War and the Military

Searching For a Tipping Point…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

This is probably too trivial an episode, but you never know. What might it take to cause a tunnel-visioned, propaganda-marinated, Trump-Deranged, ethically-stunted Democrat or progressive to slap himself,herself or whateverself briskly in the forehead and say, “What the hell? Why have I been supporting these people? They are corrupt and embarrassing!”

On April 17, our President informed a shocked nation that he thinks his uncle was eaten by cannibals. The purpose of his rambling discourse was, of course, the evilness of Donald Trump, as Biden repeated the now Axis-enshrined claim that as President, Trump refused to visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France in 2018 because the U.S. soldiers buried there were “losers” and “suckers.”

Here’s what Biden said:

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Unethical Quote of the Week: President Joe Biden

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“They have a point.”

—President Biden responding to pro-Hamas and Palestinians protesters at a campaign event in North Carolina yesterday after they shouted “What about the health care in Gaza?” before being ushered out by security.

This wasn’t Biden’s senility on display. Nor was it one of his lies. That statement demonstrates this President’s complete ethical and moral void as well as his cowardice, the result of which is to render him incapable of analyzing any situation requiring coherent views of history and a commitment to do the right thing regardless of political fallout.

Biden wants to avoid alienating any voter block, This profound lack of integrity prevents him from leading, leaving him only with the task of unprincipled pandering.

The protesters did not “have a point,” any more than protesters shouting “What about health care in Berlin?” during the Allies’ bombing of the city during World War II would have had a point. “We need to get a lot more care into Gaza,” Biden said. Why? The United States is providing weapons for Israel to conquer Gaza and eliminate Hamas, which is supported by a large majority of the population there. Another protester, apparently as clueless as Biden, called out that health centers in Gaza were “being bombed.” Yup, sure are, and that’s because Hamas is hiding in tunnels under such places so that civilians have to die for Hamas to be subjected to the punishment it deserves and dim bulb weaklings like Joe Biden can claim that pro-terrorism, anti-Israel protesters “have a point.”

I have recorded many statements by Donald Trump that I have ruled should, under normal circumstances, disqualify him from office. None are as disqualifying as those four fatuous, offensive words from Biden yesterday.

Prestigious American Institutions Have Been Hiring Ideologically Crippled Academics For Decades, and We Are Seeing the Disastrous Results: Now What?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Spotlight: Cornell

The Cornell Daily Sun has presented this head-exploding screed:

We, the undersigned Cornell faculty, staff and alumni, strongly support the student activists who have disrupted business as usual to protest the University’s conduct amid the horrifying, ongoing assault on Palestinian populations. The students who have mobilized under the banner of the Coalition for Mutual Liberation have fulfilled the best principles of global citizenship, engaged learning and social justice. We applaud their principled struggle.

Commending the students for opposing the wanton destruction of Palestinian lives and territories does not go far enough. These young people are, quite simply, the best of us. They have shown tremendous courage in a climate of fear and repression. We thank them for their commitment and integrity. We will do what we can to ensure that they are not unduly targeted.

The CML activists have made significant personal sacrifices to publicize the demand that Cornell divest from corporations that are linked to Israeli militarism, occupation and collective punishment. Their nonviolent demonstrations have provided a moral compass at a time of official hypocrisy.

In countless ways, the leaders of our society and our institution have signaled that silence is the only acceptable response to the profound suffering within and beyond Gaza. Cornell administrators have exacerbated campus anxiety by attempting to stifle student dissent with a draconian “Interim Expressive Activity Policy,” bypassing the faculty senate. In a moment of anguish for many members of our community, the University has chosen the path of intimidation and bureaucratic aggression.

The names of more than 300 faculty signatories to the letter can be seen here.

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Announcing the First “Imagine” Award! And the Winner Is…Marxist British Solicitor Ghuffar Usman

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Hit it, John!

(Yecchh.)

The “Imagine” Award will be periodically bestowed here upon the public figure, pundit , journalist or academic whose pronouncements most reflect the fatuous and infantile virtue-signaling of the late John Lennon, who also wrote “Give Peace a Chance.” This is the category where aging Sixties veterans, fact-challenged pacifists, incompetent progressive activists and the historically ignorant will cluster, advocating policies that are literally impossible and have been proven so over centuries. An Ethics Alarms principle is that advocating or promoting some ideal solution to a problem is unethical when that solution is delusional: the aspiration only wastes time and misleads the gullible. Right now, the political Left is addicted to such fantasies. No, we cannot end hate, racism, hunger, war, greed and criminal punishment, among other natural consequences of human existence.

