U.S. Society

On the Biden-Hur Interview Tapes

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

On May 16th, while I was cut off from the internet, this blog, and just about all of the outside world because Verizon is incompetent and lies to its customers (I was given three definite times when my service issues would be resolved, and all of them proved to be false), Axios finally released some of the audiotapes (after someone leaked them) from the interview between then-President Joe Biden and Special Counsel Robert Hur.

The Justice Department and the White House had refused to do so before the 2024 election (because, see, the Democrats were trying to protect democracy from Donald Trump by ensuring that voters were uninformed…yes, I know it doesn’t make any sense, but that’s what they’ve got) and the Axis media was remarkably uninterested in hearing them, following its favorite party’s lie that the transcripts were good enough.

I knew that the tapes would prove damning: didn’t you? One of the results of this debacle should be that nobody ever accepts transcripts again when there is a recording available. As an earlier example, the transcript of the infamous debate with Trump where Biden descended into gibberish made it seem like he just made a momentary “speako.” And Biden’s White House habitually altered official transcripts to show what the confused sort-of President “meant to say.”

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Nightmare Make-Up Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The Verizon attack on Ethics Alarms, my business and sanity also wiped out the planned Friday Open Forum on May 16. Rather than wait for another Friday to roll around—after all, who can tell if my incompetent internet provider will still be functioning four days from now?—I’m going to open up the floor now.

I’m hoping the commentariate can help me get back on track while I have to deal with multiple projects that sat languishing while a hostile time machine sent me back to the 1990s.

How Can These People (Democrats, Journalists) Look Themselves in the Mirror Without Retching?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

You shouldn’t need that montage to know these people can’t be trusted. I know I don’t.

Jake Tapper will never darken my TV screen again, and the fact that CNN will keep presenting this epic hypocrite as a legitimate broadcast journalist achieves a dead heat in the “Most Disgraceful Excuse for a News Network” competition with MSNBC. Joe Concha writes in The Washington Examiner,

An unearthed five-year-old interview is rightly making the rounds this week. It stars CNN’s Jake Tapper and Lara Trump, the daughter-in-law of President Donald Trump. In the 2020 interview, weeks before Election Day, Lara Trump made the case that former President Joe Biden appeared to show signs of cognitive decline. She wasn’t wrong — even one year earlier, Democrats were saying the same thing. Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) said in September 2019: “There’s a lot of people who are concerned about Joe Biden’s ability to carry the ball all the way across the end line without fumbling. There are definitely moments when you listen to Joe Biden and you just wonder.”…

But when Lara Trump broached Biden’s decline in that interview with Tapper, the CNN “anchor” went into full defense mode on behalf of his preferred candidate in the race by citing Biden’s stutter as the reason he was having memory trouble and communication troubles in general. “How do you think it makes little kids with stutters feel when they see you make a comment like that?” Tapper asked her…..“I would think that somebody in the family would be more sensitive to people who do not have medical licenses diagnosing politicians from afar…

“I’m saying Joe Biden is struggling at times onstage, and it’s concerning to a lot of people that this could be the leader of the free world,” she retorted. “That is all I’m saying. I genuinely feel sorry for Joe Biden.”

“I’m sure [your comments] were from a place of concern. We all believe that,” Tapper snarked in return.

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Unethical Quote of the Week: Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“Legal residents of the United States sent to foreign prisons without due process. Students detained after voicing their opinions. Federal judges threatened with impeachment for ruling against the administration’s priorities…”

—–Marci Shore,Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley in the NYT Op-Ed, “We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the U.S.”

I’m trying to decide whether the appropriate response to this pathetic appeal to dubious authority is best answered with my traditional, “Good!” or a more vulgar response, like, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.” That first paragraph in the Times piece certainly shows their expertise: Goebbels could hardly have done any better at misinformation and deceit.

Exactly ONE “legal resident” has been sent to a “foreign prison,” the “Maryland father” who was an illegal immigrant and who had received a lot of “due process.” The “foreign prison” he was sent to was not foreign to him, since it is the only country of which he’s a legal citizen. No students have been “detained” for “expressing their opinions.” No Federal judges have been “threatened with impeachment” either, as any of the judges exceeding their authority to issue dubious injunctions against legitimate Presidential actions should be able to explain. Anyone, even the President, saying “those judges should be impeached” or even “I’d like to impeach those justices” is simply expressing an opinion, not making a “true threat.” Judges can’t be impeached for incompetence or even misjudging their own power. The “threat” might as well have been “I would turn them into toads if I could!” Oooh. Scary.

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The Democrats, the Trump Deranged and the Axis Media Deserve Schadenfreude

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Nelson had a good day yesterday; so did Oscar Wilde, who famously said, commenting on the sentimental death of the waif in Dickens’ “The Old Curiosity Shop,” “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.” The Democrats have made fools of themselves and continue to do so; the Trump Deranged are reduced to “stewing in their own juices” as my father liked to say, and the Axis news media is so desperate to help out its pals that it’s removing any tiny doubt that might have remained that our journalists are untrustworthy, unethical hacks.

Good times, good times.

Let’s see…

1. To the horror of all but America’s consumers, April showed the lowest rate of inflation rate in about four years.

2. The stock market essentially returned to where it was before Trump was sworn in.

3. The recession that the Axis was hoping for looked, suddenly, far, far away.

4. CNN’s disappointment over the good inflation news was palpable, bring on a grim faced analyst to try to reassure everyone that he was certain tariffs were going to crash the economy eventually. It is so, so apparent that he Democratic Party desperately wants the President of the United States to fail, the exact sentiment that it condemned then-GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell for expressing (they claimed) when Obama was President.

