U.S. Society

Ethics Quote Of The Week: Back-Up White House Spokesman John Kirby

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“If anyone gets any kind of idea in their head that taking away from Karine or her work, that’s really regrettable. And I’m very sorry that that’s any impression that anyone would have.”

—-National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications Spokesperson John Kirby, a retired Navy rear admiral, responding to a bold reporter who asked what his role was at the White House, since “almost everywhere I go, I have Black people telling me that the reason you’re at the White House is to undermine the first female Black [press] secretary. So can you clarify that?”

John Kirby, the deft and articulate Pentagon spokesperson who was brought to the White House to stand in for Karine Jean-Pierre whenever possible since she is incompetent but can’t be fired, issued the above tersely, showing why he was called upon for the half-rescue mission.

He continued,

I am simply working at the National Security Council, on national security communications. And with her good graces I’m able to come up here every now and then to talk to you about national security issue. That’s my portfolio. That’s where I’m limited. That’s where I’ll stay. And I do it at her invitation and with her approval to come up here. That’s the focus. I’m happy to answer national security questions and that’s about it.

Great answer! Diplomatic, elusive, pretending to deny the truth without doing so…he regrets that anyone gets the impression that he’s covering for Karine’s ineptitude (which is what “undermining” really means in this context), and he’s sorry that anyone has figured it out (though it is obvious to anyone who has heard Jean-Pierre babble and noticed the stark contrast with Kirby’s clarity and  skill. Kirby proved what his role is while ducking the question and preserving Karine’s dignity, such as it is.

Meanwhile, here was the White House paid liar lying about the recent Martha’s Vineyard debacle (for hypocritical illegal immigration fans): Continue reading →

From The “Res Ipsa Loquitur Files”: David Brooks’ Smoking Gun NYT Op-Ed

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Ann Althouse has been annoying me lately. The liberal (of course) Madison, Wisconsin blogging ex-law prof has been gradually red-pilled, and she is increasingly issuing posts on the same topics as Ethics Alarms, sometimes before, sometimes after, often on the same day. Such was the case with David Brooks’ throbbingly partisan and biased “Why Is There Still No Strategy to Defeat Donald Trump?”last week. I started my post about it, checked Ann’s blog and found that what she had posted that morning was so close to what I was writing that I would look like a plagiarizer.

So I’m starting again, and using Ann’s post as a foundation for mine. (Maybe that will teach her.) She took the same passage that I was going to use from Brooks’ outburst…this one:

“We’re locking in the political structures that benefit Trump…. We are in the middle of a cultural/economic/partisan/identity war between more progressive people in the metro areas and more conservative people everywhere else. To lead the right in this war, Trump doesn’t have to be honest, moral or competent; he just has to be seen taking the fight to the ‘elites.’… Trumpists tell themselves that America is being threatened by a radical left putsch that is out to take over the government and undermine the culture. The core challenge now is to show by word and deed that this is a gross exaggeration. Can Trump win again? Absolutely. I’m a DeSantis doubter…. And then once Trump is nominated, he has some chance of winning, because nobody is executing an effective strategy against him.”

Ann’s contempt is palpable, and justly so:

The needed “effective strategy” against Trump is “to show by word and deed” that it’s “a gross exaggeration” to think that “a radical left putsch… is out to take over the government and undermine the culture.” I’m not even persuaded that Brooks believes it’s all that much of an exaggeration to think there’s a “radical left putsch… out to take over the government and undermine the culture.” He just wants Trump defeated and hopes anti-Trumpsters execute a good strategy to take him out…The fact that Brooks talks about a “gross exaggeration” reveals that he thinks there is something true. If there weren’t something true, you’d call it a lie, not an exaggeration. 

Althouse commenter “Drago” has this gem:

David Brooks and Mo Dowd and all the others just keep writing the same column week after week, month after month, year after year.Brooks’ column is a cry for help on all levels. He doesn’t understand what happened in the past, he doesn’t understand what is happening now and he is semi-aware of his complete ignorance which explains this plea for someone, anyone, anywhere, to come up with a “plan” to remove all the uncomfortable truths poor David is forced to confront. And deep down, Brooks knows perfectly well what his fellow leftists are up to. And he clearly approves of it based on his “hot takes”….but apparently doesn’t want to be seen as too-approving of the Stasi tactics.

Why oh why can’t we just have a vast New Soviet Democratical majority with a completely tamed, and very small, “republican” minority that knows its place, and a populace that is happy to await their destruction while David attends the best of the best parties on Manhattan or in the Hamptons where no difficult questions are ever asked of the FakeCon “Republican” on the Times staff?

To which the reasonable response can only be, “Bingo!”

