Quotes

PM Ethics Shadows, 4/12/2022: Civil War Memories, Crazy Climate Change Terrorists, Someone Figures Out That BLM Is A Scam, And More [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The Civil War started on this date in 1861, as Southern forces fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Harbor. That’s about all that needs to be said. All wars are ethics nightmares, but none has had more ethics ramifications for this country, from the lives sacrificed to end slavery, to the war crimes of Andersonville, and the total war tactics of Sherman, to the myriad instances of astounding courage, cruelty and incompetence on the battlefields and the ongoing debate about how best to glean the right ethics lessons from them. (Tearing down statues is not it, though.) The Civil War took away our greatest POTUS, Lincoln, and gave us Presidents Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Harrison and McKinley, Civil War veterans all. The one non-veteran in the sequence, Grover Cleveland, is an ethics controversy himself because of it: Grover paid someone else to take his place in the draft. And yet….try asking the nearest college grad to give you the dates of the Civil War. I asked a Cornell law grad and former associate of one of the most prestigious law firm in the nation once.
She guessed “Somewhere in the 1930s, right?”

1. I’ll take “Unethical environmental fanatic nutballs, Alex!” Adbusters, a self-described “international collective of artists, designers, writers, musicians, poets, punks, philosophers and wild hearts” posted instructions on how to deflate the tires of “rich people’s” gas-powered vehicles. [Pointer: JutGory] “Wedge gravel in the tire valves, leaflet the SUV to let them know the tires are flat and why it was done, and walk away. It’s that simple,” the group said in a tweet. The group cautioned “to avoid targeting vehicles with disabled stickers or hangers.” That’s considerate of them…

This is what climate change hysteria does to people who lack ethics alarms. Here’s what they want you to leave on the windshield when you disable a car:

2. Good. Now what took you so long? On the Huffington Post, progressive opinionater Stephen Crockett authored a rueful essay bemoaning the fact that Black Lives Matter is apparently a racket. (Please note that this space figured that out years ago, and it wasn’t hard.)

He writes, Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Terms Of Affection And The Second Wife

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Ever since I dropped my subscription to the Washington Post in disgust (yes, the Times is better), I have been neglecting Carolyn Hax, the most consistently ethical advice columnist in captivity. I stumbled upon her latest column today, and my wife vociferously disagreed with my reaction to a question posed to her. I decided to make it an Ethics Quiz.

“Resentful” wrote that her father was widowed five years ago and remarried. She’s resentful that he keeps calling his second wife “Love of my life” in front of his adult children and his grandchildren. The daughter has “minimized contact with him as a result.” He’s hurt, and she wants to know what to tell him. “Quit [dumping] on the memory of my mother in my presence and you’ll see us more than twice a year” is what I WANT to say.”

The Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is the daughter being fair to her father?

Continue reading →

Is It Fair To Say Kamala Harris “May Be The Dumbest Person Ever Elected Vice President In American History”?

/ Jack Marshall / 55 Comments

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFAdXJtYeMI

[ Forgive me for using the above clip in the jokey context in which it was presented: It was the best I could find on YouTube, meaning that I could embed it easily. ]

During remarks she made in Sunset, Louisiana this week on a stop to highlight the value of bringing high-speed broadband internet to communities, Harris got herself stuck on the phrase “the importance of the passage of time” in between her usual inappropriate giggles. Then, today, yet another Harris staffer fled the coop, moving former Speaker Newt Gingrich to say,

“You know, he [Biden] may or may not have cognitive decline problems at his age, but at her age, she’s just dumb. Let’s be clear, Kamala Harris may be the dumbest person ever elected vice president in American history and that’s why people keep resigning.If you were her national security advisor, and you were competent, and you’d worked hard, and you knew what you were doing, and you watched her in Poland break up laughing when she’s asked about Ukrainian refugees, you had to feel a sense of total humiliation. So I’m not surprised that that particular advisor resigned because it’s very clear that Kamala Harris should never, ever be allowed to leave the country.”

Is that a fair thing to say?

Continue reading →

The Quest For The Perfect IIPTDXTTNMIAFB Continues, And Joe May Have Given Us A Winner!

/ Jack Marshall / 76 Comments

The issue is mainstream news media double standards, which are unethical in general and especially revolting in the news media’s protective stance toward President Biden no matter how badly he screws up in contrast to its coverage of Donald Trump, who could literally do no right in their jaundiced eyes. Yesterday Biden handed the news media a flaming IIPTDXTTNMIAFB, the convenient Ethics Alarms initials for “Imagine if President Trump did X that the news media is accepting from Biden.”

