Leadership

President Trump Is Spot-On About Signers For The Deaf. Of Course He’s Going To Be Attacked For It.

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

All the headlines and articles about this ongoing example of political correctness and the tyranny of a minority in action are sneering and biased. “Sign language services ‘intrude’ on Trump’s ability to control his image, administration says,” is PBS’s intro. The President is right: there is no need or justification for a signer to be standing in view while the President of the United States is addressing the nation. None. Nada. Zilch. It is distracting, of course it is. I wrote this on the issue eight years ago. Just substitute President Trump’s name for Rick Scott, and that’s the bulk of my commentary today.

“Yesterday I watched Florida Governor Rick Scott give his pre-hurricane warnings, or tried to, since standing next to him was a signer for the deaf, gesticulating and making more elaborate faces than the late Robin Williams in the throes of a fit. I have mentioned this in the context of theatrical performances: as a small minority, the deaf should not be enabled by political correctness to undermine the best interests of the majority. What Scott was saying was important, and could have been adequately communicated to the deaf citizens present by the signer standing off camera. TV viewers could and should have been able to watch a text crawl following Scott’s speech, or closed captioning. Public speaking involves verbal and visual communications, and having a vivid distraction like a professional signer—many of whom feel it is their duty to add broad facial expressions to their translations—is unfair to both the speaker and his or her audience. This is one more example of a sympathetic minority bullying the majority to establish its power.”

Continue reading →

KABOOM! I Never Thought We’d See a U.S. President (Or Senator, or Governor, or Judge) Stoop To This…

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Do I really have to explain what’s unethical about this?

I hope not.

It’s something special, all right. Talk about shattering “norms.” Also good taste, the respect for the office, the line between celebrity and public service, and… well, you fill in the rest.

I’ll be in my bathroom, throwing up.

Regarding That “Seditious” Democrat Video…

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Who’s kidding whom?

You know that six former members of the military who by chance happened to be Democrats didn’t just wake up one morning and decide to “remind” members of the military that they are not supposed to obey “illegal orders.” They know that: every member of the military is taught the principle, though few have the fortitude to actually defy a superior officer on that basis. (My father did it at least three times during World War II while in the infantry.) This fake public service message or whatever you’d like to call it was a cheap, deceitful, underhanded way of advancing the Democratic Party’s “autocrat”/”threat to democracy”/”end elections” narrative to smear President Trump while exacerbating the brain fever of Trump Derangement Victims. Oh, it’s clever in the same diabolical way the “It’s OK to be white!” signs were, or the whole Black Lives Matter scam, or “Let’s Go Brandon!” Wink-wink. nudge-nudge, you get what we really mean, don’t you?

Continue reading →

President Trump Morphs into George McGovern! Didn’t See THAT Coming!

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

In 1972, on the way to an epic trouncing by Richard Nixon in that year’s Presidential race, nice, clueless, ultra-liberal Sen. George McGovern’s flower child-fueled campaign was roundly mocked for a proposal to give a thousand dollars to every man, woman and child. This was called the ultimate nanny state hand-out plan, among the more polite criticisms of it. Now President Donald Trump, hardly one for tie-dyed shirts, says he wants to give most Americans a $2,000 handout funded from tariffs.

“A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone,” the President wrote last week in a Truth Social post. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox News that the rebates would likely be given to families making “less than, say, $100,000.”  They might get a puppy and candy too.

Continue reading →

Unethical (and Stupid) Quote of the Month: Zohran Mamdani [First in a Long, Long Series…]

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

“We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.”

—Zohran Mamdani‘s marathon victory speech on Election Night, after the Democratic Socialist (that is, Communist) was elected as New York City’s mayor.

A commenter asked my opinion regarding Mamdani’s speech and I demurred, because it was standard commie tripe that I’ve read and heard from everyone from Lenin to Castro, and now this guy. He speaks well, and I’m always in favor of that as a key leadership skill. So did David Koresh. However, as I kept seeing that quote being published by the disgracefully uncritical mainstream media, my inner Popeye scratched to get out (“It’s all I can stands, ’cause I can’t stands no more!”) Who does he think he’s kidding?

