Now that I think about it, nobody gets shot in Pixar movies. I wonder if movies about violence vigilantes need to be regulated…
He just couldn’t help himself. Learning of the horrible Batman theater massacre in Aurora, Colorado, ABC reporter Brian Ross got on the air and reported a possible “tea party link” with the killer, James Holmes, and if you don’t think this sent a thrill up his leg, I have some gold mine shares to sell you. Anything to smear conservatives: why was he looking at tea party web pages, any more than PETA sites, or Parcheesi fan sites? Because, you see, the tea parties are violent—don’t you remember? They inspired that guy to shoot Gaby Giffords! Where else would you expect to find a madman killer?
It was fantasy, of course, and Ross and ABC duly apologized, but never mind: it worked. Confirmation bias is a sure thing. I was in a Food Court at LAX today, and heard someone at the table next to me eating similar unidentifiable swill say, “Did you hear? One of those tea party guys shot all those people!” I finally got to my room in Sun Valley (it was easier to get to Mongolia than Sun Valley) to check what she was talking about. So you see, Brian? Mission accomplished!
Others are politicizing the Aurora shooting in only slightly less outrageous ways, mostly with the sadly predictable rush of anti-gun advocates to point to the slaughter and say, “See? Guns bad.” Then comes the related cognitive dissonance trick, linking gun rights to automatic weapons to madmen and criminals using such weapons to the tragic deaths resulting from said use, hence Republicans and conservatives are really allied with killers and murderers, which gives us some insight into their true character.
It’s good to have the old maverick doing what he does best.
“Bachmann!”
Rep. Michele Bachmann, Minnesota’s shame, used her oxymoronic presence on the House Intelligence Committee to argue in a June letter to the State Department and a letter this week to fellow Minnesota Representative Keith Ellison, that Huma Abedin, the top aide of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, may be a security risk because Abedin’s late father, mother, and brother had or have connections to the Muslim Brotherhood. Abedin’s position, Bachmann suggested ominously, ‘‘affords her routine access to the secretary and policy-making.’’ Her letter to Ellison was signed by five other Republicans: Reps. Trent Franks of Arizona, Louie Gohmert of Texas, Thomas Rooney of Florida and Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia.
When we can’t even figure out what ethical conduct is, it’s hopeless.
Mitt Romney’s appearance before the NAACP this week gives us a classic and depressing example of how the collision of confirmation bias, an unprofessional news media, impenetrable partisanship and political cynicism not only obscure the truth, but make it literally—and I mean literally literally, not as Joe Biden uses the term, which is to mean figuratively—impossible.
Consider:
The media, in almost every case, highlighted the fact that Mitt Romney was booed by the NAACP audience when he swore to abolish “Obamacare.” Did you know that at one point in his speech, when Romney mentioned defending traditional—as in same sex—marriage, the audience applauded, and some stood? If you do, you only found out by digging into so-called “conservative media sources.” Why isn’t this more of a story than the booing? Why wasn’t at least part of the story? Isn’t that useful information? Why does the media want to show nothing but enmity between African-Americans and the Republican nominee? Why wouldn’t the fact that the audience was listening to the substance of his remarks and responding positively in some cases be significant?
The NAACP has criticized prominent Republicans for not accepting it invitations to speak, maintaining the fiction that this wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party is “bi-partisan,” as its charter falsely claims. Then when one of them accepts such an invitation, these gracious hosts boos him. Booing is bad manners at a baseball game; in this circumstance, it is infinitely worse. If Romney had advocated a return to Jim Crow or used a racial epithet, then maybe booing would be justified. He did not. He merely stated a policy position, repealing the Affordable Care Act, that audience members did not like. They boo him, and this indignity becomes the story, thanks to the media’s tunnel vision. Why would any Republican accept such an invitation? The NAACP has proved itself to be an unethical and abusive host. Continue reading →
Laura Ingraham, for my money, is the most civil and entertaining of the far right talk show hosts. She does not engage in off-the wall rants, like fellow lawyer Mark Levin, she does not intentionally provoke the Left with politically-incorrect eye-pokes, like Rush Limbaugh (though he is awfully good at this, and sometimes very funny), and her passion for dignity and decorum in the culture is admirable, though Laura’s sense of what is smut and “poison” seems to have been formed while watching re-runs of “Father Knows Best.” Today, however, she hit the hypocrisy jack-pot while complaining about Jimmy Kimmel’s low-life performance as the MC at the White House correspondents’ dinner, and the unseemly tenor of the annual event generally. To be fair, she was absolutely right about a great deal:
The event is a national and international embarrassment. When it was a private affair allowing the White House to show appreciation for the hardy crew of journalists that dogs its occupant’s every move, allowing the President to josh with the reporters and let his hair down if he had any, an argument could be made that the event was harmless at worst, and beneficial at best. Now that the dinner is broadcast on cable TV, however, it has become increasingly cringe-worthy, as the Chief Executive is required to play stand-up comic next to the likes of Kimmel, diminishing his stature and making foreign cultures even more contemptuous of the U.S. than they already are. It should be held privately, or not at all.