One of the most damaging and despicable Big Lies pushed relentlessly by the “resistance”/Democratic Party/ MSM alliance from the moment Trump was elected in 2016 was that he was a racist. If you asked an adherent of this slander to name any evidence, the “best” they could come up with was inevitably that Trump had vocally embraced the Birther smear about Barack Obama. But this only stands as proof that Trump is an asshole and a troll, about which there has never been any doubt. He made similar claims about Ted Cruz in order to derail his efforts to beat Trump for the 2016 GOP nomination. Trump plays dirty against all rivals. He’s an equal opportunity jerk, but he’s not a racist (or a white supremacist, a related Big Lie).

But the idea of planting these idea was “priming”: make sure “Trump is a racist” is sitting around rotting in the brains of gullible Americans, and let confirmation bias do the rest. So imagine if Trump had ever looked out over a Fort Worth, Texas, crowd at a VA clinic, and, referring to three Texas members of Congress who looked like Rep. Colin Allred (D), Rep. Marc Veasey (D), and Rep. Jake Ellzey (R) (above) who were in attendance, said,

“The three congressman you have here, two of them look like they really could and did play ball, and the other one looks like he can bomb you.”

Continue reading →

Will The Audacious “It Isn’t What it is” Propaganda Assault By The American Left Succeed?, Part 2

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Taking off from Part 1 (which took off from this), let’s review some (only some) of the anti-democratic conduct of the Democrats, their Congress and their President.

  • We saw President Biden withdraw troops from Afghanistan without consultation with Congress and in opposition to the military, abandoning thousand of U.S. citizens in the process.

  • We have seen the individual liberty-defying mask and vaccine mandates in Democratic states and cities.
  • We have witnesses attempts at the state and national level to discriminate against one racial group in such benefits as Small Business assistance and pandemic remedies.
  • We have watched the Senate Majority leader directly threaten the Supreme Court if it fails to support Democratic Party policies and positions.
  • We have seen the escalating air-brushing of history, to eliminate references to individuals and ideas that the party in power opposes.
  • We have seen Democrats and their allied professions and institution attempt to discriminate against religious groups, using the pandemic to ban their activities while favoring gatherings of similar size when they supported leftist activism.
  • We have seen concerted efforts to disarm law-abiding citizens, including removing the right to bear arms from those judged mentally or emotionally ill, both historical tactics of totalitarian governments.
  • We have seen the effort to corrupt the criminal justice system and the Rule of Law by demonizing and presuming the guilt of police officers, conservative protesters and others (like Kyle Rittenhouse) based on  skin color and political preferences.
  • We have seen an endorsement of mob rule, with “defund the police” being advocated across the country, radical progressive prosecutors refusing to prosecute crimes “of need,” and police being turned into targets by more than six years of demonizing by the Left.
  • We have seen an unprecedented attack on the Constitution and various amendments, with the goal of undoing protections wisely placed in the documents by the Founders. Among the targets: the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, the Due Process Clause, the Equal Protection Clause, the amendment process (so the dead-letter Equal Rights. Amendment can pass after the deadline for adoption has passed), the Electoral College, the composition of the Senate, and more.
  • We witnessed the Democratic party embracing a Marxist, anti-American, anti-White, violent and corrupt organization, Black Lives Matter.
  • We are watching that same party continue to support a program of anti-American, pro-Left indoctrination in the public schools.
  • We are seeing the deliberate promotion of class divisions and hostility, while the Democratic Party pursues radical ideological goals such as the devaluing of citizenship, the elimination of meritocracy and the pursuit of excellence,  and
  • Perhaps most glaring of all, we witnessed, for the first time in our history, not just one but two contrived impeachments based not on the kinds of “high crimes” prescribed by the Constitution, but on the simple fact that one party had a House majority  that it abused to attempt to remove an elected President it despised, plus
  • …so, so much more that represents a gross weakening of democracy and its values by the conduct and rhetoric of Democrats. The four year effort to cripple Donald Trump’s Presidency by withholding the basic, crucial, core aura of respect and deference to the office that every other President was bequeathed by his predecessors is, in my view, the worst of these, which is why Ethics Alarms has laboriously tracked it with the tag “2016 Ethics Post-Election Train Wreck.”

