History

Why Am I Not Surprised That The Trump Administration Didn’t Follow The Law Requiring Reporting On Foreign Gifts?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

(It’s a rhetorical question.)

Federal law requires each government department and agency  to submit a list to the State Department of gifts over $415 received from officials of foreign governments. “The measure is intended to ensure that foreign governments do not gain undue influence over American officials,” says the New York Times, but that’s silly: there are a thousand ways that foreign nations can and do try to insert quid pro quos into relations with our government officials that don’t involve jewel-encrusted scimitars, busts of Winston Churchill or pairs of golden marmosets. Gifts are ham-handed way to bribe anyone, but never mind: the law addresses that old “appearance of impropriety” thingy.

So I pronounce myself shocked–shocked!—to learn that the Trump administration left office without providing the State Department with an accounting of the gifts former President  Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and other White House officials received from foreign governments in 2020. Continue reading →

Wait…WHICH Side Of The Ideological Divide Is A Threat To Democratic Institutions Again?

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

This is so outrageous that even after three cups of coffee I don’t know what to call it. Pathological hypocrisy? Playing with metaphorical matches in a kerosene factory? Prime Great Stupid? Help me out here.

In reaction to a relatively obscure 5-4 Supreme Court decision yesterday, numerous woke journalists and pundits went bonkers and argued that President Biden should just defy the ruling, you know, like Andrew Jackson did when he supposedly said, after the Court (correctly) ruled against his position in Worcester v. Georgia, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!”

More about that later.

The Supreme Court yesterday temporarily reinstated a Trump environmental policy that made it harder for states to block projects that could cause water pollution. The opinion, on the so-called “emergency docket” that allows the Court to rule on urgent matters without hearing an oral argument, was unsigned and without any written explanation (so much for Justice Barrett’s “Read the opinion” remarks) prompting Chief Justice John Roberts to join the court’s three left-leaning justices in criticizing the majority’s use of the emergency docket, or as critics call it, the shadow docket.” The particulars of the case don’t matter; what does matter is the Left’s nascent totalitarians in the news media calling for direct defiance.

Continue reading →

The Weird Pledge Of Allegiance Mystery: There’s Something Unethical Here, But Who Knows What?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The Pledge of Allegiance is an endlessly fascinating bit of Americana. A powerful snippet of poetry, an assertion of patriotism, a throw-back to simpler times, an anachronism, a culture war battleground: whatever it is, the Pledge is important. For me, it was the first thing I memorized after “Now I lay me down to sleep…” My lifelong interest in and obsession with the American Presidency was probably seeded when my first grade class stood every day to recite the Pledge while looking at the American flag with a framed photograph of President Eisenhower next to it. Now we learn that there is a controversy over who wrote it, and it is quite a tale.

The New York Times, reminding us what an excellent job it can do when it isn’t engaged in partisan spin and propaganda, broke the story yesterday.

Continue reading →

Andrew Sullivan Finally Can’t Take It Any More: Ethics Quote Of The Day

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“This is the poisonous heart of CRT: that white people, by virtue of merely existing, are all morally problematic and always will be. Even if all the systems have been repealed. Even if you’d never racially discriminate yourself. Even if you spent your life fighting racism. That is why Bond called the Abolitionist movement indistinguishable in terms of its racism from the KKK! Why? Because whites are only ever whites…Absorb that for a moment. This foul race essentialism, this view of white Americans as a single, undifferentiated blob of hate existing through the centuries as a force for the oppression of non-whites is simply the inverse of the old racism. It’s replacing hatred of blacks with hatred of whites; it’s replacing discrimination against blacks with discrimination against whites and Asians and others. It’s being used to make even more money for rich white people, to provide some elite whites with a weapon to destroy their career rivals, and to help build a new racial spoils system that leaves any notion of colorblindness or individual rights behind.”

—Blogger Andrew Sullivan, after being metaphorically mugged on comic Jon Stewart’s new TV show on an episode titled “The Problem With White People,” where Stewart and another guest called him a white supremacist.

If Sullivan’s substack newsletter were Ethics Alarms, his intense post called “The Trouble With Jon Stewart” would be tagged as a “Popeye,” as in “That’s all I can stands, ‘cuz I can’t stands no more!”

Andrew is at heart a moderate conservative and an intellectual. He started playing a progressive on TV when he decided to elevate being gay above all of his other priorities and values, but he wore the mask uncomfortably. A wonderful writer, Sullivan had never aimed both barrels of his solid knowledge and logic at the George Floyd Freakout and the resulting rush to embrace anti-white racism in the schools, private sector and government, but apparently his mugging at the hands of Stewart, and especially Stewart’s woke guest Lisa Bond, a white woman who runs an organization called Race2Dinner that charges other white women $2,500 per dinner to be harangued for their racism, was a tipping point.  (You gotta admire her entrepreneurial brilliance for that one! P.T. Barnum would be proud of her.)