The President should not be subjected to a performance that includes vulgarity and crudeness. Kimmel was both vulgar and crude, as he always is—don’t blame him, blame the fools who hired him. The President should not sacrifice respect and dignity to appear “cool.” Then again, this President does not comprehend Presidential leadership, and apparently never will. I am not a Reagan worshiper, but Ronnie would have been livid at an entertainer who resorted to such words as “asshole” in his presence. JFK would have made heads roll, and Ike would have had to restrain himself from having Kimmel shot.
For the President to be seen and heard joking about life and death issues, policies and episodes is offensive. He is the one American who has to be perceived as taking these matters seriously…always.
The last is where Laura hit an iceberg. She played an audio clip of a White House spokesperson earlier this year declaring how serious the recent Secret Service scandal was (You remember, don’t you? South American hookers and all that?) being taken on Pennsylvania Avenue, and they played Obama’s scripted joke from the dinner making light of the episode. She then segued into the hypocrisy of the mainstream media, which happily gives this President, whom they all voted for, carte blanche to make such irreverent gags, but who attacked President Bush for his “searching for the weapons of mass destruction” video routine at one of his White House dinners. Good one Laura…wait, what?You didn’t criticize President Bush’s routine then. You’re being more of a hypocrite than they are. Not only are you applying a double standard to the Presidency according to who’s in the office, you’re criticizing journalists for applying the exact same double standard you are!
And here’s strike three on Ingraham: Bush’s joke was inexcusable, Obama’s was just a mistake. The WMD fiasco got the U.S. into war and led to the deaths of thousand of soldiers and civilians, American and Iraqi. There is no comparison to President Obama’s quipping about the Secret Service episode.
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Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at jamproethics@verizon.net.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want a liar as President. I’m not talking about the kind of lies that are periodically unavoidable in leadership and governance, as much as we would like to pretend they are not. I’m talking about “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” type of lies, intentional falsehoods designed to deceive the public for political advantage with no benefit to the nation or its occupants whatsoever. Unfortunately, we are about to elect a liar as President, because lying in political campaign ads, and particularly negative ads, is sunk deep into the system like an inoperable brain tumor. It is fair to say that every President since George Washington has done it, and thus the public accepts it, and the news media shrugs it off. Continue reading →
Yeah, you’re right…if I had seen the photo first, I might have been more suspicious….
I guess his answer means yes. I also guess somebody ought to tell all the other local news and city beat columnists around the country that the heading “column” by their names is supposed to be understood as “Don’t believe a thing I say.” Someone should also let national writers like E.J. Dionne, Robert Samuelson, Kathleen Parker, John Avlon, Andrew Sullivan…anyone with a column, really…that their brand of punditry and journalism is supposed to be assumed to be satirical and tongue-in-cheek, because “column” gives proper notice that the “facts” the column contains are likely to be hooey.
Back when I lived in Boston, there was a city beat columnist I enjoyed and read often. He was clever and funny, and his specialty was local Boston stories. His name is Mike Barnacle. He’s not in Boston any more: they ran him out of town for making up stories or embellishing them with phony facts. (He is now seen on MSNBC, where facts are beside the point.) I thought they were a bit rough on Mike in Boston, and I wonder why he didn’t inform his paper that the fact that he wrote a “column” gave him leave to test the gullibility of his readers every day. Continue reading →
The issue in the Washington Post’s weekly Outlook section concerned the virtues and dangers of honesty in a Presidential campaign, a matter that interests me from the perspective of ethics, presidential history, and citizenship. Two Post reporters were given the assignment of creating sidebars to the main article, one on candidates who told the truth and were punished for it, the other on campaign lies that came back to haunt the Presidents involved.
