Incompetent Elected Officials

Wait, WHAT? The White House Is Caught Rigging Biden’s Press Conference To Make Him Appear More Competent Than He Is, And The Washington Post’s Analysis is “Everybody Does It” And “Republicans Pounce”?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!

How do these people look at themselves in the mirror without retching?

Paul Farhi was the veteran Democratic operative (aka a MSM reporter) the Post assigned to spin this scandal. “President Biden was photographed holding a notecard Wednesday, revealing the stage managing behind many political media events,” he began. Oh, the euphemism is “stagemanaging,” is it? What the “notecard” was is called a cheat sheet, and what it signifies is cheating, and lying to the public.

The card in Biden’s hand—he’s so diminished mentally that he can’t even cheat competently–read “Question # 1,” and directed the President to call on Los Angeles Times reporter, Courtney Subramanian. The card included Subramanian’s name, a pronunciation guide, her affiliation and a headshot. The card also included Subramanian’s question: under the heading “Foreign Policy/Semiconductor Manufacturing,” the card read, “How are YOU squaring YOUR domestic priorities — like reshoring semiconductors manufacturing — with alliance-based foreign policy?”

Biden called on her for the first question, she asked what she was supposed to, and Biden offered an uncharacteristically detailed and coherent response. Farhi’s spin: “White House press office employees have routinely polled reporters about their priorities and interests in advance of news meetings to anticipate what their boss might be asked while on the podium. The practice is also common in news conferences with Cabinet secretaries, such as the secretary of defense and secretary of state.” Fine, that’s their job. And it is an ethical reporter’s job to say, “Sorry, you’re just going to have to find out when I’m called on.” Sure Presidential aides want to brief POTUS on what the likely topics are. Rigging the questions in advance, however, is something completely different. It’s called cheating. This is particularly true in this case, when much of the pubic is concerned about the President’s cognitive abilities. Presenting him as able to whip off a detailed answer to a reporter’s question when in fact he was tipped off and the reporter was in cahoots with the White House is pure deception.

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Oh For God’s Sake…A 6th Grader Should Know This Law Is Unconstitutional, And The Texas Senate Doesn’t? [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Texas Senate Bill 1515, introduced by Sen. Phil King (R-Weatherford), an ethics dunce, is on the way to the Texas House for consideration. Given the degree of right-wing derangement in Texas, a fair match for Woke Derangement in California, New York and other states, it’s a better than an even bet that public schools in Texas will be required to prominently display the Ten Commandments in every classroom starting next school year. Next up, I suppose, will be a Texas law requiring citizens to say the Lord’s Prayer every morning and to pass a yearly Bible literacy test or be forced to wear sack cloth and ashes. There is no chance, zip, nada, uh-uh, zippo, that the Ten Commandments law survives a legal challenge. None. That is not, as Mona Lisa Vito states under oath in “My Cousin Vinny,” an opinion. It’s a fact.

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Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month: Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY)

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Just listen to this guy! He’s just screaming and ranting, in a public place, adding no substance other than signalling to whatever apathetic, emotion-driven, lizard-brained fools who would vote for such a hack that he wants Congress to “do something” about gun violence. He isn’t persuading, he isn’t making a case, he isn’t informing anyone. This is a member of the U.S. Congress exhibiting the same level of social skills and civility as the typical Jerry Springer guest. He should be disciplined under the House ethics code for violating the very first rule on the list:

“A Member, Delegate, Resident Commissioner, officer, or employee of the House shall behave at all times in a manner that shall reflect creditably on the House.”

He won’t be, of course. Democrats won’t hold him to a higher standard than a reality show contestant in a staged meltdown because they have no integrity or shame, and Republicans don’t want to be accused of being racists, or, as Jamaal would doubtlessly say “caring more about some damn rule than they do about dead kids!”

Br proud, 16th District! Take a bow, Democrats, progressives and anti-gun rights voters! This idiot is your representative. Res ipsa loquitur.

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An Unethical Quote Spectacular!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

There are a lot of really unethical people saying some astounding things lately. Such as…

1. Incompetent Elected Official Of the Month Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-TX), who completely beclowned herself in the The House Weaponization Subcommittee examination of Twitter Files heralds Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger. She was determined to discredit them for daring to reveal the efforts by her party and its allies to bury the Hunter Biden laptop story and censor critics, and apparently did no research into te topic of the hearings at all, announcing that she didn’t know what “a substack” was and showing complete ignorance regarding Bari Weiss. (Ah, if only she read Ethics Alarms!) Meanwhile, all of a sudden Democrats oppose journalists’ desire to protect their sources.

