rationalizations

The Unethical, Inexcusable, Embarrassing Ambassador Guilfoyle [Updated and Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Update: Guilfoyle has resigned. See below]

President Trump has “asked” the ludicrous Ambassador to Greece, Kimberly Guilfoyle, to resign, says Katie Zacharia, the new White House Paid Liar.

Good, sort of. This political grifter should never have been appointed in the first place, and never should have been confirmed when she was. She was a solid bet to become a walking, talking black eye to the Trump Administration and the U.S. and sure enough, that’s what happened. Never mind! Appointing assorted incompetents, narcissists, liars, crooks and scumbags isn’t this President’s worst flaw, but it is a bad one. It is also one that he’s never going to shake.

It is true that sending incompetent, corrupt and persons of otherwise dubious character as ambassadors to nations that are allies and relatively stable is a tradition as old as Betsy Ross, but “Everybody Does It” is no excuse, especially when the practice ends up letting someone like Kimberly Guilfoyle represent the U.S. in anything more weighty than a pig-calling competition.

Her qualification for the job was that she is the former fiancée of Donald Trump Jr. She is also the former wife of Gavin Newsom, and I will eschew the temptation to expound on the significance of that. She’s a professional trophy wife.

Guilfoyle recently made headlines by asking Trump donor Eric Deters to wire $100,000 to her American Express account. “She was so desperate for that $100,000. It was a quid pro quo,” Deters said in an interview with NBC News. “She said I could ask her for anything and everything in Trump world. There was no request too big.”

Anything?? When an infamous bimbo like Guilfoyle says that…well, the imagination runs wild. My imagination, anyway. Too bad about the cosmetic surgery, Kim.

“We have asked Ambassador Guilfoyle to resign,” Zacharia said during her first briefing yesterday. “She has been a wonderful asset to the team, and we wish her well.” What a debut! Three lies in 21 words:

  • Being asked to resign by POTUS is being fired.
  • She has been a festering sore on “the team” and everyone knows it.
  • They wish she would sink into the earth and stay there.

So should we all.

***

This Kimberley’s resignation statement, posted on Twitter/X:

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The Naked Teacher Principle, Brought To You By “Only Fans” Again and Of Course [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

[Added: The comments to this post indicate that many don’t know what the exact Naked Teacher Principle is. My fault: I usually re-state it in the posts, and did not this time. The Principle states that a secondary school teacher or administrator (or other role model for children) who allows pictures of himself or herself to be widely publicized, as on the web, showing the teacher naked or engaging in sexually provocative poses, cannot complain when he or she is dismissed by the school as a result. It does not hold, and has never held, that such teachers must be dismissed or should be dismissed in all cases.]

That’s St. Louis substitute teacher Sheena Sittner above—trust me on this. Like some other teachers—and bet there are a lot more potential firees out there—she lost her job over having an OnlyFans account. It wasn’t the school that fired her but the agency that delivers substitute teachers that suspended her pending termination and that she must “refrain from contacting any school or districts.”

The enterprising educator follows July’s Naked Teacher Principle (NTP) star, Maris Nichols, 25, the married Georgia high school teacher who in addition to having sex with students is a provocative OnlyFans performer. Maris was being blackmailed by some of her students who discovered the OnlyFans channel she owns, operates, and uses to display her excellent Linda Lovelace impression, among, uh, other things.

It’s a theoretical argument that Nichols’ example, which provides one reason OnlyFans teachers have no defense to offer school boards once they are outed, doesn’t apply to a substitute teacher. Who would extort a substitute teacher for grades, when they don’t usually give out grades? Never mind, though: there are plenty of other reasons a school (and parents) might not want to have an amateur porn star guiding young impressionable minds. Do I have to go through them again? Here’s an idea: why don’t you review the EA archives on the subject? It will be entertaining, and I don’t have to write the same things I have posted dozens of times over many years.

Sheena does have a distinction that puts her in a sub-category: she’s a dim-witted rationalizing Naked Teacher. She’s been broadcasting X-rated content on OnlyFans along with her substitute teaching for the past two years, and says she knew it would probably be discovered eventually. “If teachers were paid better, women wouldn’t have to resort to online content creation,” Sittner said. “Sex sells.” Yeah, so do kidneys, crack and child trafficking. And, you know, women don’t have to resort to selling their body and dignity for the enjoyment of pervs: there are many other options. Moreover,the reasons one chooses to engage in a side-gig that is incompatible with holding a parent’s trust as a role model and a conveyor of societal values still don’t justify the conduct if it affects others and is inappropriate.

Maybe this is why she’s just a substitute teacher.

Stay Classy, College Football!

