Quotes

The Fourth Annual Ethics Alarms Awards: The Worst of Ethics 2012 (Part 1)

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Trayvon

Welcome to the Fourth  Annual Ethics Alarms Awards

Recognizing the Best and Worst of Ethics in 2012!

This is the first installment of the Worst. (Part 2 is here, the Best is here.)

2012 inspired over 1000 posts, and Ethics Alarms still missed a lot. And the last week of 2012 was sufficiently ethics packed that the Awards are late this year. My apologies.

In a depressingly unethical year, these were the low points:

Ethics Train Wreck of the Year

Was there ever any doubt? The Trayvon Martin- George Zimmerman fiasco, naturally, which is far from over. This year’s winner may be the worst ethics train wreck since Monica and Bill were dominating the news.  So far it has involved dubious, unprofessional or clearly unethical conduct by, among others, Martin’s parents, their lawyer, Zimmerman, his wife, the police, Zimmerman’s first set of lawyers, the prosecutor, the Congressional Black Caucus, NBC (which repeatedly broadcast an “accidentally” truncated tape of Zimmerman’s 911 call that made him sound racist), the rest of the broadcast media, conservative talk radio and bloggers (who decided their contribution would be to try to show that Martin deserved to be shot), Spike Lee, Rosie O’Donnell, the New Black Panthers, and President Obama, who ratcheted up the hate being focused on Zimmerman by implying that the killing as racially motivated, and by connecting himself to the victim. Runner-up: The 2012 Presidential campaign.

“Incompetent Elected Officials of the Year” Division Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week: Chicago White Sox Thirdbaseman Kevin Youkilis

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

“And to all those kids out there in Red Sox Nation, I can give you my Dad’s advice. ‘Life is like a throw to first base: always aim high.‘”

—–Kevin Youkilis, former Boston Red Sox star recently traded to the Chicago White Sox, in a farewell letter of appreciation to Boston’s management and fans

“If you trade him, he will leave an inspiring ethics quote…”

 

The letter concluded, “I love you all, and thanks.”

And thank you, Kevin, for departing with class and gentility, and for imparting some sound ethical wisdom on the way.

“YOUK!”

________________________________________________________________________

Source: Boston.com

Graphic: Anyclip

_______________________________________________________________________

Ethics Dunce and Unethical Quote of the Day: Jon Dawson

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

“OH, you mean the one with the word “Column” at the beginning?”

—-Jon Dawson, alleged columnist for the Kinston Free Press, in snotty response to my query regarding his fake story that prompted my recent post, “Ethics Train Wreck in a Little Tea Pot.” I asked if his story was a hoax.

Yeah, you’re right…if I had seen the photo first, I might have been more suspicious….

I guess his answer means yes. I also guess somebody ought to tell all the other local news and city beat columnists around the country that the heading “column” by their names is supposed to be understood as “Don’t believe a thing I say.” Someone should also let national writers like E.J. Dionne, Robert Samuelson, Kathleen Parker, John Avlon, Andrew Sullivan…anyone with a column, really…that their brand of punditry and journalism is supposed to be assumed to be satirical and tongue-in-cheek, because “column” gives proper notice that the “facts” the column contains are likely to be hooey.

Back when I lived in Boston, there was a city beat columnist I enjoyed and read often. He was clever and funny, and his specialty was local Boston stories. His name is Mike Barnacle. He’s not in Boston any more: they ran him out of town for making up stories or embellishing them with phony facts. (He is now seen on MSNBC, where facts are beside the point.) I thought they were a bit rough on Mike in Boston, and I wonder why he didn’t inform his paper that the fact that he wrote a “column” gave him leave to test the gullibility of his readers every day. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Twitter Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

An Ethics Alarms Quiz for a hot sleepy Sunday:

Grant’s Tomb or the National Stupid Question Monument

Young Georgia Ford of Great Britain wasn’t a veteran of Twitter, and when she sent a tweet to her followers naively asking if the Wimbledon tennis tournament was “always held in London,” she had no reason to expect that viral re-tweeting would make her an international laughingstock. It did though, as thousands of Twitterphiles, and some celebrities, pounced on her question and mocked her by name. “Wow, that Georgia Ford tweet from earlier is possibly the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” tweeted one Laurence T. Green, who obviously does not follow the speeches of Joe Biden, the political opinions of Bill Maher, or the periodic pronouncements of Rep. Allen West. Embarrassed and humiliated, with her name being made a synonym for ignorance, Georgia closed her Twitter account.

Your Ethics Quiz: Was Georgia’s treatment by the Twittersphere unethical, or was her tweet fair game for ridicule? Continue reading →

Making Mitt Seem Stupid: A Confirmation Bias Case Study

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“Tina Fey, Sarah Palin…who cares who said what? Palin’s stupid, right?

Many progressives and liberals (this therefore includes the majority of journalists)  are so sure that conservatives are stupid that they allow confirmation bias to make them act stupidly and unethically. Either that, or some of them just choose to lie their heads off and pretend people don’t notice.

I first realized this a while back when the ABC website posted a feature called  “I Can’t Believe He Said That!” or something in that vein, featuring verbal gaffes by politicians. Well, actually it featured verbal gaffes by 19 Republicans and one Democrat (Joe Biden, of course.) Oddly, President Obama’s goof about the “57 states” wasn’t there, because, as we all know, he’s brilliant and his gaffes don’t count. Well, actually, the list was 18 Republicans, one Democrat, and Tina Fey. Yes, the celebrated Saturday Night Live Sarah Palin impressionist was represented with her “I can see Russia from my house!” line…except that it was attributed to Sarah Palin. Similarly, I have quizzed people about who first used the non-word “strategery.” Sure enough, about half in my unscientific poll, almost exclusively Democrats, thought it was President Bush, and not the real quote-master, SNL Bush satirist and comedian Will Farrell when he was playing Bush.

