Leadership

The Portman Reversal: Why He Did It DOES Matter

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

reversalI feel it necessary to return to the topic of  Senator Rob Portman’s reversal of his long-held and much-publicized opposition to same sex marriage and homosexuality in general in the wake of his son’s disclosure that he is gay.

Anyone who required further evidence that current events analysis, not to mention public consciousness, is almost untouched by an understanding of ethics, need look no further than the near universal pronouncements in the editorial pages and the Sunday talk shows that “it doesn’t matter” why  Portman suddenly decided that he was in favor of gay marriage once the issue affected someone he cared about.

It is not yet 11:00 AM in Virginia, and I have already read and heard this reaction so many times that the flashing red light on my head that signals an imminent explosion is flashing bright. It doesn’t matter? It doesn’t matter that Senator Portman firmly, strongly, extensively and consistently declared in public forums, to interviewers and in op-ed pieces that the sanctity of the institution of marriage as well as the moral fiber of the nation depended on withholding the right to marry from millions of law-abiding American citizens, but that the minute one such citizen, someone he actually gave a damn about, risked being adversely affected by his supposedly heart-felt and principled position, he changed his “principles” like he was changing his socks? That doesn’t matter? Continue reading →

The Unpunishable Betrayal of Kwame Kilpatrick

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments
The worst.

The worst.

I have been following the tribulations of former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick since he was the subject of a civil suit by a bodyguard who claimed that he had been dismissed for uncovering an illicit sexual relationship between the mayor and his aide. Then Mayor, Kilpatrick fought the lawsuit with perjury and by managing to corrupt about a dozen lawyers, including those who worked for the city, many of whom ended up with their licenses suspended. In the end, he was forced to resign and sent to jail for obstructing justice, but the affair with his subordinate turned out to be a tiny tip of a very ugly iceberg. Once the golden glow was removed from Kilpatrick, who had been regarded as Detroit’s savior, other transgressions came into view, far more serious ones. Now he has been convicted of racketeering, and will probably be in prison for decades.

Yet even if he gets the maximum sentence for the 26 charges, including racketeering, fraud and extortion, a Detroit jury convicted him of yesterday, Kilpatrick will be getting off easy. There isn’t a crime on the books, you see, for accepting the trust of a community, a vulnerable, desperate community, yearning for a hero, and then using that trust to satisfy greed, personal gain and selfish motives, while those who put their welfare in your hands suffer and a city dies. That is what Kwame Kilpatrick did to his home town. His sentence, whatever it is, will not render justice for the unpunishable crime of accepting responsibility for the fate of a city, and murdering it while its back was turned. Continue reading →

“The Walking Dead” Ethics: The Toughest Leadership Dilemma Of All

/ Jack Marshall / 46 Comments
“Michonne, you’re gone..these are words that Rick choke upon, my Michonne…

“Michonne, you’re gone..these are words that Rick should choke upon, my Michonne…

In the absence of “Homeland,” currently waiting for Claire Danes to get back in shape after becoming a mom, AMC’s “The Walking Dead” is the best ethics show on TV. Apocalypse ethics is instructive and fascinating, because it addresses ethical problems as they were originally considered, before laws, before enforcement methods, and before organized morality. The objective is survival and continuation of the tribe and the species, without abandoning all semblance of humanity.

Yesterday’s episode built to an ethical dilemma of major consequence; naturally, some reviewers thought this was boring. Rick, the former sheriff leading the (mostly) good guys through the zombie-filled wilderness that was once the United States, is trying to protect the group’s refuge, an abandoned prison, from the imminent attack of a larger, better-armed commune run by a deranged psycho who calls himself “the Governor.” A former member of Rick’s group who now consorts (cough!) with the Governor (and who has been rightly condemned as an idiot for doing so, since she either knows or should know that he has the basic instincts of Vlad the Impaler), attempts a mediation to avoid bloodshed, and Rick and the Governor meet to parley. Continue reading →

From “Psychology Today”: How To Be A Better Liar—And A Negligent Endorsement Of Deceit

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments
Tommy Flanagan

“Psychology Today” has tips for Tommy Flanagan and the other aspiring liars out there.

Jeff Wise provides what he calls “The Ten Secrets of Effective Liars” on the “Psychology Today” website. I have some problems with his list, among them that despite his protestations to the contrary, it sure reads more like a handy-dandy self-help list for the George Costanzas, Tommy Flanagans and Bill Clintons among us.