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

As I will argue here until the metaphorical cows come home, football is a cultural embarrassment and a societal pathogen. In addition to that “giving players brain damage” thingy, both colleges and the pros allow their players to be felons and thugs if they are good enough. The King’s Pass reigns. Colleges now pay their football players, so they are truly fake students. The game (aka. business) advances the corruption of higher education. We once were told that a benefit of sports was that it conveyed the value of sportsmanship ( as in “ethics”) to rising generations. Riiiight, about that:

  • A star on the #1 team in the nation, Texas’s Colin Simmons was flagged for an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty after he simulated urinating after a record-setting sack of Tennessee’s quarterback.
  • Another player, Raleek Brown celebrated a touchdown by rubbing his genitals, sniffing his hand, and pretending to pass out. The Texas running back was not flagged for that disgusting celebration, after all, that was funny!

Steve Sarkisian, the Texas coach, said about the penalty,“We took [Simmons] out. We addressed it, and put him back in. I’m not gonna give the guy the death penalty over an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty. We’ve got to fix it, though. That can’t continue as we move forward.”

Why does “that” exist at all, Coach? It’s your job to manage the culture on the team. I guarantee that a Major League Baseball player who mimed urinating on the field would be suspended immediately, and for a very long time, if not released. Why did one of your players think such public vulgarity was appropriate? Yeah, yeah, upbringing, growing up with a bad crowd, Hip-Hop, yada yada. College once was where young idiots were supposed to learn how responsible adults get through life. Notice that the coach was concerned about the unsportsmanlike conduct penalty, not the unsportsmanlike conduct.

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Comment of the Day: “Not An Ethics Quiz: The “Lake America” Sweatshirts”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I’ve been remiss in posting deserving “Comments of the Day,” and I apologize. It’s not that there haven’t been worthy submissions, its just been a fact that getting content up on EA at all has been especially challenging of late. The last Comment of the Day was almost a month ago. Yikes.

Below, after a brief observation on the specific incident inspiring the post, Charles Abbott segues from the CEO fired for trolling the Trump Deranged in social media with a photo saluting “Lake America” to the ideological grandstanding that has taken over Facebook, at least based on what I am reading there.

Here is his Comment of the Day on the post, “Not An Ethics Quiz: The “Lake America” Sweatshirts”:

It seems the safest thing to do is simply to shut up. That will be a post for another day.

I want to redirect this comment to the topic of your experiences on Facebook. I’m not an expert on the the topic but I’ve had a Facebook account for approximately 20 years now. Like many of us.

You often post that you are surprised by the sorts of posts and comments and behaviors you see on Facebook from people you know personally and/or professionally.

Here’s the way it looks to me. If Facebook has ever been a place where people went to debate things in good faith, or to seek the truth, or to strive after correcting error, that time is long gone.

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Unethical (And Infuriating) Quote of the Month: Fake Conservative Pundit David Brooks

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

And I get — we get to go, or at least to dinners, sometimes off-the-record dinners between journalists, columnists, and politicians. And I would say, over the last two years, used to be, when you were at a dinner, an off-the-record dinner with the Democratic politician, there was distance between the journalists and the Democrats, because they’re politicians.

But if I could vent one pet peeve about us, starting in 2015, we in the mainstream media learned that, if you bash Donald Trump, the clicks go up, the ratings go up. It became the business model. And I’m not saying we’re — we play it straight. We do our job, but it’s become the business model.

Our job is to keep some distance. In my view, at many places and in many of the dinners I have been to, there’s no distance anymore. And that is a problem for the media. And that is our problem. We have got to reestablish some distance from the Democratic Party. These are people we cover. They’re not people we root for. They’re not people we’re spin doctors for. They’re people we cover. And I do think we have done a not ultimately excellent job at maintaining as much distance from the Democrats as we keep from the Republicans.

—-David Brooks, the New York Times’ Stockholm Syndrome fake conservative pundit, on PBS, further amassing Ethics Villain points with wild equivocation as he whitewashes the news media’s leftward and pro-Democratic Party bias by purporting to criticize it.

Pardon my Portuguese, but what an asshole.

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Peak Lindsay Clancy Ethics Train Wreck Insanity! “The View’s” Sara Haines Can’t Understand Why Clancy’s Husband Divorced Her

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments
@juice5news

🚨 THE VIEW HOST QUESTIONS PATRICK CLANCY FOR DIVORCING LINDSAY CLANCY ‼️ Sara Haines questioned how Patrick’s marital love ended so quickly after Lindsay killed their 3 children. Patrick has since remarried. Do you agree with Haines? #LindsayClancy #PatrickClancy

♬ original sound – Juice 5 News – Juice 5 News

[Sorry for stooping to using TikTok, but it had the only suitable clip that WordPress would let me embed…]

“The View” is trying to get its own private dining car on the Lindsay Clancy Trial Ethics Train Wreck. First Sunny Hostin uses the issue to declare that she was the “lone juror” who got a man declared not guilty after he killed a woman and made her into a delicious soup…and it turns out that she was lying about the whole thing and wasn’t the “lone juror” after all. Now Sara Haines—how can anyone determine which of these opinionated, wokeness-infected, ignorant women is the dumbest?—expressed her shock that Lindsay Clancy’s husband (now remarried) would divorce the woman who murdered his children. After all, Haines says, don’t the marriage vows state “in sickness or in health”?

