Journalism & Media

20 Ethics Observations On The President’s Charge That Obama Tapped His Phones

/ Jack Marshall / 49 Comments

In the first week of March, in the midst of the over-blown flap regarding Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ two meetings with the Russian ambassador, President Trump issued arguably his most explosive  tweet yet:

“How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!.

Later, he  tweeted,

“I’d bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!”

It has been more than a week, and we know only a little more about what prompted this extraordinary accusation than we did then. However, there are some relevant ethics point to be made. Here we go…

1.  It is irresponsible and unpresidential to issue tweets like this. It is also unfair. If the Trump administration wants to make a formal complaint, charge or indictment, or announce an investigation, it should be made through proper channels, not social media. That stipulated, he will not stop doing this, and at some point we will have to accept it. Is this how Presidents communicate? It is now.

2. Thus the tweet is unethical even if it is true. However, the fact that it is unethical, or that Trump the Liar sent it, doesn’t mean it is untrue. An astounding number of pundits and journalists have made exactly that assumption, proving their bias against the President and their knee-jerk defensiveness regarding former President Obama.

3. The tweet cannot be called a “lie,” and anyone who does call it a lie based on what is known is revealing their confirmation bias.

4. One more point about the tweet itself: the fact that it has a typo and the level of articulation of the average 9th grader is itself an ethics breach. The President should not sanctify carelessness, or seem to embrace it. He is a role model.  Nor should a significant charge be written in haste, as this obviously was.

5. There seems to be a significant possibility that the President was trolling. Having had enough of the months long, absolutely evidence-free news media and Democrat innuendos that his campaign was coordinating election tampering with the Russians, he may have decided to make a sensational, unsubstantiated charge of his own to get the Russian hacking speculation off the front pages. If it was trolling, it was excellent trolling. The McCarthyism purveyors  deserved it; the accusation was a deft tit-for-tat,  one of the President’s favorite rationalizations.

6. As an example of what Trump has been and is being subjected to, we have Rep. Keith Ellison, vice-chair of the DNC.  He told Alisyn Camerota on CNN’s “New Day last week,”

“This is stunning when you think about it. Far worse than Watergate, when you believe a hostile foreign power engaged in an attempt, and with the collusion of the sitting administration to manipulate an election.”

By sheerest moral luck, Camerota that day was feeling ethical, so she actually corrected a Trump-basher from her own party, said, “Well you don’t know that,” and pointed out that there is no evidence of collusion.

“I’m not saying there was collusion, I’m saying those meetings indicate that there could be, and I think that needs to be investigated,” Ellison then said, immediately after saying there was collusion.

These are awful, vicious, conscience- free people who subcribe to total political war and the ends justify the means. They are trying to bring down an elected government without winning an election. Even that does not justify treating them unethically, BUT… Continue reading →

Catching Up On “Instersectionality,” And Finally Paying Attention

/ Jack Marshall / 175 Comments

There are more than 22,000 tags used here, even if you eliminate the duplicates due to my typo problem, and still  “intersectionality” is not among them. I have seen the term, mostly recently, but only in contexts that led me to dismiss it as leftist, scholarly jargon, the kind of word radicals throw around to confuse their opposition and make people think they are intellectual when they are really arguing nonsense. I wasn’t wrong: it is one of those words. Still, it is a useful one, because it helps explain several phenomena of great importance, which can be collectively described as the increasing totalitarian tilt of the political left, especially since the election of Donald Trump. I should have realized the importance of the word long  ago and investigated: I apologize. Bias makes me  stupid too.

Over at New York magazine, Andrew Sullivan had one of his lucid moments—when he can bypass his anger at anti-gay attitudes (the bias that makes HIM stupid), Sullivan can be brilliant—, and delivered a perceptive essay about “intersectionality,” beginning with the recent disgrace on the Middlebury College campus, where a student protest designed to prevent sociologist Charles Murray from speaking turned into a violent riot, injuring a professor. Do read all of Sullivan’s article, but here are some key passages:

[W]hat grabbed me was the deeply disturbing 40-minute video of the event, posted on YouTube. It brings the incident to life in a way words cannot. At around the 19-minute mark, the students explained why they shut down the talk, and it helped clarify for me what exactly the meaning of “intersectionality” is.