Now the Ethics Alarms Observations:

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Ethics Quiz: Those Illegal Immigrant Exporting “Stunts”

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

In today’s Open Forum, veteran commenter Arthur in Maine writes in part,

I’m sure you’ve all heard about the fact that Ron DeSantis sent two charter planes loaded with illegal aliens to Martha’s Vineyard, which is about 10.5 miles south of me. I find this situation absolutely hilarious on the macro scale. But from an ethics standpoint, it’s more troubling.

1) The Biden administration has been flying illegals to airports all over the country and dumping them off. This, in my view, is unethical (as is the administration’s policy on the southern border). Essentially, DeSantis did the same thing, but that doesn’t make it ethical in return.

2) Conservative media is, in my opinion, overstating the reaction on the left. Unethical. That said, there’s enough pearl clutching on the left to make this all highly entertaining. To me. Which is unethical, and I’m not proud of it, but I never claimed to be perfect.

3) DeSantis’s timing could have been better. Most of the uber-rich limousine liberals with summer homes on the Vineyard head out around Labor Day. Had he done this in August, he actually could have made this a bigger story. Which would, of course, be unethical – but no more so than it already is.

4) The aforementioned pearl-clutchers on the left are calling this a political stunt, using illegal aliens as pawns. That argument is not without merit. But it’s curious that they didn’t seem to care much when the border states were bearing the brunt of hundreds of thousands of illegals by themselves. Which is… unethical.

DeSantis’s move, though it is funnier and more diabolical (can something be ethical and diabolical?), has to be considered in the same category as the busloads of illegals that were sent to the “sanctuary cities” of New York, Washington, D.C., and Chicago. The original idea was the inspiration of Texas Governor Greg Abbott, or a particularly creative advisor.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is it unethical for the governors of Texas and Florida to be sending illegal immigrants to ostentatiously progressive destinations?

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Catch-Up Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Maybe you noticed: I wasn’t around much yesterday, though I see that there were some epic comments. A legal expert report draft required my attention from about 6:30 am to 1:30 am, with only breaks for bodily necessities and Spuds. I did stumble on a great and interesting legal ethics story from my files that is worth a post today, but otherwise, I have some catching up to do.

Unfortunately, I am also blotto and exhausted. You can help me ease back into the saddle (that ethics story involves cowboys) by pouncing on today’s Open Forum, and letting me know what’s going on in the outside world…

Afternoon Ethics Aftershocks: 9/14/22: Patton’s Bigotry, Clinton Knock-Knock Jokes, An Elected Killer, And Other Embarrassments

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Today marks the anniversary of the writing of “The Star Spangled Banner” in 1814, which officially became our national anthem in 1931. Francis Scott Key wrote the poem, originally titled “The Defence of Fort M’Henry,” after he witnessed the fort being bombarded by the British during the War of 1812. Key saw the lone (and huge—you can see it at the Smithsonian) U.S. flag still flying over Fort McHenry at daybreak, inspiring the most famous words of the song: “And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.”

I love the story, and love the song. Always have.

1. To nobody’s surprise, certainly not mine, Georgetown University was the 4th worst in FIRE’s annual ranking of universities based on their support of free speech. #1, the best, is the University of Chicago. Harvard finished in 170th place, a few slots short of the bottom fourth. Dead last, at #203 with a speech climate rated “abysmal,” is Columbia.

The whole report is here.

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Stop Making Me Defend Jimmy Kimmel!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Boy, that’s a headline I never thought I’d write. I detest Jimmy Kimmel. I loathe him. He is the most revolting of all the Left-Licking late night and cable progressive comics, worse than Colbert, Maher, Samantha Bee, all of them. All of them combined. He is an ongoing blight on the ethics of American society, and yet he is self-righteous in the process. I long ago decided that the Emmys were even more rigged and less ethical than other award shows, so I never watch the broadcast. Kimmel was the host this year, so that made the show even less appealing, if indeed that is possible. Thus I missed an incident which, had I witnessed it in real time, would have ensured that I wrote this post before this one, from yesterday: “A Case Study Of How Race-Baiting And Race-Bullying Undermines “Diversity” And “Inclusion”: The New Yorker’s Cartoons.” 

For they are essentially about the same phenomenon.