My main objection, though, is to his #3 on the list, #3 Tell the truth, misleadingly. He correctly points out that a statement that is technically true will often be the most effective way of misleading others, but writes, “Technically, it’s only a prevarication – about half a sin.” I don’t know or care about how it ranks on the sin scale, but he is describing deceit, and deceit is a lie, period, no question about it. Wise is passing on a misconception himself, one that allows the most effective and destructive liars among us deceive routinely and then rationalize that they “really weren’t lying.” Spreading this common, popular and useful—to liars—myth does more damage than any of the supposedly beneficial results of his list could make up for.

Among the sinister results of promoting deceit as only half a lie, and therefore twice as forgivable as a “real” lie, is that it gives deceit masters (like Clinton) an effective excuse when they are caught. “Oh! Oh, I’m sorry! When I said ‘I didn’t have sex with that woman,” you thought I meant that I didn’t use my superior power and influence to persuade my young female intern to give me a hummer! I should have been clearer!” Right. Thus the liar switches the real blame onto the listener who was originally deceived. If that listener likes the liar and was inclined to trust him (or her), the rationalization that it was all a big misunderstanding will often be enough to allow the party deceived to keep trusting the liar…and be set up to be deceived again. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week, Sequester Ethics Train Wreck Division: U.S. Dept. of Agriculture Officials

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

“We have gone on record with a notification to Congress and whoever else that ‘APHIS would eliminate assistance to producers in 24 states in managing wildlife damage to the aquaculture industry, unless they provide funding to cover the costs.’ So it is our opinion that however you manage that reduction, you need to make sure you are not contradicting what we said the impact would be.”

—- U.S. Agriculture officials, responding to Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service official Charles Brown after he asked “if he could try to spread out the sequester cuts in his region to minimize the impact.” Brown quoted the response in an internal e-mail obtained by the Washington Times.

Why isn't the news media screaming?

Why isn’t the news media screaming?

Assuming that Brown’s account is accurate, the e-mail appears to show, in the interpretation most favorable to the Obama Administration, that at least one federal department believes that its job is to ensure that the across-the-board sequester cuts do as much tangible harm as possible, even where it is possible to mitigate that harm through effective management. The interpretation least favorable would conclude that President Obama has issued internal orders to the effect that any effort to lessen the cataclysmic results he and his Cabinet members predicted prior to the sequester deadline is forbidden, since it would undermine the political strategy of creating public anger against Republicans.

I don’t know where the truth lies. I can say that here in Washington, D.C., both Democrats and Republicans, without the benefit of the e-mail, seem to have adopted the worst case interpretation, which is shocking. Even more shocking is that the sick culture here is largely shrugging this off as “hardball politics” on behalf of the President and his Democratic allies. I cannot fathom this, just as I cannot fathom why all news media, left and right, are not screaming like the Donald Sutherland pod duplicate at the end of the remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” if they also believe this is true. Continue reading →

Just What Every President Doesn’t Need…A Traitor

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments
"My observations while serving in the President's trust are held in strictest confidence, and...HOW much? Sure, I'll write a book!"

“My observations while serving in the President’s trust are held in strictest confidence, and…HOW much? Damn! Sure, I’ll write a book!”

President Obama is hardly the first President to be blind-sided by a “tell-all” exposé authored by someone who had an obligation to keep his mouth shut and his keyboard quiet. The unethical practice of a President’s former advisors, cabinet members, secret security agents, servants and others who held his trust cashing in and publishing often bitter, agenda-driven books detailing juicy and uncomplimentary details of what went on behind closed doors began gaining steam during the Reagan years (something else to detest David Stockman for) and has accelerated in every administration since.

The latest sniper shot from a grassy knoll is the work of Vali Nasr, a professor and former senior State Department adviser who worked with Richard Holbrooke, previously Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. In his new book, which, of course, had to be published while Obama was still in office to have a chance of making the former advisor the money he craves, Nasr relates details of what he regards as the incompetent White House foreign policy decision-making apparatus, in which vital calls that should have been left to experts were run through Obama’s political team, whose judgment was based on polls and narrow, short-term political considerations. Continue reading →

Coming To A Ballot Box Near You: “The Naked Senator Principle”?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

 

Go Ashley!

Go Ashley!