“Intersectionality” is the latest academic craze sweeping the American academy. On the surface, it’s a recent neo-Marxist theory that argues that social oppression does not simply apply to single categories of identity — such as race, gender, sexual orientation, class, etc. — but to all of them in an interlocking system of hierarchy and power. At least, that’s my best attempt to define it briefly. But watching that video helps show how an otherwise challenging social theory can often operate in practice.

It is operating, in Orwell’s words, as a “smelly little orthodoxy,” and it manifests itself, it seems to me, almost as a religion. It posits a classic orthodoxy through which all of human experience is explained — and through which all speech must be filtered. Its version of original sin is the power of some identity groups over others. To overcome this sin, you need first to confess, i.e., “check your privilege,” and subsequently live your life and order your thoughts in a way that keeps this sin at bay. The sin goes so deep into your psyche, especially if you are white or male or straight, that a profound conversion is required….

Like the Puritanism once familiar in New England, intersectionality controls language and the very terms of discourse. It enforces manners. It has an idea of virtue — and is obsessed with upholding it. The saints are the most oppressed who nonetheless resist. The sinners are categorized in various ascending categories of demographic damnation, like something out of Dante. The only thing this religion lacks, of course, is salvation. Life is simply an interlocking drama of oppression and power and resistance, ending only in death. It’s Marx without the final total liberation.

It operates as a religion in one other critical dimension: If you happen to see the world in a different way, if you’re a liberal or libertarian or even, gasp, a conservative, if you believe that a university is a place where any idea, however loathsome, can be debated and refuted, you are not just wrong, you are immoral. If you think that arguments and ideas can have a life independent of “white supremacy,” you are complicit in evil. And you are not just complicit, your heresy is a direct threat to others, and therefore needs to be extinguished. You can’t reason with heresy. You have to ban it. It will contaminate others’ souls, and wound them irreparably….Murray’s old work on IQ demonstrates no meaningful difference between men and women, and Murray has long supported marriage equality. He passionately opposes eugenics. He’s a libertarian. But none of that matters. Intersectionality, remember? If you’re deemed a sinner on one count, you are a sinner on them all. If you think that race may be both a social construction and related to genetics, your claim to science is just another form of oppression. It is indeed hate speech….This matters, it seems to me, because reason and empirical debate are essential to the functioning of a liberal democracy. We need a common discourse to deliberate. We need facts independent of anyone’s ideology or political side, if we are to survive as a free and democratic society. Trump has surely shown us this. And if a university cannot allow these facts and arguments to be freely engaged, then nowhere is safe. Universities are the sanctuary cities of reason. If reason must be subordinate to ideology even there, our experiment in self-government is over.

This outburst was apparently too much for Andrew, his old libertarian/conservative persona emerging full-force after a long hiatus, so his piece suddenly shifts into a standard issue anti-Trump rant. It’s fascinating to see, because Andrew apparently hates the President so much that he can’t perceive that the same antipathy created by “intersectionality” that he rebuts regarding Murray (after all, Sullivan is friends with Murray), applies to the President (whom he detests) as well. The proof is how Trump’s misogyny and opposition to illegal immigration has led the Left to presume that he is racist, classist and homophobic as well. He’s not. But, to quote Sullivan against himself, “But none of that matters. Intersectionality, remember? If you’re deemed a sinner on one count, you are a sinner on them all.”

Thus Sullivan pivots to blaming all of the social and political tilt he correctly deems as dangerous on Donald Trump, and in doing so, he becomes the partisan hack he so often appears to be: Continue reading →

Now THIS Is As Close To Genuinely Frivolous Lawsuit As You Are Likely To See…And Naturally, It Is An Attack On The President

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Publicity stunt? Whatever would make you think this lawsuit is a publicity stunt???