2. Not included in the video above was an offensive question by serial unethical House hack Debbie Wasserman Schulz, the former DNC chair who rigged the 2016 primaries for Hillary Clinton. She accused Matt Taibbi of profiting from authoring the “Twitter Files” reports, implying that he was motivated by persoanl profit, saying: “After the ‘Twitter Files,’ your followers doubled … I imagine your Substack readership … increased significantly because of the work that you did for Elon Musk.”

These people really lash out when they’re exposed, don’t they?

3. Over to the Republican side: Jenna Ellis, one of President Trump’s lawyers in the post-election push to have the results examined, admitted in Colorado Bar disciplinary proceedings that she deliberately engaged in the following misrepresentations “for selfish reasons”:

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Unethical Quote Of The Week: Jill Biden

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

“Ridiculous…“We would never even discuss something like that. How many 30-year-olds could travel to Poland, get on the train? Go nine more hours, go to Ukraine, meet with President  Zelensky? So, look at the man. Look what he’s doing. Look what he continues to do each and every day.”

—First Lady Jill Biden, after being asked during a CNN interview about Nikki Haley’s proposal that politicians over the age of 75 undergo mental competency testing.

In related news, Lance Armstrong declared that testing competitive cyclists for doping is “ridiculous,” and O.J. Simpson opined that DNA technology was “ridiculous.”

Fortunately, all we need to do to determine the competency of First Ladies is to analyze a cretinous answer like that one to a flamingly easy question. We are looking, Jill. And it’s not pretty. The words the First Lady was searching for were not “ridiculous,” but responsible, necessary, and “a matter of common sens

The United States has already courted disaster with Presidents continuing in office after their mental faculties have been damaged or declined. President Pierce was impaired by grief, crippling depression and alcoholism during his single term in office, which occurred at a crucial point in the deadly run-up to the Civil War. Woodrow Wilson infamously remained President after being crippled by a major stroke. There is evidence that President Reagan’s cognitive stability was declining during his presidency.

As for Jill’s human meal-ticket, no modern President has shown so many signs of mental decline and confusion, and this frightening development has come after a career in public office unmarked by intellectual acuity at its zenith. Every responsible Presidential candidate should be required to pledge to take such competency tests on a regular basis and agree to resign from office once a thorough, non-partisan diagnosis confirmed by multiple physicians concludes that there is significant cognitive decline.

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Ethics Dunce: President Biden

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

I suppose the theory is that if you can’t do anything else right, grandstand. From a political perspective, that’s not a stupid theory for a US President (which is why you don’t see Sidney Wang from the Ethics Alarms clip archive), but it is a desperate one, and it only is responsible leadership if there is no substantive risk of something really bad happening to the country you are leading as a result. Biden’s been grandstanding a great deal of late, such as shooting down harmless balloons like crazy to make up for the fact that he let the Chinese spy balloon travel across the U.S.  For perspective, reasonable estimate is that it cost about $2 million to shoot down the Lake Huron balloon that may have cost as little as $12, but to be fair, the Biden Administration is operating under the assumption that money doesn’t matter, so this doesn’t qualify as “harm” in their eyes.

The much ballyhooed “surprise” trip to Ukraine for photo ops, however, had an undeniable potential downside: the President could have been killed. As he “stepped out into the streets of Kyiv”  the New York Times reported, “an air-raid siren sounded, a dramatic moment that underscored the investment the United States has made in Ukraine’s independence.” Thanks, Times flaks, good pro-Biden spin and propaganda there! You’re doing your job, or at least what fake journalists today consider their job. Nevertheless, let me return to reality:  the “dramatic moment” underscored how stupid and reckless Biden’s visit was. Continue reading →

Presidents Day Hangover, Jimmy Carter Edition: A Popeye, A KABOOM! And An Epic Comment Of The Day. Part I, The Popeye And The KABOOM!

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

I was going to post Steve-O-in NJ’s record-setting ( over 4700 words!) essay on the presidency of Jimmy Carter yesterday, and should have, but trips back and forth to the hospital (my Dad had his fatal heart attack in the midst of doing that, and now I know why) interfered with my best laid plans.

Then, last night, I read a head-exploding column by progressive Democratic historian, Kai Bird. His piece is an “it isn’t what it is” classic, as he tries to argue that Carter wasn’t the crummy President he unquestionably was. Bird can’t really do it, since the facts are so damning, the best he can muster being, “His presidency is remembered, simplistically, as a failure, yet it was more consequential than most recall.”

