Quotes

The Pope’s Views On When Wars Should Be Fought Are Irrelevant To Reality And Not Just Useless, But Harmful

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

Once again, the position at EA is that the Pope—it doesn’t matter which Pope—is unethically abusing his authority and serving as gum in the works while fostering confusion when he presumes dictate national policy based on idealism and utopianism

A guy I never heard of who was an executive editor of The National Catholic Reporter and who, we are told, “directed coverage of the conclave that elected Pope Leo XIV,” was awarded an op-ed in the New York Times (Gift link, though it’s not much of a gift) to explain why he thinks the Pope thinks that “the age of artificial intelligence undermines the moral criteria for just war.” Ramalama ding-dong! Why is anyone listening to guys who have the luxury of dealing with the abstract and never having the responsibility of keeping a nation and a population safe and secure as they pontificate about the right way to do it? Why is anyone reading the analysis of an obscure functionary who has also never had to face the harsh human, military, geopolitical and practical realities of war as he rationalizes the basis for a Pope’s irresponsible interference with serious international matters?

The New York Times has demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is fully committed to undermining President Trump, his policies and his popular support. The “just war” blather, another phase of arguing how many angels can gather on a pinhead, suddenly became useful to the Axis of Unethical conduct when it wanted to root for a murderous, anti-Christian Islamic regime while it was fighting the United States of America. Popes never support wars, and it isn’t news when the Vatican condemns one. Infamously, the Vatican refused to take sides in World War II, or take any substantive steps to try to end the extermination of Jews in Europe. Now the Pope doesn’t think a war that has among its goals making as certain as possible that Iran doesn’t have the ability to do what it has been promising to do for decades—destroy Israel— is a “just war,” or to be more precise, that we should redefine “just war” to eliminate Israel’s and the U.S.’s justification for neutralizing Iran.

There’s a damning consistency there, no?

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Rep. Jasmine Crocket On a Racist Rampage

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

And she was supposedly a rising star of the Democratic Party. Well, she’s better than Graham Platner…

Crockett, who lost her attempt to run for the U.S. Senate and now is a lame duck in the House, was in fine form this week. The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the evidence that the Southern Poverty Law Center was paying the “hate groups” it railed against. One of the witnesses called by the Republicans on the committee was Dr. Alveda King. Her father is Alfred Daniel King, the younger brother of Martin Luther King Jr., and she has broken ranks to be a GOP supporter and an advocate for President Trump.

After King’s statement, Crockett began shouting about how how “white men” had invited Alveda to the hearing and that those white men from the GOP wanted to “tell people of color who is fighting for who. People of color do not feel comfortable or welcomed within your party.”  

“That’s why you have to parade someone who has the name ‘Dr. King’ attached to them, so that people can be confused,” she continued. “Because I have been reading the comments online, and people are like, ‘Who is this Dr. King’ because you want them to believe that she somehow espouses who Dr. King was.” Crockett didn’t give this Dr. King an opportunity to respond, but the next speaker, Rep. Russell Fry (R-S.C.), allowed her to do so.

“Congresswoman, I am a bit emotional,” King began. “I’m going to watch what I say, but it seems as though you have suggested that I am a bastard to the King family legacy. I am legitimately the daughter of the Rev. Alfred Daniel Williams King and Dr. Naomi Ruth Barber King. We are a family who loves God. And I love you. God bless you.” 

Crockett walked out of the chamber in the midst of King’s statement. Nice.

She was just getting warmed up, though. Later that day, after the Karmelo Anthony guilty verdict was announced, the loud-mouth Congresswoman went on her “Clock It With Crockett”podcast and wildly distorted the facts of the case. She argued that the victim Austin Metcalf’s family couldn’t understand the pain black women have to endure daily. Crockett said that was made clear to her again while talking about the case to a friend who is a black mother. “Black women — especially black women who have black male children — live in fear and agony every single day,” Crockett said. “A fear and agony that I promise you, the Metcalfs probably never spent a day living that way.”

How ironic that their unarmed son was the one who was murdered, not the worried black mother’s son who stabbed him in the heart.

Crockett then expressed the revolutionary idea that Americans need to have “real conversations about race in this country,” as if such conversations aren’t usually hijacked by race-hustlers like Jasmine Crockett, making them divisive and useless.

