Weekend Ethics Update, 7/29/2023: Navy Joan, “Payback,” Soccer Creeps, News Media Denial, UFOs, Trump’s Relationship With Jesus, And Hillary [Excellent Typo Fixed]

Talk about a “day that will live in infamy”: on this date in 1921, Adolf Hitler became the leader of the Nazi Party, aka the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party. You know the rest.

I’ve been remiss in writing Warm-Ups and similar multiple issue posts: on a time/views basis, they are the least efficient use of my own limited blogging time, as they take about twice as long to prepare and attract about half as much attention as the single issue essays—don’t ask me why. But looking at my list, if I don’t give due attention to some of these backed-up stories now I may never get to them at all. Soooooooooo…

1. The Navy Joan saga, cont. As discussed here, President Biden officially made his son’s 5-year-old love-child Navy Joan Roberts, a non-person by refusing to count her among his grandchildren literally, as he told staff that they were to only acknowledge that he had six grandkids, not seven. This, despite his repeated paeans to family and his love of his grandchildren. This is a major indictment of Biden’s integrity, fairness, courage and character, and the majority of commentators, even some in the pro-Biden propaganda corps, were appropriately critical. Enough so, it seems, that Joe’s”s advisors decided that he had seven grandchildren after all.

President Biden publicly acknowledged his 4-year-old granddaughter, Navy Joan Roberts, for the first time yesterday, saying in a statement that he and the first lady, Jill Biden, “only want what is best for all of our grandchildren, including Navy.”

The reversal deserves no applause. His initial cruel handling of yet another situation created by his Black Sheep son was signature significance: decent people don’t act like that, ever. That he changed his position only after it appeared that his already miserable poll numbers might suffer is redolent of the disgusting machinations of Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal, when a Dick Morris poll indicated that the public wouldn’t tolerate him lying about the affair. If you need a poll to tell you what conduct is unethical, then you’re hopeless ethically. Clinton was hopeless, and so is Biden.

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Now THIS Is An Unethical Prosecutor…

It’s the second Costanza of the week! (Pointer credit and thanks to JutGory)

First we had the Incredible Texting Judge, but this guy, Burnett County, Wisconsin assistant district attorney Daniel Steffen, 52, actually engaged in conduct similar (but worse) than what George was trying to wriggle out of in the immortal scene above from the Ethics Alarms movie and TV clip archive.

You’ll recall that he was called on the metaphorical carpet by his boss for having sex on his desk with a cleaning woman.

Steffen, however, topped George by secretly recorded himself having sex with three women, one of which he was in the process of prosecuting. In one of his recordings, the ADA can be heard promising leniency in exchange for sex, according to the criminal complaint. “While the defendant and Victim #1 are still engaged in sex, the defendant looks at the camera, sticks his tongue out, and winks several times,” and can be heard repeatedly telling the victim, “Who’s in charge?” the complaint says.

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Ethics Verdict: Greg Gutfield’s Comments About The Holocaust Were Accurate And Inoffensive, And The White House Attack On Him Is An Abuse Of Power [Corrected!]

In its eagerness to ensure that an indicted man be feeble Joe Biden’s opponent in on 2024, the apparently shameless and now completely ethics-free Democratic Party and its mainstream media mouthpieces are pushing the Big Lie that the Florida black history standards for its grade school students advance the theory that U.S. slavery benefited slaves.

Ethics Alarms examined the standards here; they don’t (though they include far too much instruction on the topic); one politically stupid, academically legitimate item buried among the others is being used by to characterize the whole curriculum: “…slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” For example, MSNBC host Joy Reid invoked the topic (“You can’t even say slavery was bad now in the Republican Party!” Despicable. ) as part of her network’s perpetual partisan propaganda effort, and truth be damned.

So, you may ask, what does this have to do with Jews and the Holocaust?

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Friday Open Forum!

A funny thing happened on the way to this forum…about eight sudden deadlines raised their ugly heads, I had two genuine home crises to deal with, and the Ethics Alarms runways are packed with backed -up ethics issues. The week also featured “The Attack of the Banned Commenters,” WordPress glitches, and more. Meanwhile, last week’s forum is still bumping along, and I haven’t had time to read any of it.

Today is devoted trying to organize the rationalization list into a book outline (finally!), catching up here, there, and everywhere, and sending good thoughts to the Red Sox, who are in San Francisco where all sorts of bad things could happen to them before they even take the field tonight.

What do you want to talk about—respectfully, civilly, perceptively?

