Leadership

CREW vs. Issa: Biased Accuser, Guilty Accused

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Unethical for Rep. Issa to make it, and unethical that CREW didn’t

The Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington does almost half a great job in its stated role as a government ethics watchdog. The supposedly non-partisan group is obviously partisan, since it goes after unethical Republican officials with frequency and relish while targeting unethical Democrats with infrequency and reluctance. CREW’s complaints, however, are almost always well-supported and legitimate. Why almost half a great job? CREW can’t be as effective in its efforts to expose unethical Republican conduct as it needs to be because its obvious bias makes the organization’s motives and judgment less trustworthy and more vulnerable to attack.

We have a perfect example in the news. “The Hill” reports that CREW….

“…has asked the Office of Congressional Ethics to investigate whether Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) violated rules by producing a video that attacks President Obama. Continue reading →

Chris Christie and the Curse of Consequentialism

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

It will be scant consolation to Chris Christie, who probably lost forever any chance of becoming President, but his bi-partisan actions in the wake of Superstorm Sandy provide a perfect example of how a completely ethical and responsible decision can have consequences that cause it to be judged unethical and irresponsible.

Even before Obama won Ohio’s electoral votes, guaranteeing his re-election, analysts were pointing to Christie’s much-photographed stroll with (and hugging of) the President, and the well-timed opportunity it provided to allow Obama to appear both Presidential and willing to co-operate with Republicans, as the tipping point in a close race, breaking Mitt Romney’s momentum and undercutting the argument that only he could “reach across the aisle.” I doubt that Chris and Barack’s New Jersey Adventure was in fact the primary reason Romney lost, but I have no doubt at all that conservatives will blame Christie, among others, for the loss. Continue reading →

Why Nate Silver Is Wrong

/ Jack Marshall / 156 Comments

Funny, Nate, I don’t see “leadership” anywhere in here…

I have wrestled with whether to write this post for about a month now. I am not in the election predicting business, which is a fool’s game, and this is tangential to ethics at best. On the other hand, leadership and American culture are among the subjects frequently explored here. Nate Silver’s analysis of the Presidential election on his New York Times blog has been at once fascinating and aggravating for me, though it has been a godsend to my nervous friends on the ideological left. Silver has insisted that his statistical analysis of the polls fortells an Obama victory with increasing certainty. Last I looked, his model was showing the election to be all but in the bag for the President, with, Silver calculates, an 86% chance that Romney goes down to defeat.

I don’t question Silver’s figures or formula. He’s a statistics whiz. His mistake is trying to use the tools he has used to great success on the poker table and in the world of sabermetrics to analyze the election of a President of the United States, without acknowledging or understanding the core of the process, or the culture and context in which it occurs. In many elections, most perhaps, his model would work perfectly. This time, it is going to fail. Silver won’t see his failure coming because as brilliant as he is in his chosen field, his demonstrated expertise is in economics and statistics. He really believes, apparently, that American history doesn’t matter, that what Americans think about when they choose a President is irrelevant, and that numbers purify the discussion and remove all the bias and static. He couldn’t be more wrong. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: New Jersey Governor Chris Christie

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

WHAT? A Republican being cooperative and respectful toward the President? What’s the matter with him?”

In the wake of Superstorm Sandy,  New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is being labelled a turn-coat by some fellow Republicans and conservative commentators for supposedly “sucking up” to President Obama.

“The president has been all over this and he deserves great credit,” the Governor said.  “He’s been very attentive, and anything that I’ve asked for, he’s gotten to me. So, I thank the president publicly for that. He’s done—as far as I’m concerned—a great job for New Jersey.” Christie not only praised the President’s responsiveness to the plight of his state, along with New York the hardest hit of Sandy’s victims, but also toured disaster sites with Obama, giving the President photo-ops that could bolster his re-election campaign in the crucial final days. Rush Limbaugh bitterly slammed Christie, somewhat cryptically calling him Obama’s “Greek column,” and other talk radio hosts and political pundits followed suit. Here’s the Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis: Continue reading →

Ethics Check: Sen. Bob Menendez’s Dominican Republic Sex Scandal

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“…and how could you see him with that gray thing covering your face?”