As we have discussed here before, though we often complain of frivolous lawsuits,  even the worst law suits seldom meet the technical standard of what is “frivolous.”

The D.C. bar’s ethics rules state that…

A lawyer shall not bring or defend a proceeding, or assert or controvert an issue therein, unless there is a basis in law and fact for doing so that is not frivolous, which includes a good-faith argument for an extension, modification, or reversal of existing law.

This provides what I sometimes call “stupid lawyer” protection, on the theory that a stupid lawyer may have a sincere belief that an absurd action has a chance of prevailing, thus avoiding the rule’s rock bottom standard for “frivolous.” The recently filed lawsuit in Washington, D.C. against President Trump and the local Trump hotel, however, may be that rarest of legal birds, the truly frivolous lawsuit.

The married couple that owns  the Cork Wine Bar in Washington claim that the Trump International Hotel and the  restaurants similarly located in the Old Post Office building have an illegal advantage over other nearby establishments, like theirs, because of the association with the President.  Essentially the law suit claims that it’s all so unfair.

In addition to the res ipsa loquitur factor, which is to say that the lawsuit screams abuse of process to harass the President, we also have these suspicious factors: Continue reading →

Boy, I Bet That Cruel, Xenophobic, Trump Administration Will Deport This Poor Kid…

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

None of my captions for this photo of Oliver Funes-Machado are in good taste. Pass.

I don’t know about you, but I’m thoroughly sick of the daily media stories about the hardship of illegal immigrant families being “torn apart” when a parenty finally is held accountable for breaching our borders and breaking U.S. laws. Here is a refreshing story about a likely deportation that everyone can get behind.

I hope.

ICE officials in North Carolina confirmed that Oliver Funes-Machado is an illegal immigrant, and I bet the news media makes sure the “illegal” is included when reporting on his case, if they do.  The 18-year old has been charged with cutting off his mother’s head with a butcher knife.

This is unethical, by the way.

Originally from Honduras, Oliver is accused of repeatedly stabbing his 35-year-old mother before beheading her. He then walked outside, holding her head in one hand and the knife in the other, as he waited for Franklin County deputies to arrive. He  called 911 to report the crime, just like a good citizen should .

Well, that’s a mitigation, I guess.

The teen told the 911 dispatcher that he killed his mother “because I felt like it.”

I don’t think Honduras is sending us their best people.

I’m sure he is a Dreamer, but I still think he should be deported.

Ethics Dunces In Arms: Gloria Steinem And The New York Times Demonstrate How “The Star Syndrome” Works

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Gloria 2017 (right), with her ghostwriter, Gloria 2007 ( left)

Last week, Gloria Steinem authored an op-ed in The New York Times headlined, “Women Have Chick-Flicks. What About Men?”.

It was standard issue male-bashing; biased and badly researched junk, but more interestingly, at least half of it was ten years old, substantially lifted from a piece Steinem wrote for the Women’s Media Center website in 2007. This kind of lazy self-plagiarism is a major ethical breach that respectable publications do not suffer gladly, at least when the miscreant isn’t a feminist icon that their editors worship, or at least feel has earned immunity from those annoying ethical principles lesser mortals have to deal with.

As an aside, it really is a silly op-ed, not worthy of publication the first time, much less plagiarizing now. Some excerpts:

I was on a flight from New York to Seattle when a long delay on the tarmac prompted the airline to offer us a free movie. As the flight attendant read the choices aloud, a young man across the aisle said, “I don’t watch chick flicks!” I knew what he meant, and so did the woman sitting next to me. A “chick flick” is one that has more dialogue than car chases, more relationships than special effects, and whose suspense comes more from how people live than from how they get killed.

Translation: “Men are morons, women are sophisticates.” No generalizations or stereotypes there…

Think about it: If “Anna Karenina” had been by Leah Tolstoy, or “The Scarlet Letter” by Nancy Hawthorne or “A Doll’s House” by Henrietta Ibsen — if “The Invisible Man” had been “The Invisible Woman” — would they have been hailed as classics? Suppose Shakespeare had really been the Dark Lady who some people still think he/she was. I bet most of her plays and all of her sonnets would have been dismissed as ye olde Elizabethan chick lit and buried until they were resurrected by stubborn feminist scholars of today.