Grow the hell up.

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Ethics Quote of the Month: Blogger-Criminal Defense Lawyer Scott Greenfield

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

“If Hamas is not destroyed, or at least its capacity to attack Israel eliminated, then it will attack again. Hamas has made clear that it intends to do so, over and over. Until Hamas is destroyed, there can be no peace as Hamas has no interest in peace. There can be no “two-state solution” with one state controlled by terrorists bent on destroying the other state. For those anti-colonialists whose solution is the eradication of Israel, they will be surprised to learn that Israel is not inclined to commit suicide and disappear.”

—-Scott Greenfield, explaining in no uncertain terms why the progressive Left’s support for Gaza and condemnation of Israel is based on its determination to refuse to face facts

There are so many articles, grandstanding declarations and bad punditry bemoaning the fate of the Palestinians in Gaza—Jonathan Glazer’s fatuous speech at the Oscars being the most obnoxious recent example—that when an intelligent voice from the Left points out that the “Give Peace a Chance” whining is utter bunk, attention must be paid. I highlighted Hillary Clinton’s spot on and clear explanation of reality for the cement-headed ladies of “The View,” and now criminal defense lawyer and eloquent blogger Scott Greenfield has performed the same service in print. Bravo. Having read Greenfield for many years, I regard him as a traditional liberal but stubbornly unwoke. Like Althouse, bias seldom makes him stupid.

In an essay beginning with Biden’s foolish “red line” comment (what is it about Democratic Presidents that they think they can assert “red lines” when they have no intention of doing anything should their bluff be called?), Greenfield, like the good Democrat he almost surely is, briefly tries to mitigate President Biden’s cowardly and cynical attempts to mollify his anti-Semite base while still insisting that he supports Israel, recently highlighted as he ordered aid to Gaza while the US supports the Israeli attacks that make the aid necessary. But Greenfield still writes,

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Friday Forum: What SHALL We Talk About Today?

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

Something cheery, hopeful and encouraging? That would be nice.

A note regarding the mostly inconsequential happenings at the SOTU last night (It was interesting that Justice Thomas decided not to come, given that he is hardly in a position to want to draw attention to himself): this was the first post I put up after finding my wife’s lifeless body, and we had discussed the cynical idiocy of the concept, which Grace found gobsmacking. Last night Biden said “Hold my beer!” and announced that he has ordered the U.S. military to construct a temporary port in Gaza to facilitate hundreds of trucks of aid into the region each day….while the U.S. gives support to Israel’s war effort, which is what necessitates the aid. If last week’s Gaza-supporting actions were responsible and incompetent, and they were, what should we call this?

Conservative wag Stephen Green‘s answer: we should call it “desperately trying to keep Michigan’s electoral votes,” since there are so many Muslims and Hamas-supporters there.

Regarding THIS…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Apparently, as I have noted before, the Biden Administration doesn’t believe in firing anyone—well, anyone who doesn’t behave like this clown—which is itself a form of incompetence and avoidance of responsibility. A competent President who wasn’t more concerned with avoiding conflicts with the loosely-allied progressive tribes in his party than with upholding standards of conduct, ethics, and performance under his authority would fire everyone behind that screed above.

All right, he would do it immediately after giving Merrick Garland, Pete Buttigieg, Anthony Blinken, Lloyd Austin, Dr. Miguel Cardona, Alejandro Mayorkas, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, and Karine Jean-Pierre their well-earned pink slips.

No executive in any organization has to tolerate public dissent like this regarding his or her leadership. For a President, such open defiance is divisive, confusing to the public, disloyal and disrespectful. It also erodes trust. The proper way for any staff member in any pursuit at any level to express his or her disagreement with the organization’s policies and actions is to do so privately, through proper channels, or publicly after resigning. Those are the only ethical options, and the latter course has severe ethical limitations based on confidentiality and mutual trust.