The Daily Caller is breathlessly promoting this as a sex scandal, so I should let it speak for itself:

“Two women from the Dominican Republic told The Daily Caller that Democratic New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez paid them for sex earlier this year.
In interviews, the two women said they met Menendez around Easter at Casa de Campo, an expensive 7,000 acre resort in the Dominican Republic. They claimed Menendez agreed to pay them $500 for sex acts, but in the end they each received only $100.”

Assuming that the story is accurate, which we cannot know at this point (if ever), what does it signify regarding Menendez’s fitness to be a U.S. Senator? Well, he didn’t break any laws: prostitution is legal in the Dominican Republic. The Senator wasn’t betraying his wife: he is divorced.

The incident reflects badly upon his character if, as the women allege, he agreed to pay them one fee and stiffed them (poor choice of words, sorry) cheated them by paying them less, with a “take it or leave it, I’m a U.S. Senator” brush-off. That’s truly unethical and mean behavior, and would demonstrate actual contempt for women (as opposed to much of what Menendez’s party has been labeling as such this election season) as well as a penchant for abusing power and breaking his word.

However, the Senator could also be a victim of some women seeking a pay-off after a commercial dispute, or a failed shakedown. Given the uncertainty, I don’t believe it’s fair for this incident to hurt Sen. Menendez’s standing with his constituents or the public, and The Daily Caller was wrong to publicize it.
_____________________________

Facts: Daily Caller

Graphic: Daily Caller

A Disappointing and Damaging Ethics Dunce: The Obama Campaign

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

No matter who wins the Presidency on November 6, one thing is for certain. We now can be sure that the day will come when a future Presidential campaign runs an ad that concludes, “Don’t vote for him: he’s an asshole!” For that, we will be able to place the blame on, of all people, Barack Obama, and his 2012 campaign. This is the same Barack Obama who promised, the first time he was running for President, to change the tone in Washington; the same President Obama who told a group in 2010…

“But there is a sense that something is different now, that something is broken, that those of us in Washington are not serving the people as well as we should,” Mr. Obama said. “At times, it seems like we are unable to listen to one another, to have at once a serious and civil debate. This erosion of civility in the public square sows division and cynicism among our citizens. It poisons the well of public opinion….Civility is not a sign of weakness.”

Yet his 2012 campaign’s embrace of gutter-level name calling and divisive rhetoric, with the full participation of both the President and the Vice-President, has guaranteed that the tone Obama promised to change will change for the worse, and that the well of public opinion will be more toxic than ever. Continue reading →

The Benghazi Express: It’s Hard To Hide An Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

Did you hear the gross and inappropriate remark Joe Biden made to the father of one of the soldiers killed in the Benghazi attack? Of course not! Because it makes the Vice President appear to be a clueless and insensitive fool…we can’t have THAT…not before an election!

It’s pretty simple, really. The American people have a right to know what really happened in Benghazi, and as new questions keep arising, the appearance of a cover-up on the part of the Obama Administration keeps getting more difficult to deny.

  • On 9/11 of 2012, an armed attack on the American embassy in Libya left four dead, including the Ambassador. After the attack, the only official U.S. comment was on the website of the Cairo embassy, which had experienced a violent protest, disavowing an anti-Islam film trailer that had been posted on YouTube, essentially suggesting that the violence had been provoked by offensive American speech.
  • Many days afterward, that remained the official position of the Obama Administration, to such an extent that ten days after the raid the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. visited all the Sunday talk shows to describe the attack as spontaneous, not planned terrorist actions, and sparked by indignation over the video. President Obama went before the U.N., and again disavowed and blamed the video. Continue reading →

Innocence Abuse, 2012

/ Jack Marshall / 44 Comments

Stop it.