5. Both CNN and MSNBC were reduced to complaining about the President admitting a small number of South African refugees because they are white, and still complaining about Qatar’s gift of a jet to the U.S., not to Trump.

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Typical Integrity Challenge to a Desperate Ethicist…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Welcome to my world…

Received just now: “Hi, I wanted to check if you currently accept guest post or link placements on your website. If yes, could you please share your guidelines and pricing? Thanks.”

Response: “No, I don’t. Guest posts are by invitation only.”

Ethics Dunces: “More Than 150 Former State and Federal Judges”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

One aspect of the legal community that has become (disturbingly) clear to me since I entered the weird field of legal ethics full time about 25 years ago is that judges stick together even when it is obviously unethical to do so. I don’t know why this is so—lawyers certainly don’t have this proclivity—but it doesn’t matter why judges close ranks and circle their metaphorical wagons any time one of them is being held accountable for unethical conduct. It matters that it is unethical, and they know it. But in these situations they are like cops erecting the “blue line.”

I have written about the case of a lawyer in Seattle, Washington whose client revealed to him that a state judge was accepting bribes. The lawyer felt it was his duty to report the judge to authorities (especially after the judge ruled against another client after one such bribe), and indeed the judge, who was corrupt, ended up being removed from the bench and prosecuted. But the colleagues of that judge made sure that the lawyer was disbarred, because the evidence he had acted upon was a client confidence. The message sent by the action, however, was clear: don’t mess with judges, even the crooked ones.

I recalled that ugly episode when I read that “More than 150 former state and federal judges have signed a letter to Pam Bondi, the attorney general, condemning the Trump administration’s escalating battles with the judiciary and calling the recent arrest of a sitting state court judge in Milwaukee an attempt to intimidate.” That was the Times version; most news sources just emphasized the last part: How dare the Trump administration arrest a judge?

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Mother’s Day Morning Ethics Bouquet, 5/11/2025

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Happy Mother’s Day to all those who should be so greeted on May 11. I’m never quite sure, myself. Thinking about the four mothers in my immediate family, three of whom are gone now (and one is bitter about how her children turned out), makes me sad. Mother Grace was cynical about the celebration, in part because she always said that she was a lousy mother (she wasn’t), in part because she missed her own mother (who died in our home after we converted it into a hospice for her), and in part because “it’s a fake holiday invented by the greeting card industry.” Is it? If I were Ann Althouse, who appears to be going nuts again (she’s been obsessed with having conversations with Grok lately, the Twitter/X AI bot), I would muse about why it’s “Mother’s Day” and not “Mothers Day” or even “Mothers’ Day”. Mother Eleanor, my mother, regarded Mother’s Day as an opportunity to be appreciated when she tended to feel unappreciated (middle child hangover, I have decided). Dad always made a big deal out of the day—he cared so deeply about her—and would remind my sister and me about it weeks in advance.

Meanwhile…

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“The Ethicist” and Ethics Alarms Agree For Once. The Topic: Registered Sex Offenders

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

A none-too-bright inquirer and perhaps an officious busy-body who wants to ruin people’s lives writes “The Ethicist” (Prof. Appiah to his friends and students at NYU)…

“I recently reneged on an offer to buy a house because I discovered that a registered sex offender lived across the street….Now that I know about it, should I keep it a secret…? ….I feel uncomfortable telling my friends the truth about why I dropped out of the contract that I had entered for this house, because I feel I have discovered private information that I should keep secret. In the end, I think I would rather not have made this discovery in the first place.”

That last sentence is what strongly suggests that the writer is an idiot. It’s a childish sentiment: in “War Games,” the teen who discovers that a rogue computer program is about to start W.W. III says that he wishes he didn’t know, and that he would just be suddenly fried in the coming nuclear Armageddon. But because he does know, the kid is able to stop the disaster. More knowledge, even knowledge that creates dilemmas and conflicts that must be dealt with, is preferable to ignorance and misapprehension.

The writer’s reaction to learning that the individual (whom he has never met and knows nothing else about) is to be feared and shunned is also an ominous sign. It has been 14 years since Ethics Alarms delved into the problem of registered sex offenders. My coverage of the topic reached its climax with a guest post, from a friend, who authored, “’I Am One of Those Untouchables’ : The Unethical Persecution of Former Sex Offenders.” My introduction read, “No ethical person can read this and conclude that such treatment by society is fair, responsible, compassionate or American. It is the ethical duty of every citizen who believes in our society’s commitment to the freedoms guaranteed by the Declaration and the Constitution to oppose efforts to persecute former sex offenders, because our elected officials will not oppose them. It is, in the end, a matter of choosing national integrity over bigotry and fear.”

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Short Version of Ethics Verdict on Pentagon’s Elimination of Race, Gender and Ethicity As Legitimate Considerations For Admission to the Service Academies: “Good!”

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

The Washington Post’s snotty headline is “Hegseth escalates targeting of race, gender in military’s academic settings.” That’s because he’s a racist and sexist, see, like all of the Trump allies, appointees, voters and supporters.

Oh, dear. “[T]he nation’s prestigious military academies” have been ordered “to end consideration of race, gender and ethnicity in their admissions processes” and ‘begin a purge….of educational materials focused on those “divisive concepts,” gasps the Post, as if this isn’t a completely practical and fair policy. The military’s job is to protect the nation and, when necessary, to fight and fight effectively. Race, gender and ethnicity are completely irrelevant to the capability of performing those tasks, so it should be beyond debate that such considerations have no place in the determination of who should gain admission to the military academies.

There is a much stronger case to be made that “diversity” is deleterious to military morale, cohesiveness and performance, but okay, discrimination is contrary to the culture and national values, so we won’t say that women categorically don’t belong in male battle units. But they better be as capable as any of the men.

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