Well yes, Sarah, but at least the vows I took didn’t have a “whether one of us murders our kids or not” clause in there.

Haines really and truly asks, “How did the marital love end so quickly?” Gee, that’s a real brain-teaser. Domestic abuse activists argue that “marital love” has been abandoned once a husband punches his wife in the face, but that’s obviously bad and inexcusable. Murdering the children is more nuanced. Good question, Sara. I’ll have to think about that….

How is someone as dumb and confused as Haines on television anyway? The inconvenient truth about all journalism is that the vast majority of reporters just aren’t very bright, and certainly not as smart as they think they are. Nonetheless, we allow them to have public platforms and exposure that consistently accomplish the opposite of what our Founders believed made “the press” essential to a functioning democracy. Heck, we allow them to manipulate elections. Haines and her colleagues—not just the confederacy of dunces on “The View” but reporters and pundits generally—make the public less informed, less astute, less ethical and less responsible. Somehow this stupid woman—yes, I hold that asking why a man would divorce his wife after she murdered three children, especially their three children, is signature significance: no intelligent person even thinks that’s a puzzle, never mind announcing it on national TV—managed to be a correspondent on NBC and ABC. What does that tell us about the competence, judgment and trustworthiness of broadcast news?

Related questions:

Will anything cause ABC to recognize that calling “The View” a news program is a disgrace, and that the network metaphorically soils itself and the culture every time it gives this coven of morons gets another hour to lobotomize the public?

How do Democrats continue to get votes when siding with progressives means associating oneself with the likes of Sara, Sunny, Whoopi and Joy, never mind Bernie, Kamala, AOC, Fredo, Ayanna, Jasmine, Gavin, and Zohran?

When did American woman lose their ethical bearings?

Can they be saved?

Ethics Hero, King’s Pass Division: Milwaukee Brewers Manager Pat Murphy

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

You would have a hard time finding a clearer explanation of why “The King’s Pass” (#11 on the EA Rationalizations List) is toxic to organizations than what Milwaukee Brewers manager Pat Murphy told the news media yesterday.

On the night his team became the first MLB franchise to have a 100 win season in three years, Murphy pulled one of his best and most respected players, All-Star catcher William Contreras, for a pinch-hitter in the eighth inning of Milwaukee’s 5-1 win over the Phillies as punishment for not hustling. Contreras had jogged to first base on his ground ball to Phillie shortstop Trea Turner in the fifth inning, presuming it would be an easy out. But Turner bobbled the baseball, and because Contreras wasn’t running hard, he had plenty of time to throw to first for an inning-ending out in a tie game. 

“I don’t know if he could have been safe or not,” Murphy said. “Everybody knows how much William does for our team, how hard he plays and how much he competes. But he’s also a guy that people expect a lot out of. We don’t accept that. He knows that.”

Translation: “He’s a veteran and a role model for our young players. If he doesn’t play hard, they might think it’s okay not to play hard. Major League players, stars or not, have to play hard all the time. I won’t accept anything less, even from William.”

“There’s never going to be a time when you’re not responsible for playing winning baseball,” Murphy added. “It’s a guy that has done so much for the Brewers, he still has to abide by all the same [rules]. He doesn’t have to go 100 percent every time down the baseline, but when a guy muffs it, you have to be going hard enough that you’re safe if he does muff it.

Contreras has played at least 141 games and started at least 108 games behind the plate in each of his four seasons with the Brewers, making him the first catcher in Brewers history to catch at least 1,000 innings in three straight seasons. His 1,067 2/3 innings in the grueling position behind the plate are most in baseball this season. This morning a commentator on the MLB DirecTV channel argued that the Contreras was so dedicated and hard-working that the manager should have given him a break. I think that’s how most people react, which is why “The King’s Pass” persists such an unethical blight in companies, universities, the military, government and society in general.

At least Murphy’s players seem to have received the message.

“I think it’s great. I’m sure you guys have heard him say it because he says it to us all the time: ‘You can’t coast uphill,’” said first baseman Jake Bauers when asked about Murphy’s symbolic move. “He wants [us] to keep [our] foot on the gas. We want to keep the foot on the gas. And we don’t want to go into the postseason feeling like we already did something. It’s really just, keep our heads down, keep working, keep preparing and go out and execute at a high clip.”