Ethics Observations On Former Rep. Mo Brooks’ Claim Re Trump’s Plans To Reverse The 2020 Election

Brooks, a Republican who represented an Alabama district in Congress until last year, told reporters that the former President had entreated him to help overturn the 2020 election as recently (or as late) as September 2021. He asserts,

“Donald Trump wanted me to do four things: advocate rescinding the election, advocate physically removing Joe Biden from the White House, advocate reinstating Donald Trump as president of the United States and advocate a new special election for president of the United States — all of which violate the U.S. Constitution and federal law. And after I got done explaining that to him, he withdrew his endorsement and endorsed my opponent. So I’m mildly surprised none of these people have made inquiries about the details of this, but it is what it is.”

Brooks says he is surprised that he hasn’t been asked to give evidence to prosecutor Jack Smith, currently running one of the many Democratic “Get Trump!” operations.

Observations:

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The DeSantis Campaign Mess: “Can’t Anyone Here Play This Game”?

Unbelievable.

Axios broke this nauseating story, writing,

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ 2024 campaign fired an aide this week who secretly created and shared a pro-DeSantis video that featured the candidate at the center of a Sonnenrad, an ancient symbol appropriated by the Nazis and still used by some white supremacists.

Nate Hochman, a speechwriter on the DeSantis campaign and a former writer for National Review, created the video on his own and shared it through a pro-DeSantis Twitter account, according to a person familiar with the matter. Hochman then retweeted the video, but it was deleted shortly afterward.

“Nate Hochman is no longer with the campaign. And we will not be commenting on him further,” a DeSantis campaign official told Axios….

Observations:

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Here Is What’s Really Wrong With Florida’s New Black History Curriculum…[Links Fixed!]

It over-emphasizes slavery.

This is supposed to be a state that opposes Critical Race Theory theology, and the concerted effort to teach America’s children that they had the misfortune to be born into a racist nation, built on slavery without ever having properly atones, one that still conspires to elevate white citizens above all others employing all of its institutions to that end. Yet if the newly-minted Social Studies requirements for Florida’s public school students are to be taken seriously, and a genuine effort is to be made to meet them, Florida students won’t have time to learn much of anything about their nation’s history except slavery. With that kind of emphasis, who needs CRT or the 1619 Project’s distortions? A student won’t be able to graduate from high school without getting the message that the single most important feature of the United States and its history was slavery.

The full official curriculum is here.

Below, courtesy of The National Review, are all the curriculum requirements related to slavery. I recommend skimming: I have more to discuss after the astoundingly long list. No college course—heck, no three college courses—could competent cover what follows. How many teachers are qualified to present this material fairly, competently and thoroughly without distortion, misrepresentation and bias? A fair answer is “Few, if any, but nobody will be checking.”

What follows is literally unbelievable, and I mean literally literally. It contains the word “slave” 96 times, “slaves” 23 times, and “slavery” 45 times. Hold on to your skulls…

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Dog Days Open Forum!

I had momentarily forgotten that the blog hits its non-holiday traffic nadir during the so-called “dog days of summer,” which officially occur between July 3 and August 11 every year. I am optimistic that the many looming issues out there along with EA’s loyal and alert commentariat can fight the tide a bit.

We shall see…

I Don’t Know What To Call This, And I Really Don’t Know What Can Be Done About it, But I Know It’s Bad…

I’ve mentioned this toxic phenomenon before, but yesterday I was in Hell. While walking Spuds and driving I saw 14 pedestrians striding along staring at their phones. Three were walking their dogs, and paying no attention to them. One was pushing a baby carriage.

In contrast, I saw only nine adults who were not staring at their phones.

The phenomenon is one of many that is isolating members of society, crippling social skills, undermining the interaction between strangers and neighbors, and giving social media and remote communication an outsized influence over society and the culture. We paved the way for it with such developments as the Sony Walkman, now, if self-isolation and absorption in public isn’t a social norm, it is rapidly becoming one.

Is the conduct unethical? It is tempting to argue that it hurts no one but the phone screen addict, though that definitely doesn’t apply to those behaving like this while caring for dogs, babies and children (or crossing the street). The counter argument would be Kant’s Universality Principle: would we want a world where everyone walks through the world oblivious to everyone and everything but their phone? Well, that’s what we are on the way to creating.

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Bad Analogy, Bad Legal Theory, Bad Judge

The ABA Journal reports that Waco, Texas, Justice of the Peace Dianne Hensley objects to performing same-sex weddings because of her religious beliefs, and makes such couples seek to get hitched elsewhere. Now she is claiming that her stance is supported by the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 30 decision in 303 Creative v. Elenis. That one, I’m sure you recall, declared that it was “forced speech” and a violation of a web designer’s First Amendment rights to require her to create websites for same-sex weddings.

The Texas’ State Commission on Judicial Conduct slapped Hensley with a public warning for refusing to perform same-sex weddings. Hensley filed a lawsuit against the Commission in December 2019, but it was dismissed. Now she is appealing, using the new SCOTUS decision as her ammunition.

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