U.S. Society

Still More Election Day Ethics Musings…

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

I’m posting that picture because it made me laugh out loud when I first saw it yesterday, has made be laugh several times just thinking about it, and still makes me laugh. I’m considering blowing it up and having it framed. I’m depressed and exhausted, I’m alone in a big house missing my wife, I have a million boring, annoying things to do and no plausible reason not to do them, and whoever took this photo (and I don’t care if it’s fa; it worked) is an ethics hero in my book.

Meanwhile:

1. Confronting my biases, 2024 election edition: I’m really going to have to work at not losing respect for a lot of friends and relatives who have written and said some of the dumbest, most ignorant things over the pat several months. I think I really will treat them asif they have been suffering from some obtrusive malady, like Tourettes, making them scream out obscenities, or uncontrollable flatulence. Of course, this will depend on whether they can calm the hell down…

2. At the risk of summoning “A Friend” from Spam Hell, kind of like inadvertently using a Ouija board to loose and evil spirit on the world, I must note lawyer-blogger John Hinderaker’s excellent takedown of the email the New York Times sent its subscribers, including me (though I don’t know how much longer I can stand it). The thing really is astounding in its hypocrisy and lack of self awareness, and I salute John for saving me the time to defenestrate it. What struck me was how every single item in the Times propaganda piece was identical to the arguments of my Trump Deranged relative who doesn’t read the times. Who is spreading these talking points? From whence specifically do they emanate? The one that particularly interested me was the last item: “[Trump] also vows to avoid the pattern of his first term by appointing loyal aides who will carry out his wishes.”

How dare he! Hinderaker writes, “We certainly hope so! That is what a president is supposed to do, and what Kamala Harris surely would do, with the help of whoever it is that has been running the Biden administration and now would run hers.”

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The Most Deranged Anti-Trump Lie of All, And Other Election Day Morning Ethics Musings…

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

I realized, as I woke up with a bang this morning earlier than I wanted to, that I am far more emotionally, intellectually and patriotically, never mind ethically, invested in the Presidential election result in 2024 than in any previous election.

The reasons, I hope, have been made reasonably clear here, not just over the course of the campaign, but over the past eight years, ever since the 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck chugged out of the metaphorical station. I also am, alternately, furious and amused by the ridiculous reality that the candidate I feel so strongly has to win today for the good of the nation is probably the worst Presidential candidate one of the two major parties has ever offered to the American public on Election Day, at least since the Civil War, with the exception of Woodrow Wilson, Trump himself and Hillary in 2016, and Joe Biden in 2020. I also am more anxious about what the Post 2024 Election Ethics Train Wreck will bring.

I am certain that if Trump wins, the Left will riot, and as the rioting will occur during a dead-in-the-water Democratic Administration, it will not be controlled and may even be encouraged. Make no mistake, this will be 100% the fault of the Axis of Unethical Conduct and the Harris campaign. They have used fear and hate as primary weapons against Donald Trump when they weren’t trying to impeach him or lock him up, and raised the intensity of this unethical—I could say “evil”—strategy to previously unimaginable levels when they realized that they had nothing positive—well, unless you consider aborting more babies positive—to justify another Democratic Presidency.

The party and its unethical news media useful idiots deserve to be punished, though I am not sure how. Both may have damaged themselves sufficiently to qualify as condign justice, but I doubt it. They have divided, wounded, scarred and imperiled the United States of America. There has to be accountability; there have to be consequences.

The first penalty needs to be a defeat today.

Other related ethics observations:

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“The Untrustworthy 20,” the Worst of the Worst On the Ballots in 2024, Part 2: Naming Names

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Ugh.

I was afraid of this: when I went over the various files to make the final cut, I had to leave out so many genuine miscreants whose presence as elected officials is a blight on America the Beautiful. Because I want to have the list evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, I couldn’t even find space for all the members of “The Squad.” Or Maxine Waters.

Back when I was doing the “Dirty Dozen,” the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, aka CREW, was a helpful resource because the group used to maintain its own list of corrupt officials. Oh, the list was heavily weighted toward Republicans, naturally, because while CREW claimed to be non-partisan, it clearly wasn’t. Eventually its ideological bias became undeniable, and now about half of its “investigations” involve Donald Trump.

Since the list is long, I won’t belabor the reasons for each honoree. In most cases, I shouldn’t have to. And, as in the past, most of these unethical candidates will win.

1. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky). He’s 82, making the fact that he’s running at all unethical. Then there is his destructive and wildly unethical—but legal!—refusal to allow Barack Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, even come to a vote.

2. Nancy Pelosi (D-S.F.). Like McConnell, Pelosi is an ethics dunce just for running (she’s 84). Her Ethics Alarms dossier is thick and damning, and her despicable open disrespect for President Trump during his final State of the Union address was a low point in American political history. She is a lifetime Ethics Villain.

