How Much More Dishonest Can A Campaign Ad Be Than This Abortion of a Pro-Abortion Ad “Approved” By Democrat Tim Kaine in Virginia?

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Oh, I know there are some just as bad; indeed, the pro-abortion ads being run in Maryland against Republican Larry Hogan in the U.S. Senate race are at this despicable level. The Kaine spot, however, reminds me of Mary McCarthy epic take-down playwright Lillian Hellman: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.”

Let’s see…

  • The Supreme Court didn’t “rob” any women of anything. It sent the issue of abortion regulation to the states, where it always belonged.
  • The issue isn’t a “right to choose.” The issue is how far anyone’s right to kill another human being can or should be acknowledged. There is no right to “choose” to kill those who inconvenience us. Using deceptive phrases that deliberately disguise the rights, parties and stakeholders in a political dispute is deceit, a lie.
  • Abortion is legal in every Southern state. That it is not is an outright, indefensible lie.
  • More deceit: “If Republicans take control in Washington and pass a national abortion ban” is like saying, “If Republicans take control in Washington and legalize slavery.” A national abortion ban is not going to happen, can’t happen, and would almost certainly be ruled unconstitutional if by some miracle it did. Legal scholar and ethicist William Hodes made that case powerfully in his article published on the Federalist Society website, pointing out that any such federal legislation would be unconstitutional, as it would exceed the scope of congressional power.
  • Of course women would have “options.” Finding solutions to the result of their own actions, or the actions of others, that doesn’t involve killing nascent lives is an excellent, ethical option.
  • “The Republicans won’t stop there” because they’re evil! EVIL! This is shameless demonizing and fear-mongering. They’ll legalize cannibalism! They’ll make everyone wear their underwear on the outside! How can the women in that video look at themselves in the mirror?
  • Contraception is protected under the Constitution. IVF involves complex biological and ethical issues, but there is no indication that there would be sufficient support in the Republican Party to ban the procedure. Yet this ad states as fact that the GOP would do it.

That’s pretty impressive hysteria and dishonesty for a 30 second ad. And this was the guy Hillary Clinton picked to be her Vice-President.

I don’t see how anyone who has any standards for honesty in our elected officials can vote for some who puts out deliberate falsehood like these and “approves” them. I know, I know, it’s “the ends justifies the means,” the unethical fallacy that has swallowed the whole Democratic Party.

Anything to be able to kill unborn human beings at will.

Yes, It’s Another Installment of “It’s Hell Being An Ethicist”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

This weekend was Grace’s memorial event, and yes, it came off very well despite my long-standing dread. I have wonderful, talented and loving friends, as did Grace. My long-time musical collaborator on my pop music parodies ethics programs, Mike Messer, brought down the house and made Grace smile, I hope, with a rousing performance of her favorite John Lennon solo, “Twist and Shout,” backed up by the unusually musical crowd.

But I digress. The next day, when a friend who helped organize and mange the event (since I was useless), brought me the receipts. I expected the bill for the platters of food I had ordered from Safeway, for he had picked them up. “No,” he said,”they told me you had paid for them when you made the order.”

But I had not. I tried to pay, but the dead-eyed, barely conversant clerk refused to process my credit card, and insisted that payment would be due when the platters were ready. The price is almost $400.

Well, I’m an ethicist, so I have to pay it, though I may take my sweet time about it and wait until my cash flow is a bit more robust. I know what my mother’s reaction would have been—“What luck! The food was free!”—just as surely that I know that my father would have headed over to Safeway by now and paid the bill.

Now, my sister had a dandy rationalization, though she didn’t commit to it. “These stores are incompetent,” she said. “I’ve had similar experiences, though not $400 worth. The only way they’re ever going to get better as if sloppy work like this costs them money.”

“I’d be tempted not to pay,” she said.

Oh, I’m tempted all right. And I’m drowning in debt dating back to when the pandemic crashed my business and ruined my credit. Nevertheless, I got the food, I owe Safeway the money, and I’m an ethicist, dammit.

Phooey.

Smellodrama?

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Yet another revival of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” has opened on Broadway. It’s a genuine classic: my late, lamented theater company devoted to classic American plays never produced it in 20 years because we were restricted to “forgotten and under-performed” shows, and though it has been 86 years since its debut, “Our Town” remains a standard part of the American repertory in colleges, community theaters and professional theaters.

Although the play is about life , love and death in a turn of the century New England town, the new production is multi-racial, indeed contriving a bi-racial romance, which was about as likely in 1901 New England as the arrival of a herd of centaurs. There are other aggressive updates to make the play “relevant” as well: anachronistic costumes, the suggestion of an interfaith wedding (more likely in the real setting of the play than centaurs, but not by much) with Freya Ridings 2017 hit “Lost Without You” being sung during that wedding. Regular readers here know my standard for assessing such directorial intrusions: if it works, it’s fine. However, I also recall an old theater mentor whose mantra was, “When presenting a classic, make sure that it will be appropriate for an audience member seeing it for the first time, and one who will see it for the last time.” These riffs by director Kenny Leon sound like the inspiration of someone who has seen “Our Town” too many times, but then, to be fair, I haven’t seen this production. The Times reviewer certainly liked it, [That’s a gift link!] but whether this was because of its wokeness or its genuine value as live theater only he could say.

