Leadership

On The Ethically Depressing GOP Presidential Field

/ Jack Marshall / 113 Comments

The New York Times gave us the chart above, in an article about how the “he could shoot someone at high noon in central park and we wouldn’t care” Trump “base” will make a Republican effort to nominate a responsible, respectable, competent candidate for President difficult if not impossible. Look at that array! And my sister, a Democrat, complains that her party’s options are terrible, which they are.

How can a nation this large and diverse have no leaders who seem capable of doing the top job ethically and well? This is a societal, cultural, systemic failure.

That a character like Donald Trump, former POTUS or not, can have that kind of overwhelming support in the midst of indictments, the long, long trail of ridiculous and offensive statements, and his disqualifying conduct of refusing to accept his electoral defeat yet tells us that something is deeply rotten in the state of America. And whatever that state of rotteness is, returning either Joe Biden or Trump to the White House would be an invitation to too many disasters to contemplate.

But let’s start from the bottom of the list, where hope blooms. Nobody wants Chris Christie to run. Good. He was an ethics villain in 2016, knocking off Trump’s adversaries in the debates when he had the rhetorical tools and ammunition to take out Trump the way he reduced poor Marco Rubio to a laughing stock. Then Christie endorsed Trump, whom he knew was unfit, in a corrupt quid pro quo deal, probably to be Vice-President, which Trump reneged on. Then Christie was out to get Trump again, but it was too late. The one-time rising GOP star’s star was already permanently tarnished by his George Washington Bridge fiasco anyway. He’s running to get headlines and speaking fees, I guess. That he has almost no support speaks almost as well for the Republican voters as their support for Trump is damning.

Vivek Ramaswamy is the GOP equivalent of tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang in the last cycle for the Democrats. He’s not a serious candidate, and anyone who thinks he is doesn’t understand the American Presidency. Like Christie, he’s just static in the race, and a distraction. In a very important election like the one approaching, causing static and distractions is unethical.

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If Donald Trump Were An Ethical, Responsible Public Servant And Wanted To Do What Was In The Best Interests Of His Nation…

/ Jack Marshall / 116 Comments

…he would announce that he was withdrawing from the Presidential race immediately, because the prosecutions he faces, just or unjust, will be a destructive distraction from the election as well as an impediment to him serving as President if he were nominated and elected.

And if I were an aardvark, I could save money on groceries by eating ants and termites.

Trump won’t do this, of course (that is, drop out, not eat ants and termites), but it is the only ethical alternative. A lawyer facing a single serious indictment would step away from his or her law firm. An ethical judge would resign. A doctor facing indictments would take a leave of absence. A general facing such legal jeopardy would retire. The United States cannot have a Presidential candidate laboring under the shadow of multiple criminal prosecutions any more than it can afford to have a mentally declining President who serves as a puppet for aspiring totalitarians. Trump continuing his candidacy increases the likelihood of both.

If Richard Nixon had been like Trump—a toxic narcissist—he wouldn’t have resigned, and the nation would have been roiled and scarred by a genuine impeachment process. Clinton is like Trump—maybe a teeny-weeny bit less of a narcissist, but not much—and he should have resigned as the truth of the Monica Lewinsky allegations emerged. The nation and the Presidency—and his party—would have been far better off today if he had, and Clinton’s scandal was not even in the same metaphorical ballpark as Trump’s, which also includes a sexual assault civil ruling.

At this point, Trump continuing to seek the Presidency can only do damage, and the question is just “How much?” I don’t want to think about how much. His entire career has been built on a foundation of stubbornness, resilience and a refusal to admit defeat: quitting his quest for redemption goes against his core. Real patriots and great leaders, however, can muster the character and courage to do what needs to be done even when it violates all of their baser instincts. Unfortunately, I am not an aardvark, and Donald Trump is neither a real patriot or a great leader.