As Bruce Willis would have said to Sullivan in the actor’s better days, “Welcome to the party, pal!” Continue reading →

Tuesday Ethics Afterthoughts, 3/29/2022: A Cheat Sheet, Mask Mayhem, And More

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

(THERE IS NO GOOD GRAPHIC FOR “AFTERTHOUGHTS”)

The 29th is another of those ill-starred days in U.S. ethics, topped off in 1973 by the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, the half-way war that was an ethics train wreck for decades. Two years earlier, on the same date, Lt. William L. Calley was found guilty of premeditated murder by a U.S. Army court-martial at Fort Benning, Georgia. Calley, a platoon leader, had led his men in a massacre of Vietnamese civilians including women and children on March 16, 1968. Ten years before Calley’s conviction, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of espionage for their role in passing atomic secrets to the Soviets during and after World War II. They were executed in 1953, a flashpoint in the schism between the American Left and Right that still is a sore point. (Ethel appears to have been a genuine villain.)

1. I thought this was a hoax. It’s not, unfortunately: someone got a photo of the cheat cheat for “talking points” that President Biden was holding when he massacred his explanation for his Russian regime change outburst in an exchange with Peter Doocy.

This does not fill me with confidence. You? The ethical value at issue is competence.

2. The propaganda and misinformation continues. Though some recently departed here could never grasp it, honest and trustworthy newspapers shouldn’t be publishing falsity and partisan propaganda in house opinion pieces. That’s when the opinion is offered using misleading or incomplete facts—deceit–and the New York Times does it almost every day. I can’t trust a group of editors who permit that. Examples:

It’s incredible how quickly we’ve normalized the fact that the last president tried to retain power despite losing the election and that a mob he incited stormed the Capitol. Many people took part in the effort to overturn the election — among them, we recently learned, the wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice, who hasn’t even recused himself in cases about the attempted coup.

The President in question wanted to challenge the results of an election he believed was the result of illegal manipulation, and as President, he had a duty to do that. I know Krugman isn’t a lawyer, but incitement is a term of art and a crime, and Trump did not “incite a mob” by addressing a crowd. Saying Justice Thomas “hasn’t even” recused himself because of the completely legal communications of his wife falsely implies that doing so is required or the justification for him to do so is undeniable. It isn’t. Editors should not allow such deliberately confusing and misleading opinion material Continue reading →

Is It Fair To Say Kamala Harris “May Be The Dumbest Person Ever Elected Vice President In American History”?

/ Jack Marshall / 55 Comments

[ Forgive me for using the above clip in the jokey context in which it was presented: It was the best I could find on YouTube, meaning that I could embed it easily. ]

During remarks she made in Sunset, Louisiana this week on a stop to highlight the value of bringing high-speed broadband internet to communities, Harris got herself stuck on the phrase “the importance of the passage of time” in between her usual inappropriate giggles. Then, today, yet another Harris staffer fled the coop, moving former Speaker Newt Gingrich to say,

“You know, he [Biden] may or may not have cognitive decline problems at his age, but at her age, she’s just dumb. Let’s be clear, Kamala Harris may be the dumbest person ever elected vice president in American history and that’s why people keep resigning.If you were her national security advisor, and you were competent, and you’d worked hard, and you knew what you were doing, and you watched her in Poland break up laughing when she’s asked about Ukrainian refugees, you had to feel a sense of total humiliation. So I’m not surprised that that particular advisor resigned because it’s very clear that Kamala Harris should never, ever be allowed to leave the country.”

Is that a fair thing to say?

Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Month: Prof. Michael Ignatieff

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“Lincoln should be with us all these days especially since ‘malice toward none’ has been replaced by malice toward all, as if in our ideological arrogance we have forgotten that neither God nor justice is necessarily on our side.”

—-Philosophy scholar Michael Ignatieff, Ph.D. professor at  Central European University in Vienna, Austria, in his recent book, “On Consolation,” his examination of how figures in history, literature, music, and art searched for solace while facing tragedies and crises.

In a chapter devoted to Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, delivered in March 4,1865, near the end of the Civil War and with his own assassination six weeks away, Ignatieff explains that Lincoln concluded that “neither side could ever know what God intended by the fiery trial,” so “the victor had no right to raise the sword of vengeance while the defeated had the right to claim the dignity of honorable defeat. Humility about the ultimate meaning of the war, in other words, created the space for mercy.” Continue reading →

I Would Say That The “Doomsday Clock” Has Finally Lost All Integrity, But It Never Had Any In The First Place

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I hate to repeat myself, I really do. Unfortunately, unethical people keep doing the same damn things over and over while the rest of the public has short memories. I could write this post almost entirely by cutting and pasting from a 2017 post I already re-posted once, in 2020, but it has more ethical implications for us now.