In the view of many (including me), the exact moment Jimmy Carter lost the 1980 Presidential election was when he used the closing minutes of the only Presidential debate to spin the tale, dubious at best, about his solemn conversation with his daughter Amy. Carter claimed that he asked her about her assessment of the most important issue facing the nation, and that  “the control of nuclear arms” was his thirteen-year-old advisor’s sage response. The story seemed insincere and manipulative, all the worse for Carter’s placing his answer in his daughter’s mouth for tactical purposes. Carter used Amy as a prop and a ventriloquist’s dummy. Even if the story was true, the tactic was offensive.

Here in Virginia, a closely contested “purple” state, the tactic of using children to carry political messages in full bloom. An ad for Republican Senate candidate George Allen, attacking opponent Tim Kaine and President Obama for their pro-abortion stance shows a series of cute “potential” children, facing the camera and telling us what they would have been in their lives—a mother, a fireman, a soldier (no homeless, serial killers or drug dealers, oddly enough)—if their existence hadn’t been snuffed out in the womb. Meanwhile, President Obama recently descended to the rock bottom level of the rest of his campaign by calling Mitt Romney “a bullshitter” by placing the epithet in the mouth on an anonymous 6-year-old girl.

With that kind of leadership model to follow, I suppose it shouldn’t be too shocking that far worse was on the way. A pro-Obama group called “The Future Children Project” has released an ad that represents a new low in the use of children as programmed messengers. Created by advertising agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, the spot shows a chorus of dead-eyed, sad children, shot in black and white, singing from a dystopian future about what America became because it didn’t re-elect Barack Obama. The lyrics: Continue reading →

Ethics Hero Emeritus, Sort of: Russell Means (1940-2012)

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

“Fly swift, like an arrow.”

Clarence Darrow, the greatest of all American criminal defense lawyers, admired more than one criminal. One he especially admired was John Brown, the radical, violent and possibly insane abolitionist whose deadly 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry, Maryland was a terrorist act by any definition. Brown was hung for it, but he became a martyr for the anti-slavery movement, and his raid a rallying point for its cause. Darrow believed that some societal wrongs were so resistant to law and democracy that their grip could only be loosened by violence, and so he extolled men like Brown, whom he regularly eulogized in public with a fiery speech that concluded,

“The earth needs and will always need its Browns; these poor, sensitive, prophetic souls, feeling the suffering of the world, and taking its sorrows on their burdened backs.  It sorely needs the prophets who look far out into the dark, and through the long and painful vigils of the night, wait for the coming day.  They wait and watch, while slow and cold and halting, the morning dawns, the sun rises and waxes to the noon, and wanes to the twilight and another night comes on.  The radical of today is the conservative of tomorrow, and other martyrs take up the work through other nights, and the dumb and stupid world plants its weary feet upon the slippery sand, soaked by their blood, and the world moves on.”

I immediately thought of Darrow’s words about Brown* when I learned that Russell Means had died this week at the age of 72. Clarence Darrow would have loved Russell Means. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Month: Indiana GOP U.S. Senate candidate Richard Mourdock

/ Jack Marshall / 73 Comments

“The only exception I have to have an abortion is in the case of the life of the mother. I struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize life is that gift from God. I think that even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”

—–Indiana GOP U.S. Senate candidate Richard Mourdock in Tuesday’s televised debate, in response to a question regarding the candidates’ position on abortion.

“If found, please contact Indiana GOP Senate candidate Richard Mourdock, who will answer the phone by saying, “URUHHHHGHHAR???”

Ah, so few words, so many options for Ethics Alarms!  Should we make Richard Mourdock an Ethics Dunce? The Incompetent Elected Official of the Week, perhaps? Since it is his quote that opened up this cornucopia of possibilities, I decided that it should be the quote that gets nod.

How is Mourdock’s quote unethical? Let me count the ways:

1. It needlessly confuses right and wrong. If God intends that a pregnancy should result from a rape, then one can argue that the rapist is just doing God’s will. I know that people like Mourdock answer that the Lord works in mysterious ways, but this argument does nothing but undermine the victims of rape (“If God wanted this, is it wrong for me to complain? To reject the pregnancy?”) and hands a rationalization to rapists.

Continue reading →