Two words: Prove it. Since  very few  great female authors were writing similarly brilliant literature in those periods, Steinem’s bet is rigged. Where are those buried woman-authored masterpieces that stand up as the equals of “King Lear” and  “War and Peace”? I’ll make another bet: I bet if those works had been written by women, we’d know it, and they would be just as admired and immortal as the works authored by men. Has Gloria heard of Wuthering Heights? Jane Eyre? Frankenstein? Pride and Prejudice? Has she heard of Jane Austen?

But I digress.

The original article published referred to that airplane flight as taken by Steinem  “recently.” That word was taken out after Gloria’s cheat was discovered, and this “Editor’s Note” was added: Continue reading →

Gee, Would It Really Have Been So Hard For Democrats And The News Media To Just To Admit That Rep. Richmond’s ‘The President’s Female Counselor Looks Like She’s Used To Giving Blow-jobs’ Joke Was Wrong, Period? Apparently So. Wow.

/ Jack Marshall / 49 Comments

Great apology there, Cedric. Ugh.

Why do I think this story is a big deal? I think it’s a big deal because it exposes–

…the white-hot hatred of Republicans by so much of the Left, on the level we have seen with Sarah Palin being attacked for running for office while being a mother, and Martin Bashir on MSNBC wishing that someone would defecate in her mouth, to the extent that they are literally willing to abandon and reject their own alleged core principles…

…calling into question whether they even are core principles, rather than calculated pandering to receptive groups, and thus..

…raising the specter of epic hypocrisy, which is a lack of integrity and honesty.

Then there is this: I have a brilliant younger sister. She is a lawyer, a litigator, a singer, and actress, the hardest working person I know, and someone who has always been able to match or surpass me in every field. Yet I have watched as her achievements have occurred in the teeth of a stiff wind of sexist bias, often making her unhappy, angry, resentful and stressed when she deserved so much better. Growing up with her, it never occurred to me that this kind of prejudice existed until I was the captain of the high school chess team, and saw how the other teams’ players—all male: our team had the only female players (3) in the Greater Boston chess league— were openly contemptuous that a “girl” would presume to challenge them. It was great: my sister slaughtered them. She is a merciless chess player, a killer, and didn’t merely beat her male opponents but humiliated them. She had the best record on the team. Yes, gender bias is personal with me. I hate it.

To briefly recap: Cedric Richmond, an African American  Democratic Congressman, leeringly implied, as a speaker at an event, that KellyAnne Conway’s posture in a photo taken in the Oval Office, “really looked kind of familiar in that position there. Don’t answer — and I don’t want you to refer back to the 1990s.” It was a reference to fellatio, and the old, old slur against successful women that they “suck their way to the top.” This was obvious and blatant, and yet when conservatives and Republicans–and only conservatives and Republicans—protested, Richmond, incredibly, denied that his comments had any offensive content or intent. He is a liar.

Then, in the wake of  stunning silence of any leader of the Democratic Party, major feminist, major news organizations and liberal pundits, CNN’s Jake Tapper pressed Rep. Richmond’s leader in the House, Nancy Pelosi, to condemn his remarks. She refused, and also lied. One prominent Democrat without portfolio or post, Chelsea Clinton, did condemn that “joke,” which hardly salvages the party’s integrity and honor. Her mother? Madeleine Albright? Elizabeth Warren? Donna Brazile? Michelle Obama? Senator Gillibrand? Maureen Dowd? Rachel Maddow? Anyone? Hello? Bueller?

