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a culmination of blunders that could have started World War III and would have, if a less rational Soviet leader had been Kennedy’s adversary. The second was the assassination, recalling snide comments by various wags that the early deaths of Elvis and Truman Capote were “good career moves.” Kennedy’s death transformed him into an icon, frozen in youth and vitality, a brilliant leader whose death caused darkness to fall. In truth, Kennedy’s three years in office were marked by few successes and serious mistakes that outlived him, like his continuing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. In an era in which the news media were less inclined to keep secrets for a President, JFK might have been impeached. His obsessive adulterous escapades endangered national security: among his many conquests were a Mob moll and an Israeli spy.

Kennedy cannot be fairly judged one of the worst Presidents, however, because he filled the crucial role of President as Symbol of America and the living flag as well or batter than all but a few modern Presidents, in a small group that includes FDR, Eisenhower, Reagan, and Obama. This, plus the fact that he had less than three years to add something positive beyond the Peace Corps and the space program to his legacy, takes him out of the Worst President race.

Verdict: DISQUALIFIED.

#36, Lyndon Baines Johnson (1963-1969), also doesn’t make the cut. For all the pain and national scarring the Vietnam War inflicted, Johnson didn’t start it (or end it), and few Presidents, maybe none, would have been able to successfully negotiate the cultural A-Bomb of the Sixties.

Anyone who doubts LBJ’s effectiveness should listen to the archived phone tapes of his personal maneuvering, cajoling and threatening former Congressional associates to get his Civil Rights bill passed. For some reason historians like to say that Kennedy, if he lived, would have signed a similar law; that’s a dubious assumption. Kennedy probably wouldn’t have won in 1964 by a landslide: Nelson Rockefeller might have been the next President, and it was the Southern Democrats, Johnson’s cronies, who were the main obstacles to civil rights. You don’t have to agree, with the benefit of hindsight, with all of “The Great Society” to agree that Johnson was one of our most skilled Presidents, though a flawed and unlucky one.

Verdict: DISQUALIFIED.

Now, at last, we come to a genuine contender for Worst President Ever: Richard Milhous Nixon, #37 (1968-1974). Even he’s problematic: although he is the only President so far who would have been legitimately impeached and convicted, Nixon was, before the Watergate conspiracy, another very skilled and effective President. He was one of our smartest White House residents (but then so was Wilson), and understood the office from the start as few have. Nixon had many important policy achievements as well, and those accomplishments came in the teeth of strong opposition and bias from the news media (though nothing as extreme as Republican Presidents have faced in this century), and almost unanimous hate from an entire generation.

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A New Zenith For The Great Stupid! Now We’re Told To Use A Roman Emperor’s “Preferred Pronouns”…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Hello! My name is Elagabalus, and my pronouns are She, Her, and “Nutcase”…

Boy, every time I think The Great Stupid has peaked, something like this arrives…

The North Hertfordshire Museum has decreed that the 3rd-century AD Roman emperor Elagabalus should be referred to as “she” to be sensitive to his pronoun preferences.

The museum in Hitchin, England owns a coin minted during the reign of Elagabalus and includes it in LGBT-themed displays. (Don’t ask me why a museum has LGBT-themed displays). Because the Roman historian Cassius Di wrote that Elagabalus was “termed wife, mistress and queen, ” told one lover, “Call me not Lord, for I am a Lady,” and allegedly inquired about how he could be outfitted with female charms, the museum is persuaded that he would consider himself “transgender” in 2023. (As well as really, really dead.) Prior to this Great Stupid brainstorm by the museum, historians have assumed that Dio was just smearing the predecessor of his patron, Emperor Severus Alexander, who gained power after the mad Elagabalus, was assassinated.

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Revisiting 2005’s “Good Night And Good Luck”: Yikes!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Re-posted below from July, 2019 is an Ethics Alarms essay about the ironic and troubling thoughts George Clooney’s film “Good Night And Good Luck” triggered when I viewed the 2005 film for the first time.  I watched it again last night, and its commentary on politics, journalism, the McCarthy era and television struck me as even more relevant than it did the first time. I highly recommend seeing the film again, and definitely watch it if you missed the movie entirely.

The last line in the post was “I think George Clooney might want to watch it again.” Now, maybe not: I think George is smart enough to  understand its resonances now.  July 2019 was in the middle of the Trump Presidency, and the McCarthy era’s political use of imaginary conspiracy theories to impugn and destroy its enemies seemed uncannily similar to the Russian collusion witch hunt recently completed to try to bring down President Trump. But 2019 was before the Biden administration, and its concerted effort to use any means necessary to make the U.S. a single -party nation. McCarthy wanted to the public think the Democrats were surreptitiously advocating Communism as he and his allies employed totalitarian tactics to prevail. Today it is the Democrats who have chosen to make the public fear the other party, only in 2023, they really are embracing Marxism, and use Orwellian tactics to cast Republican as aspiring fascists. Continue reading →

The Worst President Ever? Part 4.