Last week, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that it will not move the time on the infamous “Doomsday Clock” closer to “midnight,” which symbolizes curtains for civilization. This, said the Washington Free Beacon, raised “questions about the practices of an institution several legacy media outlets refer to as scientific.” A whether the clock would move forward after citing criteria the organization used in the past, such as armed conflict involving countries with nuclear weapons, a spokesman from the group said the time would remain unchanged and declined to answer any follow-up questions about how the heck that could be the case.

After all, last week President Biden was openly talking about World War III. Russian president Vladimir Putin has put his nuclear arsenal on “high alert,” and NATO has mobilized its response force for the first time since its inception. The West has installed crippling sanctions against Russia, which Putin, who is alleged to have gone nuts, has pronounced as acts of war. So why is the clock frozen in place when one would think it would be speeding terrifyingly forward?

Shut up! These are scientists! Why don’t you trust them? They’re smarter than you, and they know best! Science denier! Now put your damn mask on and trade your car in for a bicycle. Continue reading →

The Quest For The Perfect IIPTDXTTNMIAFB Continues, And Joe May Have Given Us A Winner!

/ Jack Marshall / 76 Comments

The issue is mainstream news media double standards, which are unethical in general and especially revolting in the news media’s protective stance toward President Biden no matter how badly he screws up in contrast to its coverage of Donald Trump, who could literally do no right in their jaundiced eyes. Yesterday Biden handed the news media a flaming IIPTDXTTNMIAFB, the convenient Ethics Alarms initials for “Imagine if President Trump did X that the news media is accepting from Biden.”

One of the most damaging and despicable Big Lies pushed relentlessly by the “resistance”/Democratic Party/ MSM alliance from the moment Trump was elected in 2016 was that he was a racist. If you asked an adherent of this slander to name any evidence, the “best” they could come up with was inevitably that Trump had vocally embraced the Birther smear about Barack Obama. But this only stands as proof that Trump is an asshole and a troll, about which there has never been any doubt. He made similar claims about Ted Cruz in order to derail his efforts to beat Trump for the 2016 GOP nomination. Trump plays dirty against all rivals. He’s an equal opportunity jerk, but he’s not a racist (or a white supremacist, a related Big Lie).

But the idea of planting these idea was “priming”: make sure “Trump is a racist” is sitting around rotting in the brains of gullible Americans, and let confirmation bias do the rest. So imagine if Trump had ever looked out over a Fort Worth, Texas, crowd at a VA clinic, and, referring to three Texas members of Congress who looked like Rep. Colin Allred (D), Rep. Marc Veasey (D), and Rep. Jake Ellzey (R) (above) who were in attendance, said,

“The three congressman you have here, two of them look like they really could and did play ball, and the other one looks like he can bomb you.”

Continue reading →

Michael West’s Alamo Diary Concludes…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

On this date in 1836, the Battle of the Alamo and the courageous 12 day stand that preceded it began its journey into memory. The day before, March 6, near dawn, saw the fortress fall in a bloody but hopeless battle in which the Texans were overwhelmed in less than an hour.

Here is Texan and Ethics Alarms stalwart Michael West’s account of the final days, March 5 and March 6:

March 5, 1836

After the previous day’s war council (on March 4), Santa Anna was content that his glorious assault would occur. But evidently, according to several reliable Mexican sources, a civilian woman from the town, who had retreated to the Alamo with the Texans, made it out of the Alamo during the night and gave dire information to the Mexicans. Evidently the Texan garrison was increasingly despondent. According to the lady who escaped, Travis and the garrison had discussed their options and one of the more forceful arguments made was that they should consider surrender.

Santa Anna wanted none of this, and accelerated his assault time-table (which he hadn’t necessarily meant for the 6th of March but for the 7th or even the 8th).

The Mexican soldiers would have received their orders in the morning and spent the rest of the day making preparations. There was little physically they had to do other than check the locks of their muskets, ensure they had the requisite number of extra flints (which would occasionally break in battle – testing the coolness of even the most experienced soldier), or assist in the production of several ladders Santa Anna had commanded each battalion to have prepared.

No, most of the preparation would have been mental. A deeply Catholic people, the Mexican soldiers would have spent their energies on prayer and confession. New soldiers would have been nervous about how they would perform under fire, simultaneously trying to hide their nerves from the experienced soldiers, who would have recognized the unique challenge before them. Almost none had been asked to climb tall walls after traversing several hundred yards under fire against an enemy who had, in the previous 12 days, proven that their rifled muskets out-ranged the standard Mexican issue musket by nearly 300% Continue reading →