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Why The White House Cocaine Incident Matters

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

In a depressing AP story about a poll supposedly showing that a large majority of Americans don’t believe democracy is working as it should in the U.S. today, one disillusioned voter, a “moderate Republican,” singled out the GOP’s investigations of Hunter Biden as a prime example of misplaced priorities.

“Hunter Biden — what does that have to do with us?” he asked, neatly demonstrating why the Founders decided that a pure democracy was dangerous, and that a republic was much safer in many respects.

Hunter Biden is not important at all isolated from what he represents, which is strong evidence that the President of the United States is 1) lying 2) abusing power and influence to assist his pathetic ne’er do well son 3) possibly benefiting from his son’s influence peddling 4) corrupting the justice system to protect his family, and 5) untrustworthy, because he is willing to place other priorities above the interests of the United States of America. The fact that the “moderate Republican,” whose argument is that the President’s son has “nothing to do with the economy,” can’t comprehend this, is a perfect example of how most U.S. citizens don’t understand the basic concepts of ethics, government and law.

Consider the White House cocaine fiasco. A white substance in a plastic bag was found in the White House library and identified as cocaine. Hunter Biden had been to his father’s abode three days before the discovery. Hunter has been a cocaine user in the past, and there is video and photographic evidence of that. From the beginning, the White House made every effort imaginable to keep the public and the media’s suspicions going to the obvious place. On July 5, less than 72 hours after the discovery, a law enforcement source leaked to Politico that the owner of the drugs would likely never be known. National security adviser Jake Sullivan suggested the drug could have belonged to construction workers renovating the West Wing Situation Room, and Joe’s paid liar Karine Jean-Pierre flipped into indignant “How dare you!’ mode when a reporter asked if the envelope might have belonged to a Biden. She also said, laughably, insisted that the Secret Service would never allow the President to dictate how they handled delicate matters at the White House. “We are not involved in this,” Jean-Pierre said. “This is something that the Secret Service handles. It’s under their protocol.” Sure. Who believes this?

On July 13, the Secret Service concluded its investigation without naming a suspect, saying that it could not narrow the group of people who had access to the area to “a person of interest.” Hunter was never questioned. The Secret Service briefed members of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee on its findings.

Senator Tom Cotton had an amusing analogy to this narrative.”This is like if the Hamburglar lived in the White House, all the hamburgers disappeared, and they said they didn’t have any suspects or no one they could question,” he said. Meanwhile, conservative pundit and former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino says that his former colleagues are furious, and that they know who brought the cocaine into the White House, adding,

“So there’s probably less than 200 people who could have left this cocaine, by the way, in a bag which is plastic, which is non-porous, meaning it’s probably not that hard to pull a latent print. They’ve got to know who did it. The question is, who’s pressuring them to not find out who did it? And it’s gotta be coming from this White House. This is terrible. Don’t destroy this agency like the FBI. It’s really unbecoming. A lot of my former colleagues at the Secret Service who retired, they are absolutely furious about this. Oh yeah, yeah, I can tell you, I got 50 emails, communications, texts from people. ‘This is embarrassing, humiliating.’ These are good guys, man, guys who worked for Obama and Bush, non-partisan guys, most of them aren’t even political. This is embarrassing. They know exactly who it was.”

And sports bookies are releasing odds on who owned the drugs.

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Wait…What’s The Problem? Isn’t Mayor Wu Just Following The Tactics And Principles Of Her Party?

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I don’t understand. The Biden Administration has declared that opponents of his policies are threats to democracy. The current Justice Department has sought extreme and excessive punishment for the protesters and rioters at the Capitol in January of 2021 while ignoring the violent and disruptive acts of the George Floyd Freakout rioters and demonstrators. The Democratic Administration sought to intimidate parents who were critical of woke school boards seeking to inject sexual politics and CRT ideology into public school curricula. And yet when Boston’s mayor Michelle Wu admitted that her staff compiled a list of her most vocal critics and protesters to hand to local law enforcement authorities, the public, which in Boston is primarily Democratic and progressive, howled in outrage.

