War and the Military

Blumenthal’s Lies and Professional Discipline

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

I know I’m harping on Richard Blumenthal, but:

An Illinois attorney has just been suspended from the practice of law for three years for using a doctored resume to obtain his job at a big law firm.

Richard Blumenthal has doctored his resume, in public, by leading voters and media to believe he was a Vietnam veteran, when he was not. He is seeking a job, not with a law firm, but in the U.S. Senate.

The Illinois attorney has been found unfit for the practice of law by dint of his dishonest conduct, which raises doubts about his trustworthiness. Is filling out a resume to acquire a legal job itself the practice of law? No. Can anyone think of a reason why it is less indicative of bad character for a lawyer to fabricate credentials in pursuit of a non-legal job (albeit for a position that makes laws!) than a legal one? I can’t. That would seem to be an absurd distinction. Lying to the hiring partner at a law firm is worse than lying to the citizens of Connecticut? Blumenthal is the State Attorney General: he works for the people of Connecticut; they are his clients!  His lie is certainly worse.

Forget about not voting him into the Senate. Connecticut should work on kicking Richard Blumenthal out of the Attorney General’s office.

Unethical Quote of the Week: The Richard Blumenthal Campaign

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“I think in the end, the people of Connecticut care a lot more about what’s happening today in their lives, whether they’re going to keep their homes, their health care and their jobs.”

…. Conn. Senate candidate Richard Blumenthal (D) campaign adviser Marla Romash in an interview with The Associated Press, adopting the crisis-tested Bill Clinton tactic of insisting that matters like the honesty of elected officials has no bearing on their fitness for their jobs, and is a distraction from the real interests of the public.

Translation: “In the end, we know the public doesn’t care if its elected representatives are liars who, for example, claim to have fought in Vietnam when they didn’t, as long as they deliver the pork. Heck, you’ve seen it: Senators can be outright crooks, and they’ll still get the votes.”

The Blumenthal Vietnam scandal, as I predicted, is serving as wonderfully useful ethics test for other politicians, the media, Democrats, and Connecticut voters generally. Continue reading →

More on Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut’s Lying Attorney General

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Now that we know a little bit more about Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut Attorney General whose pursuit of a U.S. Senate seat has him periodically masquerading as a Vietnam War veteran, it is clear that simply defeating him at the polls isn’t enough. He should be impeached as Attorney General, and deserves professional discipline from the Connecticut Bar as well. Why? Well, he’s an unrepentant serial liar on a grand scale. Lawyers, including Attorney Generals, are prohibited from engaging in dishonesty, misrepresentation, fraud and deceit, and it is professional misconduct when this rises to a level that calls a lawyer’s trustworthiness and fitness to practice law into question. Does pretending to have credentials, especially military combat experience, that you do not have in order to get a job reach this level?

Of course it does. Continue reading →

Lying Senate Candidate Blumenthal: Not One Single Vote

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

“Senate Hopeful Misspoke About Service” headlines the Daily Beast. “Candidate’s Words on Vietnam Service Differ From History,” announces the New York Times, which broke the story. In a case like this, such delicate phrasing amounts to journalistic deceit. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, the Democratic candidate for the open Senate seat soon to be vacated by Chris Dodd, has been lying his head off, claiming that he served in Vietnam when he did not. He didn’t “misspeak,” and there isn’t any controversy about differing versions of history. He is a lair, and his lies have been deliberate, calculated, and despicable. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero Emeritus: Lena Horne, 1917-2010

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

When actress Hattie McDaniel, the imposing African-American actress who played “Mammy” in the film “Gone With the Wind,” was criticized for her willingness to accept stereotypical and often degrading roles, she countered, “I’d rather play a maid and make $700 a week than be one for $7.”  Not Lena Horne.  Breaking into the movie business as a dynamic and glamorous singer-actress in 1942, she insisted on a long-term contract with MGM that specified that she would never have to play a maid. Continue reading →

Ethics for Bureacracies—On An Index Card

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Ethicist Bob Stone has proposed a useful and perceptive solution to the perplexing problem of lax ethics in government bureaucracies. Calling on them to adopt “a strong sense of mission and a culture of trust, with authority and responsibility shifted from the few at the top to the many front-line workers,” Stone declares that too often “what passes for ethics is merely another set of rules to comply with, and ethics training usually consists of badgering workers about bribery, conflict of interest and favoritism.”