What happened was this: Will Arnett, before presenting the nominees for best writing in a comedy series, dragged a supposedly unconscious and drunken Kimmel onto the stage with him.  Arnett told the audience that  Kimmel had lost again as a nominee in the late night comedy category, and  “he just got into the skinny margaritas back there.” The host who is chagrined at not getting a award in the show he is hosting is an old, old joke: Bob Hope used it every year at the Oscars. Kimmel was just adding a new wrinkle. Continue reading →

A Case Study Of How Race-Baiting And Race-Bullying Undermines “Diversity” And “Inclusion”: The New Yorker’s Cartoons

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The cartoon above is from the current issue of The New Yorker, the woke urban sophisticate’s bible, renowned for its witty, esoteric cartoons since its founding in the flapper era. And yet as woke and progressive and Democratic Party-bootlicking-addicted as it is, The New Yorker rarely includes black characters in its cartoons, and hasn’t since its inception. I checked the most recent compendium of New Yorker cartoons covering eight decades and thousands and thousand of humorous drawings. In only a handful (out of thousands and thousands) do cartoon characters of color even appear in crowd scenes and backgrounds. If they do, they look like the male character above from the only cartoon from the current New Yorker issue to show black characters at all. There were 14 cartoons in the issue, and in the outlier above, blacks are portrayed as white people with tans. I’m sure some professor somewhere will pronounce that representation as offensive anyway. Continue reading →

Monday Monday Ethics Ethics, 9/12/2022: A Senator, A Mayor And A Vice-President Walk Into A Bar…[Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Several readers mentioned that EA did not have contain any mention of September 11, 2001 yesterday. The fact is that I didn’t have anything new or perceptive to say. I was also nauseated into paralysis by Virginia’s Mark Warner (D), one of my state’s Senators, appearing on “Face the Nation”with the assignment of comparing a sneak terrorist attack from a foreign country that killed 2,977 Americans to the one-day riot by a mob of demented assholes carrying sticks and bear-spray. Asked by CBS News anchor Margaret Brennan’s question about where the country is 21 years after the terror attacks, the chair chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee couldn’t resist resorting to his desperate party’s current strategy of fearmongering about “election deniers” as existential threats to the nation. “The stunning thing to me is here we are 20 years later and the attack on the symbol of our democracy is not coming from terrorists, but it came from literally insurgents attacking the Capitol on January 6,” Warner said, confirming his reservation for an eternal place in Hell. “So I believe we are stronger, I believe our intelligence community has performed remarkably, I think the threat of terror has diminished, I think we still have new challenges in terms of nation [and] state challenges,” he continued. “Russia and longer term, a technology competition with China, but I do worry about some of the activity in this country where the election deniers, the insurgency that took place on January 6, that’s something I hope we can see that same kind of unity of spirit.”

1. To be fair, Sen. Warner’s comments still didn’t bother me as much as another Kamala Harris horrifying lies-and-babble-fest, which I didn’t see live. Harris’s latest occurred on “Meet the Press,” which I have ceased watching permanently until, at very least, super-hack Chuck Todd is replaced as host. Todd asked Harris about the ongoing Biden-made crisis at the southern border where a record number of illegal immigrants are entering the United States. “Would you call the border secure?,” he queried, perhaps referencing the recent asinine assertion by the Secretary of Homeland Security that indeed the porous border is secure. Harris answered that “the border is secure, but we also have a broken immigration system, in particular over the last four years before we came in, and it needs to be fixed.” That’s a new “It isn’t what it is” dodge: Trump is responsible for the current crisis at the border? Harris’s claim that the border was “secure” provoked a rare expression of amazement from a mainstream media talking head at a Democrat’s lie, and from Chuck Todd, no less, who usually sees his role as a propaganda facilitator.

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The Times Promises To Explain “How the NFL Stays So Popular, Despite Its Many Scandals”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

It doesn’t. But I can.

As the football season approaches, the New York Times muses about why television viewership for the NFL last season was its strongest in six years, the television networks committed about $110 billion for the rights to show the league’s games for the next decade, and how the NFL can be on track to meet Commissioner Roger Goodell’s goal of earning $25 billion in revenue annually in 2027. After all, the game and its players were once again engulfed in scandals during the off-season:

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Attack Of The Super-Weenies!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The original story seemed so, so stupid to me that I didn’t deem it worth commenting on. Podcast Movement, the podcast industry’s biggest conference, took place in Dallas two weeks ago. Most major audio companies were represented there, including The Daily Wire, conservative pundit Ben Shapiro’s media company. The Wire paid for a booth at the exhibition hall, and Shapiro showed up at the conference to visit his own company’s booth, which is not abnormal in any way.  Never mind: some of the usual Censorious Creeps from the Bitter Left complained like Shapiro was a leper or a contagion or Donald Trump or something: many complained that Shapiro made them feel uncomfortable and “unsafe” as women, people of color, and transgenders… because of his opinions. That was enough for Podcast Movement’s organizers to issue a groveling Twitter apology: Continue reading →