This has all occurred in plain sight, so for Democrats and progressives to pick this moment in history to declare Republicans as an existential threat to democracy is Jumbo-level audacity. Is this gaslighting the result of desperation, idiocy, delusion, or “It’s so crazy, it just might work”? Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Week: Former New York Times Editor James Bennet

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Under oath!

” It’s extremely important for the editorial board to have a reputation to call balls and strikes without partisanship.

Former NYT editor James Bennet, who was responsible for the editorial now the object of a defamation lawsuit by Sarah Palin.

Wow. If that’s “extremely important,” the Times sure is doing a lousy job achieving its alleged objective. It was just this week when the Editorial slot in the paper was taken up by a piece headlined (in the print edition), “Can the Republican Party Be Saved?” (online headline: “When the Storming of the Capitol Becomes ‘Legitimate Political Discourse.“) The second headline is deceit: as I pointed out in the previous post, the recent GOP resolution condemning the two Republican House members who voted for an illegal Democratic Party impeachment and who are fully participating in a rigged partisan investigation designed to find a way to lock up Donald Trump and as many of his supporters as possible, never asserts that the Jan. 6 riot was “legitimate political discourse.” Never mind: that’s the latest false narrative fad, like the “Trump called white supremacists ‘fine people'” smear that one can still hear one’s Facebook friends cite to this day. Of course the Times is running with it.

It was the print headline that really struck me, though. This week, polls came out showing that Joe Biden’s support had slipped into the thirties with no end to the free-fall in sight, and that the Republicans were surging further ahead in the Congressional mid-terms survey. And the non-partisan Times’ question is whether Republicans can be saved! Only a thoroughly biased group of editors wouldn’t perceive how bad that kind of tunnel vision makes the paper look. But bias makes you stupid. In its most extreme cases, victims can’t even see how biased they are. Continue reading →

Hump Day Ethics Jumps, Bumps And Lumps, 2/2/2022

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

Nothing like dancing camels to end a perfect day. If only this had been a perfect day…

Meanwhile, I’m so proud! Having told my undergraduate institution that it had so embarrassed me that I would not be attending my BIG reunion this Fall, which I once was looking forward to greatly, it was thrilling to see my law school alma mater, which I also worked for over the next four years after graduation (It liked me! It really liked me!), receive a major honor. Yes, The FIRE named Georgetown University Law Center one of the 10 Worst on its yearly list of educational institutions that do not adequately respect and bolster freedom of speech.

Congratulations, GULC! You’ve worked hard for this the last few years, and the honor is richly deserved.

1. Quit, Whoopi, but let me write your resignation letter. It is being reported that Whoopi Goldberg is furious that she was suspended by ABC for her dumb, ill-considered, offensive but provocative comments about the Holocaust on the dumb, ill-considered, offensive but provocative show “The View.” Her worst statement? I vote for “Well, this is white people doing it to white people. So, this is y’all go fight amongst yourselves.” That was part of her explanation of why the “Final Solution,” in which Hitler’s crazies decided to see the purification of the white race by exterminating “lesser races” like the Semites—just guess what would have happened to the Whoop’s people when Germany took over the U.S. by getting the A-Bomb first!—wasn’t about race. She feels, we are told,“humiliated” at being disciplined  after she followed their advice to apologize. No, no, that’s not what Whoopi should quit over. Charles C.W. Cooke explains it well in “Whoopi Goldberg’s Suspension from The View Is Illiberal and Irrational” at the National Review. Meanwhile, many are asking the unanswerable question, how come Disney, who owns ABC, fired actress Gina Carano when she said on social media—not on TV, not under Disney’s banner, that the repressive political speech climate reminded her of Nazi Germany. The “Mandalorian” star was also dropped by talent agency UTA and Lucasfilms, leading some writers to compare her treatment to the Fifties blacklist. Whoopi got a relatively minor two-week suspension. Double standard there, obviously: Whoopi is a black progressive, Carano is a white conservative. Neither should be punished for an opinion unrelated to their competence at their job. If Whoopi quits, she could do some good by making it clear that it’s in defense of free speech and people being unafraid to speak freely. Continue reading →

Welcome February Ethics Warm-Up, 2/1/22: Yes, Whoopi Is Officially An Idiot

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

A Janet Jackson movie is playing on cable, so of course we’re going to hear, again, how poor Janet was unfairly and cruelly blamed for “Nipplegate,” when the supposedly family-friendly Super Bowl half-time show featured an uncleared rapey bit of choreography in which Justin Timberlake “tore” Jackson’s costume, revealing her breast. It all happened on this date in 2004. CBS got fined and the NFL got in trouble. Timberlake lied, wink-wink, calling it a “wardrobe malfunction,” which everybody thought was cute. Historical revisionism has Janet as a victim of a sexist culture because she was the focus of most of the criticism and not the man in the plot. But it was her breast, after all. She also lied, and has been lying for almost 20 years.