This is how their increasingly totalitarian party operates in 2023. This is what they voted for. What are they complaining about?

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Ethics Quotes For The Fourth: On Liberty, Freedom, and Democracy [Part I]

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“

“Hurrah for the flag of the free!
May it wave as our standard forever,
The gem of the land and the sea,
The banner of the right.

“Let despots remember the day
When our fathers with mighty endeavor
Proclaimed as they marched to the fray
That by their might and by their right
It waves forever.”

—–John Phillip Sousa, “The Stars and Stripes Forever”

“Democracy is like sex. When it is good, it is very very good. And when its is bad, it is still pretty good.”

—–Anonymous.

“The real democratic American idea is, not that every man shall be on a level with every other man, but that every man shall have liberty to be what God made him, without hindrance.”

—-Henry Ward Beecher, American preacher

“Democracy is moral before it is political.”

—- Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court Justice

“The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.”

—-  Jimmy  Carter

“A constitutional democracy like ours is perhaps the most difficult of man’s social arrangements to manage successfully. Our scheme of society is more dependent than any other form of government on knowledge and wisdom and self-discipline for the achievement of its aims. For our democracy implies the reign of reason on the most extensive scale. The Founders of this Nation were not imbued with the modern cynicism that the only thing that history teaches is that it teaches nothing. They acted on the conviction that the experience of man sheds a good deal of light on his nature. It sheds a good deal of light not merely on the need for effective power if a society is to be at once cohesive and civilized, but also on the need for limitations on the power of governors over the governed.”

—- Felix Frankfurter, Supreme Court Justice

“In contrast to totalitarianism, democracy can face and live with the truth about itself.”

—-Sidney Hook, American philosopher and historian

“America’s experiment with government of the people, by the people, and for the people depends not only on constitutional structure and organization but also on the commitment, person to person, that we make to each other.”

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Comment Of The Day: “Unethical Quote Of The Month: President Joe Biden’s Howard University Class of 2023 Commencement Address”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Perhaps you could tell: I was disgusted by President Biden’s speech at Howard. Was it more destructive demagoguery than his “Soul of the Nation” speech last fall? At such unethical depths, comparisons don’t matter. Is it worse to try to turn half the nation against the other half, or to poison the minds of young college graduates by using the authority of the Presidency to convince them that their own country is a dark and dangerous place with large segments of the public determined to harm them because of the color of their skin?

For those sufficiently independent-minded, Biden’s speech was not just hypocrisy, but stunningly thinly-veiled hypocrisy. Ann Althouse focused on one example, Biden referring to SCOTUS Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson as “one bright woman.” The blogging retired law professor wrote,

“Isn’t that a microaggression? It’s my subjective experience — disagree with me if you want — that “bright” is a patronizing word. It’s used for children, and when it’s used on an adult, it’s looking down on the person as if they are something like a child. It expresses vague surprise that the person stands out and can do reasonably difficult tasks, but it sets them apart as not able to do the most sophisticated things that the speaker imagines himself to be doing. Older men in superior positions have said it through the years about younger associates and, especially, women. And I think it’s what a racist would say about a capable black person.”

The routinely perceptive and incisive Mrs. Q. picks up on the same vibes in her Comment of the Day on the post, “Unethical Quote Of The Month: President Joe Biden’s Howard University Class of 2023 Commencement Address”:

* * *

Where to begin…

Who was Biden’s mentor? An Exalted Cyclops who recruited at least 150 members into his chapter of the KKK.

What did Biden tell a digital audience on a black man’s podcast?
That if they had trouble deciding if they were for him or Trump, then they “weren’t black.” Last I checked an old white guy mentored by a formerly virulent white supremacist should be last person to tell blacks if they were in fact black.

Who said this about Obama?
“I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.” That was Biden.

Who said this during his campaign?
“…poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.” That was Biden.

And who said this gem?
” You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.” Biden of course!