Perhaps more importantly, what is the proper reaction to any American who wasn’t raised in a cave who doesn’t hear that insane claim and conclude, “Oh, brother! So much for that guy. He’s either lying, ignorant or a moron”? At very least it’s “RUN AWAY!”

Continue reading →

Back Off, Progressives: Dwight David Eisenhower Was An Excellent President In His Time.

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Which is, after all, the only time that matters.…at the time.

I just wrote a long rebuttal to a recently Trump Deranged friend of impressive mind and credentials, who decided to go after, of all people, President Dwight Eisenhower for a speech in which he extolled moral values because, my friend’s Facebook post declared, “in real life the years of Eisenhower’s administration—essentially all of the 1950s—did not even come close to measuring up to the tenets of social, racial, ethnic and sexual justice and economic equity that most of us today believe are the standards of a just society.”

“That is an important reminder for all of us us that times do change,” he continued, “and that as right-thinking as Eisenhower’s words seem on the surface, they were spoken by the leader of a society that was very repressive in many ways—economically, socially, racially, sexually and otherwise.” This, to use the vernacular, pissed me off greatly. Ike has gone higher in my estimation of him as President the more I read about him and especially the more I watch other President struggle with the job he seemed to do effortlessly. (Of course, Ike may be the only one of our Presidents for whom the office could be considered a step down in difficulty and responsibility, after overseeing the Allied effort to save the world in World War II.)

Here, with minor edits to protect the guilty, is what I posted in response to that slap at Ike:

***

But this is the purest form of Presentism, and a grossly unfair assessment of Ike, one of our most under-rated and effective Presidents. It is always easy to go back and condemn figures of the past who did not have the benefit of many decades of accumulated experience and wisdom; easy and wrong. It is by this standard that we saw efforts in demented regions like San Francisco (and our own) to strip historical honors from, among others, the Founders, because they were not sufficiently psychic to reject their society’s and culture’s mistaken beliefs, such as the inherent inferiority of other races to theirs.

 I’ve studied Eisenhower’s own writings and those about him. His vision of the Presidency was that his job was to protect and preserve the culture, not change it; that the culture would evolve and change in its own time, when society was ready for it. As a result, Eisenhower led a United States that honored and trusted its institutions at a level that seems astonishing today. He had a great part in that.

Nobody accused him of being a “king,” but in Boston, even then a bulwark of the Democratic Party, kids listened to “Hail to the Chief” on the most popular children’s show (creepily titled “Big Brother”!) as a photo of Ike appeared (the one above, in fact) on the screen and we “toasted” the President of the United States with a glass of milk. The Horror.

Continue reading →

The President’s “60 Minutes” Interview

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

President Trump sat down for a full interview with “60 Minutes” yesterday, and was grilled by CBS correspondent Norah O’Donnell (as I was once, though not on that show). The transcript and the video are here. Under the new regime of CBS News Czar (“Editor-in-Chief”) Bari Weiss, there were no deceptively edited sections as in the infamous and unethical (and, I believe, illegal) Kamala Harris interview a year ago when the network switched around her responses to try to deceive voters into believing that the Democrat isn’t, you know, a babbling idiot.

This post’s purpose isn’t to critique O’Donnell’s questions. She was appropriately respectful, aggressive and professional except that her facial expressions conveyed her hostility, which is unprofessional but now common practice among Axis broadcast journalists. The shot above was typical: she looked at the President of the United States as if he were a six-foot talking cockroach. Nor am I going to praise or criticize the substance of Trump’s responses, though I note that he showed an excellent knowledge of American Presidential history when he pronounced Joe Biden as our Worst President Ever.

It is simply to point out that the Trump Derangement narrative that this President is mentally failing and as cognitively disabled as Joe Biden (“Just in a different way” as one sufferer told me on Halloween) is either delusional or deliberately dishonest. The interview was slam-dunk proof of that, and yet this slander/libel is Axis cant now. I regard the claim as evidence of a genuine disruption of thinking ability. Bias makes you stupid, and in this case, bias is making these poor people ridiculous.

Continue reading →

Ethics Villain Revealed: Barack Obama [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

For once, the New York Times is reporting one of those over-heard conversations from an anonymous source who is violating trust to reveal it that harms the reputation and image of a progressive hero, though maybe the Times staff is so far gone that it doesn’t realize the import of the leak.