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Unethical Closing Campaign Pitch of the Week: Kamala Harris

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

1. Wow. Harris has the epic gall to say that her opposition offers a “country of chaos, fear and hate” after her party has run a campaign stretching back years claiming that Donald Trump and his supporters threaten our continued existence as a free country, that his secret goal is to lock up his political opponents, ban abortion, and install himself as a dictator. The President she has served under claiming she is in entirely in sync with his views and policies just called half the nation “garbage”—I may be a bit too sensitive, but I think that’s hateful. For a the past 60 days, Harris’s campaign’s main message is that Donald Trump is Adolf Hitler. Scary! The Democrats have not only made this country one of fear and hate, they have done so deliberately to maintain their power.

2. Chaos? Has there been an administration since the Civil War that wallowed in more chaos than the Biden-Harris term mercifully concuding? Two bloody wars, a disastrous abandonment of Afghanistan, chaos at the border, chaos on campuses, soaring crime in the cities, two assassination attempts on the Republican Presidential candidate, and worst of all, the unsettling and dangerous spectacle of a mentally disabled POTUS , manipulated by an unaccountable group of faceless bureaucrats attempting to hide his condition from the public and, when that became impossible, his party engineering a Soviet-style ouster, bypassing the established process of choosing a nominee.

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“The Untrustworthy 20,” the Worst of the Worst On the Ballots in 2024, Part I: Introduction

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

When I was writing the predecessor to Ethics Alarms, The ethics Scoreboard, I would issue “The Dirty Dozen,” a compendium of the most unethical candidates for elected office every two years. For the first election cycle in Ethics Alarms’ history, I posted on “The Untrustworthy Twenty” and thereafter, I don’t remember why, discontinued the tradition. Sloth? Hopelessness? I just forgot?

After  George Santos (above) slimed his way into Congress in 2022 after lying about virtually everything, however, I resolved to  resuscitate the project as depressing as it might be. In that old post (2010) I began,

“Trust is the connective tissue that holds societies together: it can be strengthened by demonstrations of ethical values like integrity, loyalty, honesty, civility, responsibility, competence, and courage, and weakened by proof of unethical traits like fecklessness, dishonesty, lack of independent judgment, selfishness, lack of diligence, greed and cowardice. For decades, the American public’s trust in its elected representatives and governmental institutions—and other critical institutions like the news media and the legal system—has been in steep decline. This is not because of some inexplicable public fad or the poisoning of public perceptions by an unholy alliance of the pop culture and Fox news. The decline in trust has occurred because a significant proportion of America’s elected leaders have not been trustworthy, and the reason this has been true is that American voters have thus far refused to make proof of ethical values their main priority in electing them. Because politicians know this, they feel empowered to engage in corruption, self-enrichment and deception in the confidence that partisan supporters will vote for them anyway, as long as they mouth the same policy positions and deliver their quota of pork, earmarks, and government contracts. This, of course, does not benefit of  country in the long run, but weakens it. It also creates an increasingly arrogant and power-obsessed political class to which ethical values are like Halloween costumes, donned at regular intervals to disguise who they really are. The core principles of the democratic process do not matter to many of these people, and they don’t see why they should matter.”

Isn’t itreassuring to know that things haven’t changed in 14 years? In fact, they have: they are much worse. I could easily compile an unethical 50, or 100. The two most untrustworthy major party candidates for President of the United States ever to face off in a Presidential election are on the ballot tomorrow, to succeed a a strong competitor for Worst President Ever who has made such a mess of the office and our traditional Presidential election process that the political system may never recover. In that 2010 post, I wrote,

“Public trust cannot keep declining indefinitely, you know. Eventually, a government that cannot be trusted will collapse. Just as addressing America’s fiscal crisis will take hard measures and sacrifice, addressing its equally dangerous crisis in trust requires sacrifice too. It will require voters to establish the principle that being “effective,” experienced or having the “right” policy positions will not be enough to justify electing or re-electing individuals who are demonstrably trustworthy. Voters must establish  untrustworthiness as absolutely disqualifying a candidate for election to public office. Any ethical, honest candidate with integrity must be seen as per se preferable to a corrupt, dishonest or unethical candidate, regardless of past achievements or policy views.”

I still believe that, despite being forced to vote for an untrustworthy candidate in this election because a cruel or sadistic god has chosen to make him the only available option to combat an organized and relentless effort to unmake the United States as it was envisioned by its Founders.

In that post, I offered a list of factors that do not justify determining that a candidate is necessarily untrustworthy: Continue reading →

So, Desperate and Trying For Any Edge That Doesn’t Require Actually Articulating A Clear Policy Position, Harris Cheats And NBC Helps Her…

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Nice.

This one is easy. Ethics Alarms has been stating (and showing) repeatedly that the Democrats cheat—to save democracy, of course, so it’s okay—and on Saturday the Harris campaign cheated flagrantly and openly. To do it, they needed help from the Democrat-biased media (again) and even though it knew this meant breaking the law, NBC went ahead and did it anyway.