Having a staff express disagreement with a President and his administration as the letter jaw-dropping above does is unprecedented, and it had better not become institutionalized, because no government—indeed, no organization—can function effectively and with the full confidence of its constituency and stake-holders that permits such rebellions.

Moreover, even if such grandstanding could be justified—there must be an exception out there somewhere—this surely wouldn’t be an acceptable precedent. The letter above absurdly supports an act of self-terrorism by a mentally-disturbed fool, thus aligning themselves with the radical agent of chaos who issued this tweet…

Brilliant. This New York-based writer and apologist for terrorism lumps protesting peacefully, dissent, marching and heckling politicians in the same category as suicide, rioting and law-breaking. Yet even he has a better grasp on reality than “the Staffers for Ceasefire.” In a related tweet, he suggests to these fools, “The best eulogy you can offer Bushnell is resigning en masse.”

Exactly. By all means, honor that pathetic would-be martyr.

Theirs isn’t even smart dissent, persuasive dissent, or patriotic dissent. The letter represents a group of people who are making policy recommendations above their pay-grade, literally, and displaying their biases and ignorance while doing so.

Biden should fire each and every one of them. That he doesn’t and won’t would be proof of his unfitness to lead and incompetence as a Chief Executive even if he could sing ” I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General General” backwards in 12 languages, including Urdu.

Trump’s NATO Comments and the Contrived “Axis” Freakout

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The Axis of Unethical Conduct, or AUC, the collective leftist and antiTrump allies consisting of “the resistance,” Democrats and the mainstream media, certainly had themselves a pounce orgy when Trump said over the weekend that he wouldn’t allow the U.S. to protect a NATO nation that didn’t contribute its fair share of defense funds to the alliance.

“You don’t pay your bills, you get no protection. It’s very simple,” Trump said at a South Carolina campaign event. “Hundreds of billions of dollars came into NATO, and that’s why they have money.” He also claimed that he told NATO members this when he was in office. This was the part that really caused Trump’s foes (and some of his supporters) apoplexy:

“One of the presidents of a big country stood up, said, ‘Well, sir, if we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?’ I said, “You didn’t pay. You’re delinquent?” He said, “Yes, let’s say that happened.” “No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.”

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Comment of the Day: “Army Policy Is Apparently That Its Prosecutors Must ‘Believe All Women’”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

As I thought it might, the post about the Army’s head sexual assault prosecutor being fired because a decade’s old email suggested that defense attorneys would have to fight hard for the rights of accused servicemen being targeted by politicians “with an agenda” quickly attracted intense commentary. (Oddly, or perhaps not, the story has been largely ignored by mainstream media. My mining of obscure legal ethics sources has its benefits.) No commentary was more illuminating or useful than this, the Comment of the Day by 77Zoomie, on the post, “Army Policy Is Apparently That Its Prosecutors Must ‘Believe All Women’”…

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Some thoughts from someone who has both prosecuted and defended sexual assault cases in military courts.

Although it is a difficult concept for most civilian attorneys to grasp, the military justice system that was put in place in the early 1950s (as the Uniform Code of Military Justice) Is designed to accomplish two, sometimes contradictory, tasks. The first is to provide constitutional due process to service members accused of any of a specific list of crimes delineated by the UCMJ. Military defense counsel are obviously crucial in this process because they are frequently the only individuals with the capability to adequately overcome the tremendous advantage possessed by the prosecution on a military installation. Prosecution authority rests ultimately in a series of commanders at various levels. These individuals have unlimited resources at their disposal, including the ability to select potential jurors and to influence proceedings in any one of a thousand different ways, some obvious but most not. Military defense attorneys are generally removed from the formal chain of command so that local commanders cannot affect the career of a zealous defense counsel working to protect the interests of her client.

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Army Policy Is Apparently That Its Prosecutors Must “Believe All Women”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

This story, initially reported by the Associated Press, is at very least ominous, and at most a reminder that the Biden Administration’s position is that a man accused of sexual assault is considered guilty until proven innocent.

Unless the man is Joe Biden, of course.

At the beginning of last month, the Army’s head sexual assault prosecutor, Brig. Gen. Warren Wells, was fired from his job by Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth. The justification given was a 2013 email in which he had the audacity to remind Army defense lawyers that they were the last line of defense against false accusations. The message read,

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