Crockett, ignoring the evidence at trial, insisted that the stabbing was self-defense. “If a 300-pound man is beating me, like on top of me and beating me down, I’m not limited to fists,” Crockett said. She must have been thinking of Mike Brown. “Cuz I’m telling you right now, if you were twice my weight and got way more strength than me and you got me pinned down, I don’t believe I’m going to survive,” Crockett ranted. It was reported that Metcalf was 6’0, 200 pounds, and Anthony is 5’11 and 162 pounds. The latter was never “pinned down” nor was he in danger of being pinned down. Witnesses said that Anthony dared Metcalf to touch him, and stabbed him to death when he did.

Jasmine: “And when you look at like George Floyd, like George Floyd died, and they never took out a quote-unquote weapon. So this idea you can’t die is wild, right?” Wait, was Metcalf kneeling on Anthony’s neck? What was she talking about?

Then Crockett claimed the murder weapon (it was a knife with a five-inch blade) was too small.

“Well, I would have argued the size of it alone, you wouldn’t even think it’s a deadly weapon,” she reasoned. By definition, if the knife penetrated Metcalf’s heart and killed the kid, it’s a deadly weapon.

Jasmine then said that Metcalf confronted Anthony because “this is the culture that is being instigated,” where white people are “gettin’ real bold with us right now.”

I guess the solution is to kill more white people when they get too bold.

 

Graham Platner, The Human Smoking Gun

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments
@theroguednc

A Maine voter said they would not support Platner if he had an Israeli flag tattoo.

♬ original sound – RogueDNC

There is no more mystery to be solved about Graham Platner, whom the Democrats really and truly want to inflict on the U.S. Senate, the nation, and the dumb people of Maine (if they vote for Platner, they are by definition dumber than planaria). As David Brooks explained on PBS, “The guy is a moral degenerate. The abuse of women, the sexting, the Nazi tattoo, I don’t even need to say anything beyond his Reddit posts, which are not in the past, by the way. He did that for a long time, abusing rape — people who might have been raped, diminishing rape in the military, insulting fellow military officers, calling himself a communist. It’s just — it’s a pathetic empty guy who postures in a way that’s kind of repulsive.” There was no rebuttal from his fellow leftists on the show because there is no rebuttal to be made. Jonathan Capehart, who had just endorsed voting for Platner (because Trump, and all Democrats are by definition better than all Republicans, so there!) could only mutter “I agree with you” and then go on to try to rationalize the indefensible, sounding, as usual, like an idiot.

This is the quality of the character of those urging Mainers to vote for the most repulsive major political party U.S. Senate candidate in recent history. Yes, even worse than Roy Moore (R-AL, 2017) and worse than Todd Akin (R-MO, 2012). [You remember Todd, don’t you? He was the genius who said that a woman couldn’t get pregnant from being raped, because her body would reject the sperm of a bad person, or something.] The woman in the video above, incidentally, is a journalist, Caroline McCaughey, who was at a Platner rally. Nice.

The “resistance” /progressive/ Democratic Party position is that Platner is worthy of a Senate seat over a moderate Republican, Susan Collins, because he might give the Democratic Party a Senate majority to do all of the irresponsible, proto-totalitarian things they crave, like packing the Supreme Court. They would take the same position if he said things as stupid as Akin or stalked little girls, like Moore. (To be fair, Platner wouldn’t stalk them, he would just text them photos of his penis.)

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Stop Making Me Defend Debbie Wasserman Schultz!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Ick, yuck, pooey! In the EA “Stop making me defend…” series, there has never been a subject more revolting than Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.). She’s noted in past posts for her unethical quotes, her multiple scandals (here, too), her ignorant speech patterns (also here) and her lies. She was the main miscreant in Hillary Clinton’s rigged Presidential nomination in 2016. The only reason I haven’t focused on this awful, unethical woman lately is that the Democrats have so many younger recruits who are as bad as she is or worse.

However, the one thing I will never criticize DWS for is her color.

Other Democrats, however, are not so forgiving.

After Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation last month creating a new congressional map in Florida, Rep. Wasserman Schultz decided not to run for re-election in her altered 22nd Congressional District, where she lives and where the voters are apparently morons since they have voted for this ethics-free creep for 11terms. Instead, Wasserman Schultz opted to run in the now more Democratic-leaning 20th District. Ah, but that district has long elected black members of Congress. So, true to their party’s baked-in racism, black leaders and candidates in the 20th are furious that a white bitch is daring to encroach on their domain.