Former President Barack Obama, the Times revealed, phoned New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani today, November 1. The architect of the foundering progressive take-over of American government and culture spoke with the front-runner for “roughly 30-minutes.” According to the leakers, who spoke “on condition of anonymity” to describe the private conversation, Obama said that he “was invested in Mr. Mamdani’s success” beyond the upcoming election. The two (Muslims?) “talked about the challenges of staffing a new administration and building an apparatus capable of delivering on Mr. Mamdani’s agenda of affordability in the city.”

On the call, Obama reportedly spoke admiringly about Mamdani’s campaign. “Your campaign has been impressive to watch,” he told the charismatic communist, according to the sources.

During the campaign (and before it) Mamdani has made it Waterford crystal clear that he supports Hamas and does not believe that Israel has a right to exist. As a watermark of the anti-Semite, he has repeatedly described Israel’s legitimate armed response to the Gazan terror attack of October 7, 2023, as “genocide.” Those not in favor of obliterating Israel might well have regarded these themes in Mamdami campaign for mayor serious missteps. Obama, if the account is to be believed, seems to think being anti-Israel is just hunky-dory, but as we’ve seen, that’s where his party and its most fervent members have been tending for years.

Obama offered to be a “sounding board”—as in coach, mentor, advisor— when Mamdani wins the election, with the two agreeing to meet in person at some point in Washington, D.C.. Mamdani reportedly thanked the former president for the encouragement and told him that he had drawn inspiration for his own recent speech on Islamophobia from Mr. Obama’s speech on race during his first presidential run.

That Mamdani speech was the one in which he implied that voting against him was a sign of bigotry. Yeah, there’s no reason in the world for New Yorkers to be wary of Islam. What did Muslims ever…oh. Right.

A spokeswoman for Obama refused to verify the report, but a spokeswoman for Mamdani said, “Zohran Mamdani appreciated President Obama’s words of support and their conversation on the importance of bringing a new kind of politics to our city.”

You know. Communist politics.

My guess is that Obama is quite ticked off, because this leak almost certainly came from the Mamdani camp, which has seen its candidate’s support dwindle in recent days, though probably not enough.

Continue reading →

Bullying? Capricious? Stupid? Ominous? Autocratic? Whatever Trump’s Punishing Canada For Ontario’s Anti-Tariff Ad Is, It’s Unethical

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Last week, President Trump called off trade negotiations with Canada because the government of Ontario, one of the nation’s provinces, released a deceptively edited advertisement using former U.S. President Ronald Reagan to criticize American tariffs.  It was the beginning of the Ontario provincial government’s public relations campaign in the U.S. opposing tariffs, which of course have been a prominent feature of Trump 2.0.

In a typically restrained response, Trump erupted in fury against the spot, using all caps to call the ad “FAKE” as he announced the suspension of trade negotiations with Canada.  “Based on their egregious behavior, ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED,” Trump wrote on his personal social media platform Truth Social.

Ugh.

Continue reading →

President Tyler, President Trump, The East Wing, And Leadership [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 43 Comments

John Tyler was our 10th President (1841-1845) and the first Vice-President to reach the White House via the death of his predecessor. That was the ill-starred William Henry Harrison, the oldest elected POTUS until our recent spate of geriatrics, who died shortly after being sworn in. Tyler is regarded as an obscure and rather dishonored President—he served in Jefferson Davis’s Cabinet during the Civil War, but his one big decision was a crucial one that took guts and audacity. The U.S. may not have survived without it.

As with many parts of the Constitution, the Founders were infuriatingly vague on the question of Presidential succession. It was unclear whether the VP was to serve as an acting President until a special election was held, or whether he became President for the rest of the dead President’s term. Tyler was a Democrat who ran on a ticket with a Whig President, so settling the issue promised to be a political battle that could have escalated into a dangerous crisis. Tyler didn’t wait for Congress to debate the matter: he just took the oath of office, said “I am the President at least until until the 1844 election,” and dared anyone to try to block him. Nobody did. That set “The Tyler Precedent,” and we should all say a silent prayer to John Tyler for it.

Continue reading →