Harris was a surprise guest on “Saturday Night Live, doing a sketch with Harris imitator Maya Rudolph, who later gushed about how she was a fan. This was a clear violation of the FCC’s Equal Time rule: broadcasters must offer candidates seeking the same political office comparable time and placement, Section 315 of the Communications Act states. That prohibits a licensed broadcaster from using the public airwaves to exert its influence for one candidate over another.

I thought it was a breach of the law the second I heard that Harris was going to appear, and FCC commissioner Brendon Carr protested almost immediately after the show aired. SNL and NBC had to offer the other candidates—not just Trump but Jill Stein and others—the same opportunity they gave to Harris. They didn’t.

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Just So There Is Accountability and We Don’t Forget, Here’s a List of The Lying Media Propagandists Who Claimed Trump Said He Wanted Liz Cheney Shot…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The Federalist was kind enough to supply what it says is complete list (it’s not, but never mind). The details are here, the unethical hacks are below.

When I point this kind of thing out to my usually intelligent, Trump-Deranged relative, the responses are:

  • “You keep saying the news media is biased and untrustworthy. Not ALL the reporters claimed that Trump said that!”
  • “Besides, that’s probably what he meant anyway.”
  • “So what? You know Trump has said that he wants to punish Liz Cheney!”
  • “Fox News exaggerates what Democrats say all the time!”
  • “Why are you always defending Trump?”

Here’s the list:

Jonah Goldberg

CNN anchor Kasie Hunt

CNN’s Eric Bradner

CNN’s Jim Acosta

Politico’s Andrew Howard

Politico bureau chief Jonathan Lemire

CNN’s Kate Sullivan

The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake

Reuters reporter Andy Sullivan

Reuters reporter Susan Heavey

National Review’s Jim Geraghty

Politico Senior Political Columnist Jonathan Martin

Rolling Stone reporter Nikki McCann Ramirez

I know the Federalist missed a few and maybe more than a few, like those mentioned in the Ethics Alarms post yesterday such as Joe Scarborough (The Federalist may not consider MSNBC worth counting, and that’s defensible). As far as I know, Goldberg is the only one who apologized, and a weaselly apology it was.

I’m sure the rest will say that they were just trying to save democracy, and how can you fault them for that?

BOY these people deserve to lose…

Ethics Heroes: “Diplomat” Creator Debora Chan (and the Netflix Series’ Writers)

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

What would be the odds that a Netflix Hollywood streaming series would come out a week before the election and remind the audience just how unqualified for President Kamala Harris is? I’d say looooooong. Yet that’s exactly what the second season of the smart, funny, astute series “The Diplomat,” starring Keri Russell is the role of her life and the always excellent Rufus Sewell, has done.

Oh, I don’t think it was intentional. I’m sure the scripts were written and shot too far in advance of the series’ second season debut on Halloween to have anticipated Kamala Harris being installed as the Democrats’ Presidential candidate via soft coup, then babble and duck her way to likely historical infamy. But the creative team—largely from the “West Wing” brain trust—did have time to intervene, stall the debut until after November 5, cut some damning speeches, something. It didn’t. These Hollywood progressives (redundant, I know) chose artistic integrity over the current woke mania for “making it look like it makes sense to vote for Kamala.” Well, good for them.

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Today’s Desperation “Beat Trump By Any Means Necessary” Rhetoric Twist…[Extended]

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

What Trump said (in his interview with Tucker Carlson) about the odious Elizabeth Cheney:

“Look, she’s a deranged person. The reason she doesn’t like me is that she wanted to stay in Iraq, she wants to — tough, tough person, you know, people get killed all over, she’s real tough, right? … But the reason she couldn’t stand me is that she always wanted to go to war with people. I don’t want to go to war. She wanted to go — she wanted to stay in Syria. I took them out. She wanted to stay in Iraq. I took them out. I mean, if it were up to her, we’d be in 50 different countries. No. 1, it’s very dangerous, No. 2, a lot of people get killed, and No. 3, it’s very, very expensive. … She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face. You know they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, ‘Oh, gee, well, let’s send, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.’ But she’s a stupid person. And I used to have — I’d have meetings with a lot of people, and she always wanted to go to war with people.“

How the Axis news media reported it:

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Ethics Quote of the Week: “Anonymous TV Executive”

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

I have some tweaks to make for this, but in general it’s spot on.

1. It is a stupid quote on its face, of course. Trump served as President for four years and the results were mostly positive despite deliberate and unethical efforts by the Axis of Unethical Conduct to undermine him. The Presidency is a unique job; by definition anyone who had been President (and not suffered a major cognitive decline subsequently, but that’s just a wild hypothetical) is more qualified than anyone who hasn’t been President.

2. What the anonymous (how courageous!) exec means is “if Trump wins despite eight years of 90% of the news media doing everything it it power to poison the public against him while covering up the vile conduct of Democrats” American journalism has no credibility any more and not enough power to manipulate our politics and public policy as its practitioners long to do.

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