Crickets. Yet it was undeniable, as one pundit noted, that a Republican who made such a comment about Valerie Jarret would have been “run out of town.” Wrote The Federalist’s Bethany Mandel yesterday,

This “on her knees” comment from a sitting Democratic lawmaker was largely ignored by the liberal media and those who consume it. This comment is just one of many recent incidents of sexism aimed in Conway’s direction, justified because she’s a traitor to her gender, as many feminists have claimed; a female Uncle Tom. Instead of being applauded for her groundbreaking work as a campaign manager on the biggest upset political campaign in American history, Conway is fodder for attacks on her looks and sexuality, often at the hands of individuals who claim to be feminists.Our president may have a history of misogyny, but it’s becoming increasingly clear many of those in the resistance against him are merely fair-weather feminists: happy to wage or at best ignore attacks on women based on their sex because they think it’s fair to attack the president at any cost.

Bingo.

Now comes the next chapter, as those who have exposed their deep hate and corrupting hypocrisy try to worm their way back into the public trust. Continue reading →

Double Standards, Hypocrisy, News Media Bias, “Bias Makes You Stupid” And Cognitive Dissonance—This One Has Them All! Thanks, Ben Carson!

/ Jack Marshall / 155 Comments

Here come some dreamy immigrants, longing to be free!

HUD Secretary Ben Carson is, as we learned last year, an idiot, or perhaps and idiot savant. He’s also a Republican and currently in the Trump Administration. Clearly, anything he says is likely to be  ridiculous, and probably offensive. Barack Obama, on the other hand, is brilliant. Brilliant, I tell you! He is also idolized by journalists—he sends a thrill up Chris Matthews’ leg!—, and, indeed in part because he is a Democrat and a liberal. Obama is also, of course, worshiped by blacks, intellectuals and progressives. Carson is black too,  but he is a Republican and a conservative, so the black thing is cancelled out.

Now, what happens when Carson and Obama say exactly the same thing?

While speaking to a group of employees at his department on Monday, Carson said:

“There were other immigrants who came in the bottom of slave ships, who worked even longer, even harder, for less, but they too had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great grandsons, great granddaughters might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.”

What an idiot! “Immigrants?” mocked the NAACP. The Washington Post, New York Times, the Hill, Politico, and others headlined Carson’s comments, so bizarre, stupid and insensitive were they. Listen to this dummy! And Trump appointed him as a Department head! “Ben You’re A Fool! Slaves were not Immigrants!“ headlined the Miami Herald.

Now, a while back, when the brilliant, progressive, President Barack Obama ,said this about slave ships:

We say it so often, we sometimes forget what it means — we are a nation of immigrants. Unless you are one of the first Americans, a Native American, we are all descended from folks who came from someplace else — whether they arrived on the Mayflower or on a slave ship, whether they came through Ellis Island or crossed the Rio Grande.

Continue reading →

Shaun King: Activist Ignoramus

/ Jack Marshall / 49 Comments

Deep thoughts from Shaun King…

Activists who have neither knowledge nor understanding of the government, the Constitution, civics and basic political realities should be accorded no respect, attention or influence. Since their pronouncements and assertions are based on bad information and misconceptions (and perhaps stupidity), who cares what they think about an issue? The news media should ignore them; politicians should ignore them; everyone should ignore them. Well, except to mock them. They deserved to be mocked.

This brings us to Shaun King, the Black Lives Matter activist and writer—and the fact that someone as ignorant as King can make a living as a writer is disturbing in itself.  He is on the staff of The New York Daily News as the “senior justice writer.” I’ll remind you of this later.

King just delivered his signature significance self-exposé via his favorite mode of communication, social media, in this case, Twitter. This means that many thousands of his followers, as well as the news media, now have incontrovertible evidence to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he knows less about the country he lives in and its government than we should expect from a 7th grader.

Behold!

Yesterday, King announced on Twitter what he called “serious but wild” questions. Sit down for this. I mean it.

His first:

1. Can the people of the United States somehow hold a vote now, or next year, to oust Donald Trump? Like a recall of some sort?

His second…

In laymen’s terms, what would it take for the USA to pass a Constitutional Amendment for a President Recall like CA has for a Governor?