Here is what I wrote about it in part on the Ethics Scoreboard the year it happened. I had forgotten: Janey Jackson got the very first Jumbo!

Janet Jackson has now appeared on the David Letterman Show to deny that her infamous Super Bowl breast-baring was anything but an accident. Before we discuss what a ridiculously transparent lie this is, let us also ask, “Why bother?” The damage, whatever it is, is done. Nobody is going to believe her. This was a fine opportunity for Jackson to stand up, admit an error in judgment, and use her celebrity to endorse some ethical values, like honesty, taking responsibility for one’s actions, and contrition.

But nooooooo.

Janet wants us to believe the incident was an accident, completely unchoreographed or planned. Never mind that:

  • Justin Timberlake’s move uncovering Ms. Jackson’s breast occurred on a musical beat, corresponding to song lyrics referring to his “having her naked by the end of this song.”
  • Her costume conveniently had a detachable flap that would expose the breast without doing any damage to the rest of her outfit.
  • Her breast had a large, uncomfortable-looking decoration of some kind stuck to it, raising the obvious question of what it was doing there if it wasn’t intended to be seen.
  • Timberlake’s comments immediately after the show confirmed that the moment was choreographed…

Oh, just never mind. If this were a crime, any jury would find Jackson guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Even the most dishonest people, when confronted with undeniable proof of their misdeeds, will usually confess. Not Janet Jackson.

Here’s your elephant, kid. This Jumbo’s for you!

1. Who can you trust? Justice Breyer was reportedly angry that his plans to retire at the end of the current SCOTUS term was leaked. Only close staff, family, his Supreme Court colleagues and the President had been made aware of his decision. He did not want to be a lame duck justice, and had asked his confidantes for confidentiality. Now the mystery of who betrayed Breyer’s trust is solved. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) told reporters yesterday that President Joe Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, spilled the metaphorical beans.

If I were Breyer, my reaction would be to do what Donald Trump has done several times with leaks: make the leaker and the news media look foolish by changing course. I would not retire, after a betrayal like that, and make Democrats wait another term. Justice Breyer, however, doesn’t think this way Too bad. Continue reading →

The Biden Supreme Court Pick Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Wow, that was fast. This episode has turned into an ethics train wreck with record speed. Some ethics train wrecks slow down and stop after a few months; other roll on seemingly forever. The Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman Ethics Train Wreck, which has included directly-related wrecks like the Ferguson Ethics Train Wreck and the George Floyd Ethics Train Wreck, is almost nine years old, and won’t stop until Black Lives Matter lies a-moldering in the grave. The 2016 Presidential Election Ethics Train Wreck is still going strong, with the Jan. 6 riot and the subsequent kangaroo court investigation in the House the latest cars to be hooked up. The Biden Supreme Court Ethics Train Wreck? At this point, where it stops, nobody knows.

It began before it was even certain Biden would get a SCOTUS nomination, when he first promised to name a black woman to the Court. That promise, which he quickly confirmed once Justice Breyer announced his retirement, was unethical “on its face,” as the Court might say. The statement means, and can only mean, that group identification is the primary priority for the President of the United Sates in nominating a crucial individual who will help determine the course of the nation’s laws, justice system, constitutional integrity and culture for decades to come. That function has nothing whatsoever to do with race or gender. Nothing. Being black, white, Native American or Asian does not make an individual more or less qualified for the job, and neither does gender. Biden’s statement literally means that he is placing tribalism and group identification biases above the substantive needs of the nation. That’s unethical. Other Presidents have done this, notably Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. That’s no mitigation.

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Council Rock Elementary School, “Jingle Bells,”And When Something Trivial Demands A Strong Response (Part Two)

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Part I described the cowardly and pandering rationale for a New York elementary school to banish “Jingle Bells” from its curriculum, and why the cultural and political issue underlying the move is more important than the song itself.

Here is the response of the Brighton Central School District Superintendent, Kevin McGowan, in response to media inquiries about the decision. In the interests of efficiency, I will interweave my commentary with his statement, in bold.

Continue reading →