Baseball (and Workplace) Ethics Dunce: Toronto Blue Jays first baseman Vladimir Guerrero Jr. [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I defend professional athletes against the hoary accusation that they are paid “too much.” I remember all the arguments my father would have with my Aunt Beatrice, an unshakeable liberal, who would insist that baseball stars getting higher salaries than teachers was “ridiculous.” Dad would patiently try to explain to her the economic principle of supply and demand but to no avail. It would be even more difficult keeping the late Aunt Bea’s passions in check now, when one baseball player has a ten year contract worth 700 million dollars, and the minimum MLB salary is $780,000. The amounts don’t matter, however. Those salaries reflect the actual value of those players, who have rare talents essential to a multi-billion dollar industry that supports many other industries with millions of employees.

However, alleged superstar Vladimir Guerrero Jr. of the Toronto Blue Jays recently made an exquisitely absurd argument to justify the obvious disparity between the 14-year, $500 million contract extension he signed in 2025 and his current disastrous season in which he has performed only slightly better than one of those minimum salary players. Guerrero’s mysterious season-long slump pretty much destroyed 2026 for the Jays, last year’s American League World Series representatives that were the overwhelming favorites to repeat.

In an interview, the 30-year-old Guerrero was asked about his struggles and explained that fans just don’t understand that he is being paid for what he has done in the past, not what he is expected to do in the future.

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Nikole Hannah-Jones’ Choice: Performative Ideological Grandstanding Over Parenthood

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

Nikole Hannah-Jones is shocked, shocked that her teen-aged daughter resents the fact that her rich black (racist…but don’t get me started on adjectives for this race-hustler) mother sent her to a crummy public school as performance virtue-signaling. What exactly did the creator of the fake U.S. history “The 1619 Project” expect? Hannah-Jones, surely one of the least qualified tenured professors even in the DEI infested academic world, writes in “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?A decade ago, I made a decision about my daughter’s education that I hoped would challenge New York City’s separate and unequal school system. Now 16, she thinks I made the wrong choice.”…

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked…“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” she said, hurling her words. “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?” Najya was asking what I’d accomplished by not choosing the “best” school for her. And the honest answer is, I don’t know. When it comes to the choices my husband and I have made about public education, these days I feel that I failed both my values and my child.”

Gee, ya think?

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<Sigh!> The White House Axis Press Ban Is Unconstitutional, Which Doesn’t Mean It Isn’t Justified

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Can’t do that!

“Journalists” from MSNOW, CNN and Politico had their access to the White House grounds denied today, after President Donald Trump said on social media that he had banned the news outlets over what he called their “constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS.”

He’s not wrong. And MSNOW, CNN and Politico are not by any stretch of the imagination the “independent” news organizations they say they are, or even genuine journalists, since it is remarkably obvious that they are really “Democratic Party surrogates with press credentials,” as one wag accurately describes them. And they are, as the President stated in one of his most audacious, bold and correct assessments, “enemies of the people.”

It is also true that as pivotal mid-terms approach, those three outlets and many others are throwing a major portion of the weight of the news media into spinning, concealing, misrepresenting and and prioritizing news stories in the manner most likely to push votes to Democrats and Socialist/Communists, not based on facts, law, common sense, logic or the best interests of the nation, but based on an ideological agenda.

Never mind. Trump’s actions here are futile, and I assume he knows it; if he doesn’t, then he has a bunch of lawyers to fire. He’s doing this to focus attention on the Axis news media’s unethical and corrosive efforts to manipulate elections, as it did in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Yes, it’s unethical for a President to deliberately violate the Constitution knowing that his actions will be struck down. It’s also unethical for journalists to use First Amendment protections to abuse their power and undermine democracy, but there is nothing in the Constitution that stops them from doing it

“The White House belongs to the American people and the decisions made inside are funded by our tax dollars,” MS NOW said in a statement posted on X. “MS NOW intends to take any and all steps necessary to defend our First Amendment rights and the essential role of independent journalists in our democracy,” it added. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of the press.

Yada yada. That’s all the right rhetoric. Too bad it’s such a scumbag organization using it.

“We have a right under the U.S. Constitution to do our reporting without hinderance or interference from the government and this ban is an illegal assault on this fundamental right,” CNN said in a statement posted on X. “We will not be deflected from our duty to hold the government and other public bodies to account, and we will continue to report on the actions and processes of this administration without fear or favor,” the statement added.

Of course, CNN made virtually no effort to hold the Obama and Biden administrations “to account,” but were, instead, complicit in their unconstitutional behavior. The Constitution, however, doesn’t say what biased and unethical news organizations can’t do, just what the government can’t do to them.

Politico Press, the publication’s communications team, said that “POLITICO will continue to fairly report on this White House and future ones. We will vigorously defend our First Amendment rights against any attempt to restrict them.”

The funny word in that statement is “continue.”

Nevertheless, President Trump doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on, making the metaphorical ethical leg mighty weak as well.

Too bad.