Continue reading →

Half-Ethics Hero: Kamala Harris

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Kamala Harris is going into the metaphorical lion’s den and will be interviewed on Fox News by news anchor Bret Baier. Earlier in the campaign, she rejected a Fox News debate with Donald Trump, to which he had already agreed. Good for her.

The official Democratic Party position has long been to denigrate Fox because it does not follow the pro-Democrat/progressive propaganda mission of the other major networks. Barack Obama said, more than once, that it didn’t qualify as a legitimate news source. The Party has long shown hostility toward Fox News; it formally barred the network from hosting a primary debate in 2020. Hillary Clinton, as the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, had one Fox News interview and that was the last one by a POTUS candidate from her party in the last eight years. President Biden refused to appear on Fox.

Harris gets only a half-Ethics Hero not because hers is an act dictated by crisis. If one has any doubt that internal polls, external polls, and basic vibes show Harris’s cynical, gossamer campaign on a losing flight path, her decision to have an interview with a journalist who might not be planning on voting for her should dispel it.

Continue reading →

Small Ethical Silver Lining To An Ugly Cloud: At Least This Awful Woman’s Lawyer Talked Her Into Pleading Guilty

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Tiffanie Lucas, 33, had been preparing to try an insanity defense in her upcoming December murder trial stemming from her Novenber 8, 2023, shooting of her sons Maurice “Peanut” Baker Jr. and Jayden Howard, 6 and 9. Now she says she will plead guilty and rely on the judge to decide her fate.

Continue reading →

Ethics Observations on the Kamala Harris Plagiarism Story (Or “Stop Making Me Defend Kamala Harris!”)

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

The basic story is here. Christopher Rufo, the same conservative writer and gadfly who exposed ex-Harvard President Claudine Gay’s serial plagiarism leading to her resignation, determined that “several passages” in Vice President Kamala Harris’ first book (2009’s “Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer” with co-author Joan O’C Hamilton) were taken from Wikipedia and other sources without proper attribution.

Ethics Observations:

Continue reading →

Unethical (And Stupid) Columbus Day Quote of the Decade: Kamala Harris

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“European explorers ushered in a wave of devastation, violence, stealing land, and widespread disease.”

—Kamala Harris in 2021, pandering to the “America is a blight on the Earth and the world would have been better without it” bloc in the Democratic Party  in a Columbus Day address.

Boy, what an idiot.

But to be fair to Kamala, I’m sure she would now say that she loves Columbus, and grew up in a middle class neighborhood.

What the European explorers ushered in was discovery, freedom from religious oppression, innovation, progress, and let’s just to cut to the chase, civilization. Had there been no United States, Harris and her relatives would probably be grease spots or serving as Nazi slaves today. But never mind, why should a basic comprehension of history, science and anthropology get it the way of a candidate for President of the United States vilifying the nation she aspires to lead? When does her campaign start handing out the “Make America Primitive Again” caps?

Glenn Reynolds wrote today in part,

“I recommend Samuel Eliot Morison’s Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus which takes a somewhat different position. Here’s an excerpt:

“At the end of 1492 most men in Western Europe felt exceedingly gloomy about the future. Christian civilization appeared to be shrinking in area and dividing into hostile units as its sphere contracted. For over a century there had been no important advance in natural science and registration in the universities dwindled as the instruction they offered became increasingly jejune and lifeless. Institutions were decaying, well-meaning people were growing cynical or desperate, and many intelligent men, for want of something better to do, were endeavoring to escape the present through studying the pagan past. . . .Yet, even as the chroniclers of Nuremberg were correcting their proofs from Koberger’s press, a Spanish caravel named Nina scudded before a winter gale into Lisbon with news of a discovery that was to give old Europe another chance. In a few years we find the mental picture completely changed. Strong monarchs are stamping out privy conspiracy and rebellion; the Church, purged and chastened by the Protestant Reformation, puts her house in order; new ideas flare up throughout Italy, France, Germany and the northern nations; faith in God revives and the human spirit is renewed. The change is complete and startling: A new envisagement of the world has begun, and men are no longer sighing after the imaginary golden age that lay in the distant past, but speculating as to the golden age that might possibly lie in the oncoming future.

“Christopher Columbus belonged to an age that was past, yet he became the sign and symbol of this new age of hope, glory and accomplishment. His medieval faith impelled him to a modern solution: Expansion.”

Morison’s book is superb, and I recommend it highly as an antidote to the simplistic anti-occidental prejudice of today…”

Kamala Harris is an embarrassment.

If Donald Trump Were Hillary Clinton, He’d Be Asking Why He Isn’t 50 Points Ahead…

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

…though we know the answer: Trump isn’t 50 points ahead in the Presidential race, and possibly not ahead at all, because…

  • He has personally alienated so many voters by his manner, careless rhetoric and unapologetic conduct that they would vote for anyone but him, almost literally.
  • He has been unethically sabotaged by the mainstream media for almost a decade, creating clinical Trump Derangement coast-to-coast, and
  • He has been demonized by Democrats in totalitarian fashion, resulting in two near assassinations, a crippling partisan investigation based on a Hillary Clinton hit job; two partisan impeachments, and Big Lies that have been repeatedly refuted but that Democrats and the news media continue to promote.
  • Unprecedented false casting as a looming proto-Hitler who will, if elected, end democracy.

