Comment of the Day: “Rob Reiner’s Legacy, Part I: The Artist”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

This elegant Comment of the Day by CEES VAN BARNEVELDT is short by COTD standards, but I had to honor it. Yes, the comment echoes a theme that has been covered on Ethics Alarms many times, because I am an artist myself as well as a critic and connoisseur of art, and because I feel passionately that art of all kinds has an independent life from that of the artist. It is a Cognitive Dissonance Scale challenge, to be sure, when an artist’s horrible words, views, conduct or character are underwater on one’s personal CD scale and that artist’s creative output is high in positive territory. But one has to try, and try hard, to separate the two. So much of my favorite music was written by flawed, cold, even sick people. So much of the literature I love, and that has formed a great deal of my perspective on life, was authored by terrible human beings, except for that spark of brilliance. I believe with all my heart in Thomas Jefferson’s vision of America, democracy and liberty, but find his personal conduct and hypocrisy nauseating. And don’t get me started on the performing arts: to take the most prominent example, I have spent a large chunk of my life celebrating, admiring, interpreting and promoting the talents and artistic output of Danny Kaye, who was, as I discovered late in the process, a misanthropic sociopath. That did not change however, the joy he brought to millions, his delightful performances in “The Court Jester,” “Hans Christian Anderson” or “White Christmas,” or the glory of Danny’s dazzling renditions of “Tchaikovsky” or “Anatole of Paris.”

Here is CEES’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Rob Reiner’s Legacy, Part I: The Artist,” which begins with a quote from Chris Marschner’s comment:

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Unethical Quote of the Month, Unethical Tweet, Incompetent Elected Official: President Donald J. Trump

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

Also res ipsa loquitur.

There is no excuse for this and those tempted to defend it should staple their lips shut and super-glue their fingers together.

Quick points that should be obvious:

  • Trump has a political death wish exemplified by his determination to make his most irrational foes look like they have a good point about his character.
  • The man literally doesn’t know how a President of the United States should act, or if he does, doesn’t care, which is worse.
  • His administration’s many missions are too important for him to jeopardize them with petty, ugly, breaches of decency and dignity like this, just to satisfy a personal grudge against a man who just had his throat cut by his son.
  • What an asshole. 

Rob Reiner’s Legacy, Part II: Madness

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Major Tipton is an appropriate host to this post, because, like the main character in the movie the Major memorably closes with that word, Rob Reiner was a good man turned in-side out ethically and rationally by powerful influences he was unable to resist. In Part I of this series inspired by the great director’s terrible death along with his wife at the hands of their son, I explained why I felt that Reiner’s decent into extreme and often humiliating Leftist cant should not diminish our regard for him as an artist, and why his political activism is best seen as a cautionary tale about how bias, implanted by one’s culture, can make one stupid unless eternal vigilance and self-examination are regularly applied.

To illustrate the extent of Rob Reiner’s deterioration inflicted on him by the Hollywood progressive culture, I am re-posting two essays from the Ethics Alarms archives, one from 2022, and the final post involving Reiner before the sad ones today.

First up, From The “Res Ipsa Loquitur”Files: Rob Reiner Provides A “Bias Makes You Stupid” Case Study (8/27/2022):

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Rob Reiner’s Legacy, Part I: The Artist

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

Great movies. Classic movies. Movies that will have people laughing, crying and thinking for decades, and maybe centuries. That’s his legacy.

Reiner, a brilliant director and entertaining comic character actor died horribly with his wife last night, apparently murdered by their troubled son. Rob Reiner is the second Hollywood great whose end this year will always cast a shadow over his brilliant career, Gene Hackman being the other. It is so unfair when this happens, and it happens too often. I can’t watch Natalie Wood in a movie, not even “Miracle on 34th Street, ” without wondering if her husband Robert Wagner (I try not think about him at all) drowned her; I can’t watch Phillip Seymour Hoffman, one of the best actors in my lifetime, in any of his performances without my mind flashing back to his death from binging on heroin after seemingly conquering that addiction. Maybe it’s just me: I hope so.

I also hope conservative pundits and bloggers display more compassion, humanity and common sense than progressives and Democrats did when activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated. Reiner was an artist first and foremost, but he used his celebrity and resources to play at being a progressive activist and was really, really, really bad at it. Everyone will be doing him a great favor if they just ignore that embarrassing part of his life. Remember him for “THis is Spinal Tap,” “Stand by Me,” “When Harry Met Sally,” “The Princess Bride,” “A Few Good Men,” or one of his other films. Don’t let his Leftist craziness diminish your respect for his artistry. I regard his addiction to extreme progressive cant the equivalent of Hoffman’s addiction to heroin, or Spencer Tracy’s alcoholism.