Ashley Judd, the accomplished Hollywood actress-feminist (and the non-singing sister in the singing Judd family), is seriously contemplating a run for the Kentucky Senate as a Democrat against Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. There is a potential problem, however, implies the conservative “Daily Caller.” Judd will become the first serious contender for high national office who has appeared on screen numerous times in various degrees of nudity. The blog’s entertainment editor has done her research with no less an authority than MrSkin.com, and reports that Judd went topless for 1996′s “Normal Life” and went topless and bottomless in 1999′s “Double Jeopardy.” Meanwhile, in both 1996′s “Norma Jean and Marilyn” and 1999′s “Eye of the Beholder,” Judd went full frontal while also baring her comely tush. Ashley had a lesbian sex scene in 2002′s Oscar-nominated “Frida,” and “Mr. Skin”  categorized nine other scenes as “sexy,” and if you can’t trust him on such matters, whom can you trust?

We have learned that former porn stars can’t be middle school teachers or beauty queens, that art teachers can’t be seen painting pictures with their butts (even with paper bags over their heads) and that “the Naked Teacher Principle” decrees that those we entrust with the the shaping of young minds cannot be trusted to do the job if their naughty bits are just a mouse click away. Doesn’t it follow that there is a “Naked Senator Principle”? Surely internet nudity that was previously available at the Multiplex is a disqualification for Congress. Isn’t it? Shouldn’t it be? Continue reading →

Not Jackie Robinson, Not Even Shannon Faukner: Lauren Silberman Flunks The Traiblazer Test

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments
"Okay, now I kick this funny-shaped brown thingee where, again?"

“Okay, now I kick this funny-shaped brown thingee where, again?”

Call it the trailblazer’s duty. If your objective is to be a trailblazer and break through the obstacle of prejudice in an elite field, your efforts, even if not successful, had better not make the obstacle greater. The epitome of trailblazing excellence is Jackie Robinson, shattering major league baseball’s apartheid  by simultaneously becoming the game’s first black player in decades, and also one of its greatest players of all time. The bottom of the barrel in the trailblazing pantheon is probably Shannon Faulkner, who waged a high-profile legal battle to become the first female cadet at the Citadel, only to enter the school physically and mentally unprepared for the challenge, resulting in an embarrassing failure and rapid withdrawal.

Lauren Silberman, the first female to try out for the National Football League made Faulkner look good. Continue reading →

From Connecticut State Rep. Ernest Hewett (D): The Most Inappropriate Public Utterance By An Elected Official Ever?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Wow.

Just…wow.

"Hi...I'm a friend of Rep Hewett? He invited me to attend the hearing...could you direct me to his desk, please?"

“Hi…I’m a friend of Rep Hewett.  He invited me to attend the hearing…could you direct me to his desk, please?”

The late Donald Shaefer, former governor of Maryland and mayor of Baltimore, certainly had his moments of outrageous, and often sexist, candor, and foot-in-mouth disease has certainly marred the legacies of many a politician, but this seems like a scene out of a Will Farrell movie. An unbelievable scene.

On February 21, a 17-year-old female intern at the Connecticut Science Center was testifying before the Connecticut legislature. Among those questioning her about her work was Hewett, the deputy speaker and a former mayor of New London in his fifth term in the House. The intern was discussing the benefits of her work, and told the lawmakers, “I am usually a very shy person, and now I am more outgoing. I was able to teach those children about certain things like snakes that we have and the turtles that we have… ,” she said. “I want to do something toward that, working with children when I get older.”

Hewett responded—and I’m not making this up…

“If you’re bashful I got a snake sitting under my desk here!” Continue reading →

Of Pastry Guns, Fear-Mongering, And Bad Policy

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments
What made the Doughboy attack the school? No one knows. He had been fired, that was plain. But luckily, Josh was ready for him...

What made the Doughboy attack the school? No one knows. He had been fired, that was plain. But luckily, Josh was ready for him…

In a day that will live in infamy, I took to my keyboard one December morn in 2011 and wrote, “Can political correctness “no-tolerance” idiocy in the schools get any worse than punishing a child for the shape of his pizza slice?” The presumptive answer was “No!”, but as any observer of the national scene now knows, I was dead wrong. Now it appears that I was not only wrong about how deranged the phirearmophobics could become, I was even wrong about the limits to irrational terror caused by arguably gun-shaped foodstuffs wielded by children.

WBFF Fox in Baltimore reported that

“Children at Park Elementary School went home with a letter late today explaining there was a disruption in school. 7-year-old Josh Welch was sent home from school for accidentally sculpting his breakfast pastry into a gun. The school suspended Josh for two days because he “used food to make an inappropriate gesture.” Continue reading →