That evokes another terrible rationalization (“It isn’t what it is,” Yoo’s Rationalization, is #64 on the list), #22, The Comparative Virtue Excuse, or “There are worse things,” of which “It could have been worse” and “It’s not as bad as you think” are sub-categories. This statement, however, demanded a “Popeye” (“It’s all I can stands, ‘cuz I can’t stands no more!”):

“Jimmy Carter was probably the most intelligent, hard-working and decent man to have occupied the Oval Office in the 20th century.”

Well, KABOOM!

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Sometimes Republicans Really DO “Pounce,” Or Stop Making Me Defend Joe Biden!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Speaking in Maryland, President Biden fumbled while extolling Maryland’s first black governor’s days playing wide receiver on the Johns Hopkins football team.

“You got a hell of a new governor in Wes Moore. He’s the real deal and the boy looks like he can still play,” Biden said. “He’s got some guns on him!”

Obviously the President was showing his racist streak, right? After all, calling a black man “boy” is a racist slur. Watch “In the Heat of the Night.” Thus conservative websites, blogs, pundits and news sources have feigned horror, and produced condemnations of Joe’s words–racist dog whistles!—worthy of Charles M. Blow or Joy Reid.

Oh, I get it, I do. This is a genuine IIPTDXTTNMIAFB (Ethics Alarms initials for “Imagine if President Trump did X that the news media is accepting from Biden.”) if there ever was one. The news media’s double standards in regard to Trump and Biden are ridiculous: Donald Trump would be called racist if he referred to a black 7-year-old as a “boy.” In all matters, actions, words and policies, Trump is presumed to have a malign motive, because he’s baaaaaad. Joe, in stark contrast, is always given the benefit of the doubt because he is obviously a nice guy who has never had a mean thought in his life. (He’s not a nice guy, but never mind; I assume you know that.) The conservative and Republican pouncers are just trying to inject some equity into the “gotcha!” wars. “Sauce for the goose” and all that.

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Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month: George Sen. Emanuel Jones

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

George Santos broke this Ethics Alarms distinction last year, but I still can’t let Georgia State Senator Emanuel Jones get off scot free. I’m not even awarding him “Incompetent Elected Official of the Month” for smearing Clarence Thomas as an “Uncle Tom.” That slimy tactic is well-worn, far from original, and a lazy cliche, as stupid and wrong as it is. MSNBC’s Joy Reid, among other hacks, has used it. The theory seems to be that there is an ongoing race war between blacks and whites, so any black appointed or elected official , including a judge, who doesn’t defy the ethical obligation to serve the whole public and not abuse their position by favoring his own race is an “Uncle Tom.”

I really can’t designate a black state senator “Incompetent” for saying that, since apparently a large number of black voters approve of such divisive and dastardly rhetoric. They are the true incompetents.

No, Jones is more incompetent than the others who have used this lazy slur. Oh, he’s a racist, all right: in the same speech that got him today’s distinction, he said,  “Y’all just don’t get it. And I don’t expect people of non-color to get the sensitivity that we feel.” Nice. But he really scored with his casual admission that he didn’t know the origin of the term “Uncle Tom” or whether Uncle Tom was a real or fictional character. Continue reading →

Gee, Could Massachusetts Democrats Come Up With A MORE Unethical Bill?

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

[You know,  writing this blog of late has made me feel like I’m Uma Thurman in “Kill Bill I,” fighting O-Ren Ishii’s (Lucy Liu) personal army, The Crazy 88’s. The ethics stories just get worse and worse, especially from the world of government and politics, and they keep on coming. The mission of this blog is to, in some small way, try to encourage ethical analysis and sensitivity in the culture of a nation uniquely dependent on it, and all I see is the ethics in our culture, especially in the professions (which exist to be trusted) and our institutions (all of them) deteriorating rapidly and seemingly deliberately. The effort feels hopeless. Maybe a better analogy than The Bride’s mass battle in “Kill Bill I” is Viking king Ragnar (Ernest Borgnine) fighting gleefully and futilely in a pit full of hungry wolves in “The Vikings.” After all, Uma wins her fight. But Ethics Alarms is not directed by Quentin Tarantino.

What prompts these musings? This item from the State of my birth: Massachusetts Democrats have offered a bill giving prison inmates reduced sentences when they donate their kidneys and bone marrow. State Reps. Carlos Gonzalez and Judith Garcia came up with this monstrosity, which aims to create “The Bone Marrow and Organ Donation Program” within the Massachusetts Department of Corrections. Prisoners would be able to shave between 60 days to a year off their sentences. 

Talk about killing bills—I’d love that bill as a hypothetical in an ethics class, though I would think it might be too easy for anyone old enough to vote. In The Guardian’s story, we read that the bill “has raised ethical concerns.” YA THINK??? Continue reading →