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Signature Significance: A Member of Congress Who Describes the Murder of a National Guard Member as “An Unfortunate Accident” Is, By Definition, a “Scumbag,” as Well as an Ethics Villain, an Incompetent Elected Official, and a Disgrace to His District, His Party, His Nation and His Species

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Wow. The depth of uselessness of our members of Congress apparently knows no bounds. Who the hell is “Benny Thompson” and what cabal of morons elected someone like that to the House of Representatives? Normally I would have looked for a freestanding video of that moment, but in this case the X poster’s ad hominem attack is fair and just.

This self-indicting fool has been in Congress since 1993 representaing Mississippi’s 2nd congressional district. Wikipedia says he was an “educator” after getting degrees from two “historically black” institutions, meaning, in most cases, that the degree means even less than most college degrees. Then, after undoubtedly making hundreds of young minds dumber teaching the kind of critical thinking that leads a man to call cold-blooded murder an accident, Bennie went into politics.

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President Trump Is Spot-On About Signers For The Deaf. Of Course He’s Going To Be Attacked For It.

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

All the headlines and articles about this ongoing example of political correctness and the tyranny of a minority in action are sneering and biased. “Sign language services ‘intrude’ on Trump’s ability to control his image, administration says,” is PBS’s intro. The President is right: there is no need or justification for a signer to be standing in view while the President of the United States is addressing the nation. None. Nada. Zilch. It is distracting, of course it is. I wrote this on the issue eight years ago. Just substitute President Trump’s name for Rick Scott, and that’s the bulk of my commentary today.

“Yesterday I watched Florida Governor Rick Scott give his pre-hurricane warnings, or tried to, since standing next to him was a signer for the deaf, gesticulating and making more elaborate faces than the late Robin Williams in the throes of a fit. I have mentioned this in the context of theatrical performances: as a small minority, the deaf should not be enabled by political correctness to undermine the best interests of the majority. What Scott was saying was important, and could have been adequately communicated to the deaf citizens present by the signer standing off camera. TV viewers could and should have been able to watch a text crawl following Scott’s speech, or closed captioning. Public speaking involves verbal and visual communications, and having a vivid distraction like a professional signer—many of whom feel it is their duty to add broad facial expressions to their translations—is unfair to both the speaker and his or her audience. This is one more example of a sympathetic minority bullying the majority to establish its power.”

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If Ann Althouse Read Ethics Alarms As Often As I Read Her Blog, She Would Have the Answer to This Question…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I generally check out Althouse’s blog every few days because 1) she’s a smart and independent moderate, and a source of objective and unbiased takes on political events and media coverage of them 2) she’s a retired law professor with time on her hands, and thus finds possible ethics topics that I might normally miss and 3) she’s really, really weird, with obsessions about word usage, Bob Dylan, her blog’s tags (almost nobody uses the tags, reading her blog or this one), Saturday Night Live, drawings of rats (thankfully expired) and, lately, Grok. But she wouldn’t even add Ethics Alarms to her list of useful blog links (I asked), then decided not to have any blog links.

Well, I’m smart; I’m not dumb like everybody says and I want respect! If she bothered to check in on EA, she would have had an easy answer to what was a blog topic for her this week: “Help me think of a term to apply to articles like this, something that expresses why it bothers me so much, was her headline. It’s not ‘fake news,’ because it’s not even news.” The article was the Washington Post’s “Trump leans into isolation as challenges mount at home.”

Well to begin with, it is “fake news,” Counsellor. It is a news item presented by a journalist as news, and Ann herself agrees it isn’t news: that’s fake news by definition. Now I have regrets that I never completed my promised compendium of all the varieties of fake news engaged in by our biased and corrupt news media. I know I promised that a long time ago, and yes, I still think it’s relevant and important. “Fake news” is one of Trump’s most valuable additions to our lexicon, and he’s had several.

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Mid-Christmas Season Unopened Ethics Packages

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I’m avoiding most Christmas music this time around, though I will still post about a few favorites that warm my heart. And I will dutifully watch the same Christmas season movie classics that I always did with my late wife, whose love of Christmas combined with our awful last version of the holiday and her shocking sudden death are three ghosts too many to bear, even after almost two years. I just posted, with wan response so far, the updated Ethics Companion to “White Christmas,” which includes one of our five commenters Michael West’s entertaining analysis of the military sequence that begins the film. [You are welcome to update or re-think any of that, MW, and I’ll add it right in.]