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Unethical Quote Of The Month: President Joe Biden’s Howard University Class of 2023 Commencement Address

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

The Gettysburg Address it surely wasn’t. In 1863, President Lincoln concisely and brilliantly laid out a grand plan for what should unify the United States of America. Yesterday, President Biden deliberately set out to divide the nation along the racial divide already made larger by the cynical efforts and policies of the Obama administration. President Obama, however, avoided directly stoking hostility between the races except when he was speaking off the cuff, as in his irresponsible comments on the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman Ethics Train Wreck. Biden is far more direct and open about it. His party has decided that stoking black fear of white citizens and anger toward the United States itself as a purveyor of “white supremacy” is its best strategy for keeping power—that, and hammering away at the Big Lie that the purpose of abortion restrictions is to make women second-class citizens.

After all, as the late Harry Reid would surely point out, Biden’s 2022 “Soul of the Nation” speech pushing the same theme that Republicans and conservatives are racists and terrorists “worked.” What should have been an electoral rejection of disastrous progressive policies turned into a relative victory: Democrats held control of the Senate and just barely lost the House. It was predictable that the soulless and mercenary political consultants advising the party would urge it to follow the same playbook for 2024….prime hate, anger, distrust, bias, bigotry and fear, all while accusing the opposition of being agents of …hate, anger, distrust, bias, bigotry and fear. If that course damages the nation, well, you gotta crack some eggs to make an omelette.

So thus it was that President Biden spoke in front of a Howard graduating class assembled by racial discrimination and the principles of apartheid to tell them that they, their family, their communities and their race were in increasing peril because of ‘white supremacy.” After typical Biden babble, the President kicked off another dose of race-based suspicion by saying, “When it comes to race in America, hope doesn’t travel alone. It’s shadowed by fear, by violence, and by hate.” The speech went downhill from there. Most commencement speeches are exultant in tone, cheering on a rising generation to take advantage of the open and promising road ahead of them. Not this one. Here are some quotes:

But after the election and the re-election of the first Black American President, I had hoped that the fear of violence and hate was significantly losing ground.

Of course, Obama’s election and re-election proved conclusively that racial bigotry in the U.S. had diminished spectacularly.

But in 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, crazed neo-Nazis with angry faces came out of the fields with — literally with torches, carrying Nazi banners from the woods and the fields chanting the same antisemitic bile heard across Europe in the ‘30s. Something that I never thought I would ever see in America. Accompanied by Klansmen and white supremacists, emerging from dark rooms and remote fields and the anonymity of the Internet, confronting decent Americans of all backgrounds standing in their way, into the bright light of day. And a young woman objecting to their presence was killed.

I wonder what hack wrote that purple prose. The demonstration, which had been granted a legal permit, was triggered by the home state of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson beginning to airbrush the history of the United States by removing statues of heroic Confederate officers in grand Soviet fashion. Torchlight marches are not the sole genre of the Far Right; as with most political demonstrations, many groups and interests joined the march, and many traveled from far away to participate. Even so, the number of marchers was estimated in the hundreds, not thousands.  It was also a single demonstration aimed at a matter of special emotional and historical resonance at the time.

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Unethical Quote Of The Month: Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Statement Regarding His Reparations Task Force’s Final Recommendations

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

I see another politician is envious of John Kerry’s Lifetime Weasel Award! Just consider this head-exploding response by California Governor Gavin Newsom, who appointed a task force that was under the impression that its—ridiculous, but never mind, let’s say good faith—recommendations for financial reparations to black Californians would be accepted as well as taken seriously:

“The Reparations Task Force’s independent findings and recommendations are a milestone in our bipartisan effort to advance justice and promote healing. This has been an important process, and we should continue to work as a nation to reconcile our original sin of slavery and understand how that history has shaped our country. Dealing with that legacy is about much more than cash payments. Many of the recommendations put forward by the Task Force are critical action items we’ve already been hard at work addressing: breaking down barriers to vote, bolstering resources to address hate, enacting sweeping law enforcement and justice reforms to build trust and safety, strengthening economic mobility — all while investing billions to root out disparities and improve equity in housing, education, healthcare, and well beyond. This work must continue. Following the Task Force’s submission of its final report this summer, I look forward to a continued partnership with the Legislature to advance systemic changes that ensure an inclusive and equitable future for all Californians.”