As a solution, Bob proposes a statement of ethical principles, so brief that it would easily fit on an index card:

I will:

  • Do my best at work
  • Avoid conflict of interest
  • Speak truth to power
  • Be a good citizen
  • Shun any private gain from my employment
  • Act impartially
  • Treat others the way I would like to be treated
  • Report waste, fraud, and corruption

When in doubt, my test is can I explain my actions to my mother or to my child.

Stone recommends that leaders and managers customize this to their own organizations, print it, distribute it, and then–and this is the most important part—regularly use events and decisions to discuss ethical lessons and principles with the staff, using the Statement of Principles as the starting point.

You can read his entire essay here. I recommend it. Bob has a long and distinguished background in that Mother of All Bureaucracies, the Pentagon. He knows what he’s talking about.

Being Fair to Elena Kagan

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The long knives are already out for Solicitor General Elena Kagan, now the latest Supreme Court nominee. Once, before the late Ted Kennedy shamelessly accused Robert Bork of being a racist, a sexist and a monster to boot, U.S. Presidents were accorded the respect by both parties in the Senate have confirmed whoever they chose for the High Court, unless the choice was so cynical or politically tainted as to demand defeat. No more. Now each nominee has to thoroughly debase herself or himself by denying the political philosophies that produced his or her nomination in the first place. The first casualty of the nomination process is integrity.

Is it too late to go back? Is it too late to be fair? Continue reading →

What Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax Can Teach America

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

The one with the premium-grade ethics alarms bled to death on the sidewalk. The people who never had them installed at all took pictures. Is this the way it’s going to be?

Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax was a Guatemalan immigrant who lived in Queens, New York. His life was a mess; he was destitute, ill, and had no job or likelihood of getting one. When he saw a knife-wielding man apparently assaulting a woman on the street two weeks ago, however, he knew what his ethical obligations were. He rescued her by intervening in the struggle, and got stabbed, badly, for his actions. The attacker ran off, and so did the woman, who didn’t check on Hugo after he fell, and  never contacted the police. She also neglected to say, “Thanks for saving my life.” Continue reading →

History Lesson: Stephen Ambrose

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Over the past two decades, historians have gone from obscure scholars to media stars, as the 24 hour news cycle prompted TV news shows to bring the best-selling non-fiction authors out of the archives into the studios. There the masters of the past were suddenly opining on the present, as the likes of Douglas Brinkley and Doris Kearns became as ubiquitous as Pat Buchanan or George Will. The supposed wisdom and solemn reliability of historians has put them in other unlikely roles too, such as Truman biographer David McCullough lending his soothing baritone to the narration of Kan Burns’ epic Civil War documentary.

One of the catalysts for this development was the late historian Stephen Ambrose, who hit on a formula to make history both provocative and lucrative.. Ambrose turned himself into the troubadour of World War II, inspiring dramatic renditions of his books, such as “Band of Brothers,” and launching a “Greatest Generation” industry. Shortly before Ambrose died in 2002, a brief scandal erupted when it was revealed that one of his histories was significantly plagiarized (Kearns had one of her books similarly discredited), but he handled the potential disaster deftly, admitting that he inadvertently published some verbatim notes, and died soon enough thereafter that the scandal did little to suppress sales of the “Band of Brothers” DVDs. The truth was, however, that more than one of his books stole from other sources.

Now new evidence is making it clear that Ambrose, the historian pop star, was indeed a full-fledged fraud, raising the question, “Who are these guys?” And why should we trust them? Continue reading →