I’ve been appreciating Bing, Danny, Rosemary and Vera-Ellen more with each viewing recently, perhaps because I’ve been taking them for granted. As narrator Frank Sinatra says in “That’s Entertainment,” the great MGM retrospective about the Golden Age of Hollywood musicals, “You can sit around and hope, but you will never see the likes of this ever again.”

Ol’ Blue Eyes was talking about an epic dance duel between Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell, but he just as easily could have been talking about The “White Christmas” Four. Or for me, I’m afraid, a sadness-free Christmas.

But enough of that:

1. Yup, she’s a con-artist, a law-breaker and a liar: now what? The Washington Free Beacon mounts an airtight case that Minnesota “Somalia First” Rep. Omar indeed married her brother and has lied about it for years. Why don’t Democrats care about this as much as the conservative press? I thought Democrats were the party of “no one is above the law”? The rubber-stamp response to all legitimate questions about this weird story always rebounds to Omar’s original claim that the issue was just “Trump-style misogyny, racism, anti-immigration rhetoric and Islamophobic division.”

2. Meanwhile, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a GOP embarrassment in the House, has been making a farewell tour apparently aimed at annoying as many Republicans as possible: for example, she cozied up recently to the far left fanatic group “Code Pink.” She seems less interested in principles than in setting herself up to be Liz Cheney,The Sequel, though GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert suggests that her soon to be ex-colleague is flying the metaphorical coop to avoid new regulations stopping House members from trading stocks. MTG executed over 450 stock trades since joining the House and bought $3.89 million in stocks in 2024 alone. She has a better success rate than most hedge funds.

A “Victory Girls” pundit ruefully writes, “I keep thinking about the people who defended her when it wasn’t fashionable. They absorbed the ridicule and trusted that beneath the mess there was something solid. Greene repaid that trust by posing with Code Pink and then turning around to sabotage her own party on the way out.” Funny, I keep thinking how Greene proved that her supporters, when she was an obvious self-promoting Dunning-Kruger victim who had no business being in Congress, were dupes, fools, and marks. It wasn’t hard to see how unqualified and unfit she was, if bias hadn’t made them stupid.

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Prof. Turley Calls “False Light” on House Democrats Sleazy Epstein Photos Smear

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I hate that I am tempted to write this every day now, often several times a day, but how can anyone of good character and admirable values continue to support a political party, whatever its claimed beliefs are, that behaves this way?

Yesterday EA discussed the desperate Democratic Party tactic of picking 19 photos (out of thousands) that showed a young Donald Trump (and other progressive hate-objects, like Alan Dershowitz and Steve Bannon) in the company of sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein when he was known as just another billionaire on the celebrity party circuit or in the company of unidentified women. These were described in some of the Axis media as “bombshell” and “explosive” photos, though it is unclear when and where most of the photos were taken, many of them had been publicly released before, and none of them suggested any criminal, illicit or even unethical activity.

Despite that, political hack Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) had the gall to say, “These disturbing photos raise even more questions about Epstein and his relationships with some of the most powerful men in the world. We will not rest until the American people get the truth.”

He might as well have added, “And we won’t stop lying about this phony Epstein scandal either until we Get Trump!”

Today Professor Jonathan Turley, a one-time Democrat who is obviously disgusted with Democrats, pointed out that what his former party has done with the photos is a classic example of a tort known as “false light,” where true photos are presented in a misleading and harmful way to damage a reputation or otherwise harm an individual via innuendo . It is essentially photographic deceit. He writes,

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An Inquirer Asks, “How Can I Stop My Wife From Badgering Our Friends About Climate Change?” How About….

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

…showing her that her hysteria is based on lies, bad stats, politicized “science” and hooey?

I admit it, that headline sucked me in to reading “Social Q’s,” a Times advice column that puts wokeness over wisdom, causing me to put it on the EA blacklist.

“My wife has become an eco-warrior,” a married weenie writes. “She has strong feelings about the environment and other people’s carbon footprints. She challenges our friends repeatedly about their lifestyle choices. I agree with her in principle, but I can’t support her moral outrage. …Help!“

Predictably, the column’s proprietor, Phillip Galanes, begins by saying, “I would begin by praising her, rightfully, for her commitment to an important issue.” I’ll fix it for him: “an important issue that nobody really knows much about, especially indoctrinated progressives who are passionate about what their bubble-mates are passionate about regardless of facts.”

Much better.

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