These are not difficult assignments, by any means. Either would be a legitimate term paper topic for a high school senior’s history class; both would be rejected as a history major’s thesis topic as overly simplistic. Yet both Rachel Weiner and Aaron Blake botched their tasks, and would have earned D’s at best in high school history, and that’s only because of grade inflation. The reasons for their failures exemplify the inadequacy of the mainstream media for the job we need it to do during a Presidential election.
In a horrifying opinion column, the regular CNN political pundit L.Z. Granderson evoked the virtues of public apathy and unchecked government conduct with warped logic and unethical rationalizations, to make the case that the public should merely shrug off scandals like “Fast and Furious.” I was only able to finish reading it without retching it by imagining Granderson’s motives for writing such mind- and culture-poisoning swill. At least, as an African-American journalist, a liberal and a Obama supporter (I know I repeat myself), he has the self-respect, fairness and integrity not to claim that critics of Attorney General Holder’s Waterloo are being racist. Like the race-baiters, however, he is in denial, and willing to throw principle to the wolves to protect the first African-American Attorney General, though far from the first corrupt and incompetent one.
In a column with the descriptive and idiotic title, “Don’t be nosy about Fast and Furious,” Granderson argues…
“…Times have changed. Yet, not everything is our business. And in the political arena, there are things that should be and need to be kept quiet…..there comes a point where the public’s right to know needs to take a back seat to matters like national security and diplomacy. Heads should roll because of the Fast and Furious debacle. We don’t need every detail of that operation to be made public in order for that to happen. If it were an isolated sting, maybe. But it is at least the third incarnation of a gun-running scheme stretching across two administrations, which means we could be pressing to open Pandora’s Box. We do not want to open Pandora’s Box, not about this and certainly not about a bunch of other potentially scandalous things the federal government has been involved with.” Continue reading →
Sometimes, you just have to tell your slimy boss “No.”
Emily Yoffe is Slate’s advice columnist, in its “Dear Prudence” feature. She specializes in extreme situations: a recent column involved a teenager who realized that his mother had breast-fed him far too long because she was sexually aroused by it, and then had him fondle her breasts for years after he stopped be willing to suck on them. He asked what he should do now that his mother was subjecting his younger sister to the same treatment. (Emily did get that one right: she told him to call child services on his mother, and to seek professional help for himself.)
Last week I congratulated Carolyn Hax for her advice to a woman torn between the adulterous relationship of one friend with another friend’s husband. Notwithstanding the persistent argument of one crusading commenter who felt that I should have stood for universal adultery whistleblowing on friends and strangers alike, Hax gave, as usual, practical, ethical and measured advice. She suggested that the inquirer tell the cheating husband that his secret was out, and that she would not lie to protect his illicit affair. I believe that’s the right ethical balance. Hax’s advice to the woman was to be proactive in both extracting herself from the split loyalties and to be a catalyst for either disclosure or ending the affair. I also noted that the ethical duty on the questioner may be different when the betrayed spouse is an especially close friend, or a family member. Then loyalty and trust could require disclosure.
That same week, Yoffe got an inquiry from a “well-paid assistant of a successful business mogul.” Among her duties, she told “Prudence,” is to facilitate her boss’s extra-marital affair: lying about his whereabouts to business associates, deceiving his wife when she calls, and even buying gifts for the illicit lover. “Next month he’s going on a weeklong business trip,” she wrote. “He only needs to be gone for two days, but he’s taking his girlfriend with him and staying longer. I know I’m doing wrong by his wife. But I love my job, and I’m not sure what I could or should do to behave honorably in this situation.” Continue reading →
According to a recent Pew poll, almost half of the U.S. is still unaware of last week’s landmark Supreme Court decision upholding the Affordable Care Act, limiting Congress’s power to control private choices through reliance on the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, and flagging the Democrat deceit in passing a substantial tax on the middle class while hiding the fact in public and political discourse. 15% of the public must have been watching Fox and CNN the way listeners of Orson Welles “The War of the Worlds” listened to the 1938 radio broadcast, turning the dial before misinformation was clarified. These trusting or lazy souls still think the ACA was over-turned. This is, admittedly, better than thinking the world has been conquered by Martians.
The poll means that as we head into a watershed election that challenges the nation to make hard choices about its future course in tax policy, addressing the debt and deficit, foreign policy, commitment to national defense, entitlement reform, immigration, education, infrastructure renewal, employment, financial regulation, and equally vital matters that could have a decisive impact on America’s success, stability and even survival, one half of the public lack the interest and initiative to stay current with crucial national developments. Continue reading →
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