Uh oh…I was afraid of this…

There goes the head…

Continue reading →

The Unmasking Continues: Kristof’s Unethical Tweet, And Pelosi’s Hypocrisy

/ Jack Marshall / 75 Comments

Let’s start with the tweet yesterday from Times columnist Nick Kristof:

kristoff-tweet

No, Nick, mustn’t do that. While a paper can print illegally procured documents that are leaked by others, it cannot encourage and call for illegal conduct. That’s conspiracy. Tax returns are private, and releasing them is a federal crime. With this tweet by its agent, The New York Times is soliciting a crime, and one against the President of the United States no less

By the time the Democrats, progressives and their confederates in the news media have completed their freakout, no one but fools and those in denial will have failed to recognize their exposure as frauds, whose posturing as supporters f proceess, democracy, fairness, decency and the rule of law was a cynical illusion since all they really believe in is “the ends justify the means.”

This is depressing and tragic, but it is also frightening. How thin the patina of principle is with these ideologues! Why would anyone trust them ever again?

Then there was Nancy Pelosi’s performance on CNN yesterday, disgracing herself and her party, as usual.

Asked by Jake Tapper to do what should have been easy for a proud feminist who had her female members grandstand at the President’s speech last week by wearing suffragette white: condemn the ugly remarks of Democratic Congressman Cedric Richmond, who implied that White Haous aide Kellyanne Conway was used to performing fellatio, Pelosi said,

“Well, I wasn’t at the dinner. I’m just finding out about this. But the fact is, I’m still in sort of a state of, what is going on here that the person who occupies the White House is a person who was on that Hollywood video that said the crude things he said about women.You all are criticizing Cedric for something he said in the course of the evening. And he maybe should be criticized for that. I just don’t know the particulars. But I do everyday marvel at the fact that somebody who said the gross and crude things that President Trump said — wouldn’t even be allowed in a frat house — and he’s in the White House.”

Ugh. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Update On The Jeff Sessions-Russian Ambassador Fiasco: A Confederacy Of Ethics Dunces”

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

1984, Washington State, USA --- A fierce bear growls and bares its teeth. | Location: Washington, USA. --- Image by © Michael T. Sedam/CORBIS

Glenn Logan undertook the herculean task of reading and critiquing one of the New Yorker’s endless partisan essays, this one by Ryan Lizza, who has foun himself in the Ethics Alarms bomb-sights before. It’s a masterful job by Glenn, and nicely dissects a persistent and contrived Democratic excuse for Hillary Clinton blowing the election, thus triggering one of the most amazing instances of self impeachment—by her party and supporters–in world political history.

Here is Glenn’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Update On The Jeff Sessions-Russian Ambassador Fiasco: A Confederacy Of Ethics Dunces”:

I read the article, which confirmed my suspicions of almost everything coming from The New Yorker and similar left-leaning news sources — that they accept the idea, as yet still both unproven and highly suspicious, that the Russians were working to get Trump elected.

This is exactly where bias always leads; once you have evidence of a conclusion you want to reach, you stop looking for other possible explanations.

There is no real information in this article worth knowing. It tells us Democratic senators are all wound up about possible Russian interference in the election, but we knew that. It mentions every Democrat’s favorite Republican — John McCain — and tries very hard to lead us to believe that all the Democrats’ worst fears about Russia and Trump are not just true, but being hidden, apparently by both the Obama and Trump administration, although for different reasons.

In other words, this article is a conspiracy theory. It offers nothing new, no penetrating analysis or new revelations. It describes, in very long and unnecessarily complex style meant to appeal to “intellectuals,” Putin and Russia as using a hacking strategy as a prong in geopolitical disinformation campaigns, and using Obama’s own feckless foreign policy to annex Crimea and generate a plebiscite so fast that American leadership’s heads were still spinning in the opposite direction.

But this is exactly what I would be doing in Russia’s place if I were a despot like Putin. They are opponents, and are trying to weaken our country just as we tried for years under Reagan to weaken them. If you want to shape the world, and Putin clearly does, you use information to shape perception so that when you do use force, it won’t be universally condemned. Continue reading →