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Surprise! You thought I had forgotten, didn’t you? It has been a long time, almost a year, since the last installment of this series, inspired by President Joe Biden’s spectacularly awful, divisive, incompetent and destructive first two years. Now it’s approaching three, and Biden looks worse than ever. I admit to being paralyzed after considering Woodrow Wilson in Part 3. It is hard to imagine a President being much worse than Wilson, which is remarkable, considering how long Democratic historians maintained the myth that he was one of our greatest chief executives. This fills me with hope that eventually history’s verdict on Barack Obama will align itself with objective reality, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Since May on 2022, when I began this inquiry, the performance of President Biden has only worsened. Nonetheless, he still has more than a year to go, and that’s assuming that he does not get re-elected to a second term. To be fair, I should have divided this competition into two divisions, one for single term Presidents (or less), and the other for those who served more than one term. After all, Woodrow Wilson, the current head of the leaderboard, couldn’t possibly have done as much damage if he hadn’t been re-elected in 1916 with the now mordantly ironic slogan, “He Kept Us Out of the War.” I must admit, however, Biden has done a spectacular amount of harm in less than three years. It’s impressive.

Following Wilson came a President now routinely ranked as one of the worst, Warren G. Harding, #29 (1921-1923), and he didn’t make it through even three years, dying suddenly of cardiac arrest at the youthful age (by today’s Presidential standards) of 57. I began my lifetime fascination with the Presidency reading that Harding was tied with Buchanan and Johnson for the bottom of the barrel. The record just doesn’t support that assessment. While Harding was alive, he enjoyed more popularity than all but a few Presidents while in the White House. His low ranking is attributable to first, the eruption of several scandals, notably the Teapot Dome scandal, in his cabinet after his death, and second, the sordid accounts for Harding’s remarkable sexual profligacy and adultery. While no historian has asserted convincingly that Harding was himself corrupt or complicit in the scandals, he did appoint the crooks, and was accountable. Like Donald Trump, he appointed many cronies and allies who lacked the character and qualifications for public service. There was plenty of smoke that a more attentive POTUS would have sniffed out. As for the sexual misconduct, presumably post-Harding revelations about Bill Clinton and Jack Kennedy should place this in proper perspective. As several commentators have noted in recent decades of Harding historical rehabilitation, many of his accomplishments are impressive.

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The New York Times Opinion Editor Sympathizes With This Formula For Analyzing The Issues In the Hamas-Israel War: Emotion, Emotion, Emotion

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

And ignore facts, history common sense and reality. Like so much of the Hamas-Israel Ethics Trian Wreck, this car has value unrelated to the war itself. Now we can understand why the Times op-eds are the way they are.

The Times just published a column by a recent edition to its stable of extreme woke pundits. Lydia Polgreen opines, in “This Photograph Demands an Answer,” that the news media should bombard the public with photographs that will flood readers’ minds with emotion, making rational, objective analysis difficult or impossible.

Many people may want to look away, to see the world as they prefer to see it. But what should we see when we see war? What should war demand all of us to see and understand? Given my experience in war zones, it is a rare thing for a violent image to stop me in my tracks. But I believe that this is an image that demands to be seen….And so I ask you to look at these children. They are not asleep. They are dead. They will not be part of the future. But know this: The children in the morgue photo could be any children. They could be Sudanese children caught in the crossfire between two feuding generals in Khartoum. They could be Syrian children crushed under Bashar al-Assad’s bombs. They could be Turkish children who died in their beds when a shoddily constructed apartment block collapsed upon them in an earthquake. They could be Ukrainian children slain by Russian shells. They could be Israeli children slaughtered in a kibbutz by Hamas. They could be American schoolchildren gunned down in a mass shooting. These children are ours.

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Food Ethics, Pre-Thanksgiving Installment: Sweet Potatoes and Yams

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Oh, fine, I’m an idiot. Just in time for what promises to be gloomy and lonely Thanksgiving, I learn that all these many moons I have thought yams and sweet potatoes are the same vegetable. It turns out that they are not; they aren’t even related. The reason is flat-out multi-continental language malpractice.

No wonder nobody seems to know this: here’s the explanation that Food Channel expert Alton Brown unearthed in a video posted here. Let me try to summarize:

Sweet potatoes are not merely potatoes that happen to be sweet. They are actually the root of a vine in the morning glory family, and morning glories are a kind of lily.  Christopher Columbus brought some back to Spain in 1493; they were called “batatas” by the Indians who lived in the Greater Antilles Islands. The Spanish called them “patatas.” Here’s Fred and Ginger performing a Gershwin song  about such matters…

Where was I? Oh, right, sweet potatoes…The Spanish king served a sweet potato pie to King Henry VIII at some royal event and he loved it (of course, he loved just about anything he could put in his mouth) , he took some vines back to England. There patatas became “potatoes.” (Cue that song again…). Continue reading →

How Can Any Democrat, Never Mind Anyone Else, Trust House Minority Whip James Cliburn (D-S.C.) After This Op Ed?

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Heck, how can anyone trust a political party that would install such a calculated liar (or, in the other Hanlon’s Razor alternative, an utter moron) who would issue such cynical, obvious, “it isn’t what it is” piece of unconscionable gaslighting?

Clyburn has one of the most damning Ethics Alarms dossiers of any member of Congress, which is impressive, considering what an awful collection of corrupt and destructive incompetents “low-information voters” have elected to govern us. He, or more likely a soulless aide—the best defense Clyburn could offer for this thing is that he allowed his name to be attached to it without reading what it said—gave the ludicrous primal scream against democracy to CNN, which dutifully published it instead of handing it back laughing and saying, “Good one. Now where’s the real op-ed?”

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