Continue reading →

On the Bight Side, at Least the Coach Didn’t Order Them To Jump Out a Window…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I guess I understand how this could happen, but I don’t want to.

Student cheerleaders at Evans Middle School in Lubbock, Texas displeased their cheerleading coach by doing the “wrong cheer,” whatever than means, and she disciplined them by ordering the girls to do “bear crawls” and “crab walks” for miles on an outdoor track when in was nearly 100 degrees in Lubbock and the temperature on the track was well over a hundred. Some of the girls became sick under the sun, all of the cheerleaders ended up with first and second degree burns on their hands and knees, and at least one had to go to a burn center.

When they complained that the track was painful, the coach reportedly said that she didn’t care, and to keep crawling. Parents are furious, naturally, and the evil teacher has been placed on leave (she should be prosecuted—Special query for Humble Talent: Would it be unethical for me to add, “and should be shot”?), but what bothers me is that none of the girls had the sense, character and courage to refuse to accept the cruel punishment, and when the coach said that those who didn’t “crab walk” on the hot track would jeopardize their “cheer careers” (Remember, this is Texas, aka. Bizarro World), at least one girl—we would call her a “leader”—didn’t say, “Well take this cheer and shove it, I’m out of here!,” stop crawling, and walk away on her feet. Movie fans of the original “Carrie” will recall that the protagonist’s chief foe refused to do push-ups as her gym teacher’s punishment for mocking her vulnerable classmate in the shower. That character is a jerk, but she is a gutsy jerk.

Continue reading →

A “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Meets “Nah, The Mainstream Media Isn’t Trying To Rig The Election!” Horror Spectacular, Part II !

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I was going to mention the attempt by the Axis media to cover for CBS in the epic betrayal of the American public and its journalistic duties it engineered in the Harris “60 Minutes” interview. Now I’m glad I waited. The entire Axis is trying to spin this into what it is not, and what it is is a flaming example of how hard the news media is working to foil democracy and bring down Donald Trump, as it has been since the 2016 election.

First, there were initially headlines describing “accusations” of unethical editing of Harris’s interview, or “Trump complaints about “alleged” editing. Those were lies, of course: this was res ipsa loquitur all the way: “60 Minutes” aired one version of Harris answering a question that showed her in typical incoherent Gabby Johnson mode (“Rarit!”), and another version with the identical video of the question and a completely different response, that is, a relatively coherent one by Harris.” “60 minutes” did this. There’s no “alleged” about it.

Then the news media shifted into a different strategy, because, to be blunt, the American news media is scum.

Part of the strategy is to ignore the story and hope it goes away. The New York Times hasn’t written about the “60 minutes” in-kind contribution to the Harris campaign at all yet, and the story has been out there for four days. At all!

You know what? I’ve had it. Anyone who tries to argue here that the Times isn’t a dangerous, sinister propaganda mouthpiece for Democrats is also scum, and I’m taking the gloves off. A smug asshole who was banned here long ago keeps sending in asinine illicit posts defending the Times and accusing me of bias for pointing out reality. Screw him, and anyone tempted to take a similar road on my ethics site. The New York Times sits on a story that reveals that an iconic name in American news is now little more than a cheap Democratic propaganda agent, and this isn’t news that’s fit to print?

For the Times to bury CBS’s cheat is almost as unethical as the cheat itself.

The Washington Post is taking the other approach. The Post wants to make the story about Donald Trump, who was the victim of the “60 Minutes” Harris trick. We see this deflection device all the time, it’s the “Republicans pounce” cheat. Jim Treacher neatly described it four years ago, and Instapundit has encored hit regularly since:

Low-life Rolling Stone headlined the issue this way: “A Pouty Trump Cancels ’60 Minutes’ Interview, Calls for CBS to Lose Broadcast License.” After what CBS did to bolster Harris, Trump would have been certifiably mad to agree to let “60 Minutes” manipulate his interview. A Presidential candidate is “pouting” when he objects to a major news show deliberately altering an interview video to help his opponent? See above. Scum.

The Post headline is  “Trump calls for CBS to lose broadcasting rights over Harris interview.”  Donald Trump wasn’t involved in the “60 Minutes” false editing incident in any way: it was all CBS and the Harris campaign.

Aside:  The Harris campaign is denying that it was involved in the cheat. “We do not control CBS’s production decisions and refer questions to CBS,” a Harris campaign aide told multiple outlets including Fox News and Variety. Hilariously, any response by the Harris campaign in such matters resembles the old puzzle about the two tribes on an island where one tribe always lies and the other always tells the truth. 2024 Democrats, and the Harris campaign particularly, lie constantly. It’s answer regarding whether it was complicit in the “60 Minutes” scam would be identical whether it was or was not conspiring with CBS. You can guess what I think, presumably. Continue reading →