“I would not have expected the call would come from inside the house,” said Elijah Manley, a teacher and activist who was the first candidate to enter the primary race for the district’s seat. “I didn’t think a white Democrat would be the one to take away a black seat.” Rapper Luther “Luke” Campbell, also running for the seat, said, “If her strategy is to come in because there are multiple Black candidates and hope we ‘split the vote’ … that’s the same old playbook — divide and conquer.” “At a time when aggressive redistricting has already weakened minority voting strength across Florida, the preservation of Black political representation is not optional,” the Democratic Black Caucus of Florida said in a statement. “It is essential.”

I keep trying to imagine a political party throwing a fit on the grounds that a black candidate is daring to run for a “white” seat. That would be seen, correctly, as racism straight up. But Democrats have programmed their black supporters to embrace “good racism” while maintaining that all blacks are cookie-cutter clones who will think and behave as their color demands, rather than as objective and patriotic Americans seeking what is the right course for all.

I would vote for a block of cheese over Debbie Wasserman Schultz, but black Democrats opposing her based on her race shows how warped, corrupted and bigoted their party has become.

Ethics Villain: Jill Biden [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

There are lively debates among historians regarding who was the best First Lady (I view it as a dead heat between Abigail Adams and Eleanor Roosevelt), but the contest for the Worst First Lady Ever is settled. It’s Jill Biden, easy. Edith Wilson hid her husband’s stroke from the nation but at least she wasn’t complicit in letting an unfit and mentally declining man run in the first place. Woodrow was a terrible human being, but until his stroke he wasn’t an incompetent one. Michelle Obama was and is loathsome, but she didn’t do much substantive damage while she was in the White House. She left that to her husband.

I’m going to give you a gift link to the New York Times’s notably uncritical report on Jill’s new spin on her husband’s crack-up during that fateful debate with Donald Trump, when the mentally declining President descended into authentic frontier gibberish. The Times:

“I don’t know what happened,” the former first lady said in an interview with “CBS News Sunday Morning.” “As I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.’ And it scared me to death.” In a 30-second snippet of the interview, which is scheduled to air in full this weekend, she said that she had never seen her husband have a meltdown like the one she saw when he took the debate stage in Atlanta. Next week, she is releasing ‘View From the East Wing,’ a memoir of her time as first lady.”

I call bullshit, and so should everyone else. There is so much wrong with that fake narrative if boggles the mind:

1. She’s lying. Everyone had seen Biden freeze, become disoriented, mumble and get confused repeatedly for nearly four years. Months before, Special Counsel Robert Hur released a 388-page report on President Biden’s retention of classified material. In opting not to bring charges, Hur said that Biden would appear to the jury too befuddled to find guilty of the requisite intent. “We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur wrote. “Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.” Sure sounds like a man every American should feel secure having his finger on the nuclear button! Yet the Axis chorus of partisan hacks continued to tell the public that Joe was “as sharp as a tack.”

2. After Biden’s embarrassment in the debate, Jill went into full cover-up mode. “You answered every question!” she exclaimed, treating the President of the United States like a second-grader. His gibberish was bad enough that she thought he had a stroke, she says now, but not bad enough to have him checked out. Biden had refused to have a cognition test: after this episode, wouldn’t a caring wife be obligated to insist on a medical examination? Of course she would, except that the reality was that Biden’s debate performance was not out of character at that point. His staff and family were thinking, “Oh no. I was afraid this would happen.” Their response after the debate, joining in the agreed upon narrative that “he had a cold…he was tired….he just had a bad night…it could have happened to anyone…he’s always had a stammer…Trump rambled too!” proves that there was no new concern for Biden’s well-being, only concern that the jig was up.

3. In February of 2020, I wrote in part…

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OK, Maybe Bill Maher Is Sincere In His Criticism Of Democrats and Progressives…MAYBE, Part II: Why Bill’s “New Rule” Is Not As Ethical As He Thinks It Is

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

In Part I, I published Bill Maher’s surprising slap at Democrats and progressives for their unethical drift into anti-Semitism. It’s pretty good—for Bill. The 18 paragraphs are numbered so I don’t have to repeat them here, especially since WordPress nearly sent me to the woodchipper when I was trying to compose the first post. I’m sorry that you’ll have to jump back and forth, but so do I, to write this.