If there are any African-Americans in California—or the universe, for that matter—who see Newsom’s statement as anything but an insult to their intelligence, well, their intelligence deserves the insult.

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The Problem: Trump Doesn’t Believe In Democracy That Much More Than Democrats Do

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Some prominent progressives are noticing that Democrats are increasingly hostile to the core principles of democracy. Yesterday, for example, actor/activist Tim Robbins issued a tweet condemning the House Democrats who threatened reporter Matt Taibbi with prison following his congressional testimony on the so-called Twitter Files:

A serious, individual liberties-respecting, democratic values-honoring GOP candidate who hadn’t already burned every bridge he came across might have some success turning such previously knee-jerk Democratic voters around. Such a candidate is emphatically not Donald Trump.

In both his social media posts and his recent rally in New Hampshire, Trump implied that he wouldn’t participate in any pre-primary debates among other contenders for the Republican nomination. Describing the debates as giving rivals like Florida governor Ron DeSantis a chance to challenge him, he asked the crowd n Manchester,“Why would you do that?”

Gee, give me a minute; let me think. Oh! You do that because democracy requires an informed public. You do it because voters deserve an opportunity to compare their options. You do it to show respect for the process of American elections and the office Trump is seeking.

Then he said, “I do look forward to the debate with Joe.”

Idiot. Why would Biden agree to debate Trump if he didn’t have to? Trump ducking the primary debates would eliminate any traction he could gain by claiming that Joe was “ducking him.” Trump skipping the GOP candidates debates all but guarantees that Biden will refuse to subject himself to the risks of a debate format.

All of which degrades and undermines the functioning of our system. These guys don’t care, and Trump is seemingly setting himself up to run a Bull Moose-style kamikaze third party assault if the Republican Party doesn’t do his bidding and make him its candidate. Recall that the RNC announced that promising to support the GOP nominee was a prerequisite for participating in the debates. Now Trump is saying, “Debates? I don’t need no stinking debates!” It’s obvious what he’s threatening, isn’t it?

Trump is declaring himself the nominee—Napoleon crowned himself as Emperor, remember—-leaving the rest of the possible contenders with a no-win dilemma: all they can do is knock each other off while Trump coasts to the nomination, only appearing before fawning audiences of deplorables and never having to engage with his critics.

Democrats want to silence and criminalize dissent; Trump wants to block any route to challenging his power.

As divided as Americans are, it doesn’t appear that enough of them care about preserving democracy to do anything to preserve it. They only differ on the means by which they are willing to let it collapse.

Trump Wraps Up The Ethics Alarms 2023 “Asshole Of The Year” Award In Record Time

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

I may even have to name it “The Donald Trump Award.”

At a New Hampshire campaign rally yesterday, the former President drew laughs and cheers from his crowd of human seals when he did an imitation of President Joe Biden being disoriented and getting lost on stage.

Nice. Stay classy, Mr. President.

“You would think at least one time he’d get up and say, ‘I’m running for President — where, where am I going, where the hell am I going?’” Trump, said, doing his best imitation of an addled old coot. “I want to get out, oh, no over there, over there,” Trump said as he wandered away from the podium.

The ugly routine evoked this episode from his 2016 campaign, in which Trump mocked a disabled reporter (and later denied that he did.)

Trump is out of control at this point, assuming he’s ever been in control. He’s convinced that he’s invincible and already has the GOP nomination wrapped up. The political hit jobs on him from the George Soros prosecutors, the House Democrats and the Justice Department have only made him stronger politically.

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