This was brought back to mind recently when “Doonesbury’s” Gary Trudeau  mocked Mitt Romney for making this spectacularly fatuous, Dan Quayle-like declaration in a stump speech,

“I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in.”  Continue reading →

Yet Soon We Will Be Missing Ann Curry On The Today Show

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Pretty, perky, biased and incompetent—yup, perfect for NBC.

Fresh from highlighting the lack of professionalism exhibited by Ann Curry as she was booted off the Today Show, I was jostled by another blog’s link to this one reminding me that I already had an ethics run-in with her replacement, the fresh-faced, cute as a button, proudly biased and ignorant Savannah Guthrie, who continues the devolution of the female liberal mouthpiece co-anchor position on the show that began with Barbara Walters.

The hard conservative site Freedom Report alerted me that I had blown the whistle on Guthrie’s incompetence in an April, 2011 post, after she tried to “gotcha!” Donald Trump and exposed her own Constitutional illiteracy instead. I had forgotten the episode, perhaps because it forced me to defend The Donald, which was and is about as appealing to me as snorting skunks. You can read the post here. A quick summary: Guthrie attempted to argue against Trump’s pro-life views by asking the Constitutional equivalent of the automobile-tuning query asked of expert witness/hairdresser Marisa Tomei in the climax of  the classic,”My Cousin Vinnie,” to which she replies, “It’s a bullshit question!”: Continue reading →

The Ethics Verdict on the Chris Hayes Apology

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

To be fair, while Chris Hayes is ill-informed, ungrateful and arrogant, at least he’s incoherent.

As anyone could have predicted, MSNBC host Chris Hayes had to issue an apology after his fatuous and inarticulate comments about Memorial Day. If you were lucky enough to miss them, here they are:

“I think it’s interesting because I think it is very difficult to talk about the war dead and the fallen without invoking valor, without invoking the words “heroes.” Why do I feel so [uncomfortable] about the word “hero”? I feel comfortable — uncomfortable — about the word because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war. Um, and, I don’t want to obviously desecrate or disrespect memory of anyone that’s fallen, and obviously there are individual circumstances in which there is genuine, tremendous heroism: hail of gunfire, rescuing fellow soldiers and things like that. But it seems to me that we marshal this word in a way that is problematic. But maybe I’m wrong about that.’

With so many interesting, thoughtful, perceptive and provocative statements being written and uttered every day that vanish forever, never to be repeated or published, it is cruel irony to confer immortality on cretinism like that, but I digress. My commentary on Hayes’ statement is here. His apology was pre-ordained, because he insulted so many, so deeply, so pointlessly and so arrogantly, at the worst possible time, that a national outcry was guaranteed, and the eventual directive, “Apologize or pack!” from his MSNBC overlords was a forgone conclusion.

As forced apologies go, how did Hayes’ rank? Continue reading →

Stephen Decatur, Eduardo Saverin, and the Unpatriotic Hypocrisy of the Right

/ Jack Marshall / 77 Comments

Stephen Decatur

I admit that I am often ambushed by the hypocrisy of both political parties and their followers. The ability of both conservatives and progressives to completely reverse positions and advocate exactly what they had passionately opposed mere months, weeks, or even minutes before is breathtaking, and I never seem ready for it. For example, after the Democrats had tried to pin the shooting of Rep. Giffords on the harsh rhetoric of  Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and others in the conservative camp, I really wasn’t ready for them to ratchet up the metaphorically violent metaphors themselves within a few weeks, but they did. Similarly, after conservatives had mocked and condemned the discouraged liberals who had fled the U.S. in dismay after George W. Bush was re-elected, I was unprepared for the unseemly applause emanating from the Right when Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin decided to become an ex-American to save mega-millions on his tax bill.

Lock-step ideology is damaging enough, but lock-step ideology without consistent values, principles and priorities is dangerous, and that, I fear, is what we have on both ends of the political spectrum in America today.

Stephen Decatur (1779-1820) was a genuine American hero, once featured in grade school history lessons but now, like so many others, the victim of cultural oblivion. One of the greatest naval commanders in U.S. history, Decatur had his meteoric career was cut short by a duel, and as his exploits on the waves have faded from memory, the one feature of his remarkable life that is best remembered is his legendary  toast, made in April 1816,  that became an iconic, if often misunderstood, expression of American patriotism:

“Our Country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong.” Continue reading →

Ethics Alarms Recap: A Long Weekend of Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

If the long Presidents Day weekend took you hither and yon and away from ethical dilemmas and controversies, welcome back! Here is what went on here in a lively three days:

The Most Ethical President

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

When I am asked who I think was the most ethical President of the United States, my answer is the man whose birthday President’s Day preempts: George Washington. He was not our most brilliant or eloquent President, and it often took him a while to find his way to the right thing to do, slavery being the most important example. Still, the United States was extraordinarily fortunate to have such a principled and instinctively wise leader as its first. He created the template that, though weakened by time and inferior successors, continues to exert a powerful influence over our choice of Presidents. He was honest. He was civil. He was dignified and insisted on respect, but never worship: his simple decision that America’s Chief Executive be called, humbly, “Mr. President” had immense consequences for the nation’s attitudes toward executive leadership. Perhaps most important of all, Washington was a gifted leader but a reluctant one. He believed that a citizen should heed the nation’s call when needed, but he was a reluctant public servant, and condemned those who sought power for its own sake.

I am always amazed, when I return to Washington’s writings and speeches, how sure, persuasive and perceptive his statements remain, so long after they were made.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from our most ethical President.

Happy Birthday, approximately, General Washington. Continue reading →