And away we go…

1. Everyone has a right to be anti-Semitic, just as everyone has a right to lie, or commit adultery. Advocating anti-Semitism, promoting it, and acting on it is still unethical. These ethical nuances, rights vs. law vs. ethics, are beyond Maher’s comprehension.

2. See? Bill immediately defaults to a Rationalization #22 defense of Israel. It isn’t the worst country! Wow. Talk about a back-handed compliment!

3. Not quite as bad as China, Russia, Sudan, Iran, Myanmar, Haiti, the Congo, and North Korea, eh? Way to make anti-Semites feel ashamed, Bill….

4. Ezra Klein is nothing to be proud of. He has been a leader of Axis bias for a decade.

5. A “They’re just as bad” (Rationalization #2) cheat by Maher, and he’s cherry-picking. Carlson has been excoriated by conservatives for his anti-Israel stance. He is not representative of the Right at all, and I, for one, never thought he was.

6. Bill managed not to mention the Times’ “dog rape” libel.

9. Maher likes the #22 rationalization so much he comes back to it. This is because Bill doesn’t get ethics. He also evokes “Everybody does it!” here, the hoariest rationalization of all. Jeez Bill…read a book.

10. The “new rule” is about Democratic Party anti-Semitism, but the candidate he writes the most about is an obscure anti-Semitic Republican. Huh.

11. Israel overwhelmingly has the “right-wingers” on its side, and it has the President of the United States on its side in particular. Maher never mentions President Trump at all. He’s only willing to infuriate his audience so much, apparently.

12. Trying to continue his false equivalence argument regarding anti-Semitism on”both sides,” Maher pairs two typical leftist academics with…Candace Owens? She is persona non grata among conservatives, a true embarrassment, and she is the opposite of an academic, as she is illiterate.

13. Again with the rogue Republican joke in a statement about Leftist anti-Semitism, and again, Bill is cherry-picking. There is a reason that Margery Taylor Greene isn’t in Congress any more. Representing her idiocy as mainstream Republicanism is despicable. Rep. Fine’s sharp quip after one of Mayor Mamdani’s Muslim minions derided dogs was, in my opinion, undiplomatic but defensible. No dogs in the U.S. have engaged in any mass shootings or terrorism.

14-18. Bill finishes very strong, almost making up for his rationalizations and weasel words on the way to his conclusion

I Hope Rudy Giuliani Recovers Sufficiently To Read This: A Legal Ethicist Neatly Explains What’s Wrong With Bars Punishing Trump’s “Stop the Steal” Attorneys

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Rudy Giuliani is in critical condition in a hospital today, and it reminded me to finish this post.

Giuliani is one of the lawyers hit with bar association discipline for representing Donald Trump in the wake of the highly suspicious 2020 Presidential election, or perhaps I should say the way they represented Trump and his contention that the election was “stolen” or “rigged.” I have written two posts about the D.C. Bar and New York Sate Bar’s proceedings against Rudy here and especially here. My conclusion in then latter piece, in part. :

“This case has been the subject of much debate by my legal ethicist colleagues of late, with a depressing near-consensus that Rudy is getting what he deserves. This is because, I detect, the vast majority of lawyers cannot see through their political biases and Trump hate. At the most simple level,… contrary to the Court’s certitude, all of the evidence is not in, though the claim that there was widespread election fraud and that the election was “stolen” has for many months been pronounced “a lie” by Democrats and the mainstream media with suspicious vigor. While the opinion makes a convincing case that many of Giuliani’s statements, including some made to courts and government bodies, were careless, sloppy, badly sourced, unprofessional and wrong, it cannot know at this point that his (or Trump’s) general claim is false. If it is not false, then raising doubts among the public cannot be called dangerous to the public. It is more dangerous to keep opinions, arguments and ideas from the public’s awareness “for their own good.”…Giuliani, like so many other victims of the 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck, is being punished by a double standard predicated on the hatred of Donald Trump. That’s unethical.”

Esteemed law professor Brad Wendel, who belongs to the same, almost totally anti-Trump legal ethics specialist association that I do, has published a contrarian analysis following California’s disbarment of John Eastman (above), who was one of the principal architects, along with Kenneth Chesebro (who was disbarred in New York after pleading guilty in Georgia to charges of election interference), of President Trump’s legal assault on the 2020 election. There are plenty of tells in Prof. Wendel’s essay that he is far from a Trump admirer (for example, he refers to the “scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election.”) However, he writes,

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Ugh…So The President Attacks The Pope! The Two Diagrams Trump Doesn’t Understand…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

This is ridiculous.

The President took to social media again yesterday to announce that he doesn’t like the Pope:

What an irredeemably stupid thing to do.

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The Drip Drip Drip Of Trump Derangement Evidence…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Seen on social media (with over 6,000 “loves”:

“Name one thing this administration has done that it promised it would.I can name a dozen ways this admin has backstabbed his base. I can’t name single accomplishment other than feeling good the day he won.”

It’s one thing to be deliberately obtuse, continue with absurd Axis narratives (“Trump is senile”) and to deny facts right in front of your face, which is what my Trump Deranged Facebook friends do daily. It is quite another to put a statement as fatuous as the one above in the web like a hanging curve over the middle of the plate to Aaron Judge.

Conservative lawyer Will Chamberlain replied as I might have,

“Border crossings to near zero. Net negative migration. 95% reduction in asylum grants. Lawsuits against a slew of woke universities. DEI getting crushed everywhere. Massive, beneficial deregulation. No tax on tips. No tax on overtime. Venezuela turned into an American ally. And that’s just off the top of my head.”

He left out winding down the Dept. of Education, finally getting rid of public funding for NPR and PBS, using tariffs to negotiate more favorable trade deals, making major progress in ending the war in Gaza, seriously addressing crime in major cities, gutting idiotic climate change policies, and making America Great Again, which means, in part, going to the Moon again, demonstrating American military power, and ending wokey military policies that have nothing to do with defending the country. And that’s just off the top of MY head. It is also relevant that Trump has only been in office less than 15 months.

As for the alleged “endless wars” betrayal, any President who would not do what Trump did in Iran after assessing new developments and intelligence because of a campaign promise has breached his oath and his duty. That’s unethical as well as cowardly.

I know, I know…I promised to do an exhaustive and thorough post about what constitutes Trump Derangement beyond disapproving of the Presidents tweets, rhetoric, style and dubious taste in appointees. I hope I find time to do it (living up to my promises)…in the meantime, I’ll be addressing the issue piecemeal.

Ethics Trivia, Horror Stories, and More…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The Rest of the Story: After picking up frozen entrees at Trader Joe’s yesterday, this afternoon I went to Harris Teeter’s for staples, like coffee and soft drinks. And guess what! The same woman who hit me up yesterday flashed her “I am poor with children and they are hungry…” card at me again, and a second woman, using what looked like the a copy of the same card, stopped me a bit later! I reported both of them and got them kicked out of the store. I should have told them, “The ice section is right over there…”

Also:

1. Memories! Last night I re-watched “Swing Time,” my favorite of the Fred & Ginger movie musicals (directed by George Stevens before filming the death camps in Europe during World War II convinced him that he didn’t want to make comedies any more) and was jarred into a reminiscence when Fred started doing his homage to Bill “Bojangles’ Robinson, one of his tap-dancing mentors. I remembered how in 2018 I wrote a serious ethics post about how Astaire’s blackface number “Bojangles of Broadway” was an example of using black make-up as simply make-up, and not as a racial slur. When I poste it on my Facebook page, Facebook banned Ethics Alarms, with any link to it causing a post to be taken down, for over two years. At the time, a lot of my views were coming from Facebook, and the censorship was harmful. So no, I don’t forget, and won’t forgive, Woke World for its suppression of speech, opinions and ideas as practiced by Big Tech and the social media giants through to the end of the Biden administration, and yes, that experience taught me that the “liberal” side of the ideological spectrum wasn’t liberal at all. Here’s that post.

Now watch me get banned again…

2. Some Democrats are really talking about impeaching President Trump because he said that he would wipe out Iran’s civilization. Why would anyone take this party seriously? I’ve been trying to think of what Trump’s variation on Teddy Roosevelt’s most famous quote, “Speak softly but carry a big stick” would be, not that TR always spoke softly by any means. “Speak like a madman and keep them guessing?”

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