Unethical (and Stupid) Quote of the Month: President Biden

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

“I condemn the antisemitic protests.That’s why I have set up a program to deal with that. I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”

—President Joe Biden answering a shouted question at an Earth Day event at Prince William Forest Park in Triangle, Virginia outside Washington, DC.

Joe Biden saying something stupid, incomprehensible or dishonest is a virtually daily occurrence, but some of his statements have significant consequences, taking them out of Julie Principle territory. This one continues his astounding effort to try to pander to both sides of the Hamas-Israel conflict and their respective supporters simultaneously. It is such an obviously impossible and indefensible mission that it’s amazing that there is anyone who isn’t disgusted and insulted by it, for it is predicated on the belief that everyone is even dumber than Joe.

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Fevered Musings on Abortion, Love Canal, and the Broken Ethics Alarms of American Women

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

(This may end up as more of a rueful observation than a post.)

Last night I watched PBS’s “American Experience’ because it was late, my satellite package has amazingly few channels that aren’t commercial junk (No TCM for example, and I miss it) and no baseball games were on. It was a new episode about the Love Canal protests during the Carter Administration, something I hadn’t thought about for a long time.

It was the first toxic waste dump scandal—PBS was celebrating “Earth Day”—- and a landmark in the environmental movement: one can get some sense of the kind of things going on from “Ellen Brockovich,” about a another community poisoned by chemical manufacturers. That account focuses on the legal battles, but Poisoned Ground: The Tragedy at Love Canal centers on the local activists, mostly housewives and mothers, who organized, protested and kept the pressure on local, New York State and national government officials to fix the deadly problem, something the bureaucrats seemed either unwilling or unable to do.

One feature of the tale I had forgotten: the furious women briefly held two EPA officials hostage, and released them promising a response that would make that crime “look like Sesame Street” if President Carter didn’t meet their demands for action in 24 hours. And Carter capitulated to the threat! It doesn’t matter that the women were right about the various governments’ foot-dragging and irresponsible handling of the crisis: a competent President should never reward threats from people breaking the law. Jimmy just didn’t understand the Presidency at all, the first of four such Presidents to wound the U.S. from 1976 to 2024.

That wasn’t my main epiphany, however. It was this: In the late 1970’s, before the feminist movement took hold, so-called ordinary women, mostly mothers, became intense and dedicated activists fighting for the lives, health and futures, of their babies and children, as well as their unborn children because the Love Canal pollution was causing miscarriages and spontaneous abortions. The women were heroic, and the public and news media were drawn to them because they projected moral and ethical standing by fighting to save lives.

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The Explanation For Everything That Afflicts Americans of Color Is Systemic Racism, Part II: Botched Executions

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

A report released last week by Reprieve, a human rights group that opposes the death penalty apparently shows that the lethal injections of convicted murderers are botched more than twice as often as the executions of white convicts. Spinning, the New York Times says, “That finding builds on a wealth of research into racial disparities in how the U.S. judicial system administers the death penalty. The proportion of Black people on death rows is far higher than their share of the population as a whole.”

“We know that there’s racism in the criminal justice system,” said Maya Foa, an executive director of Reprieve. “We know it’s there in the capital punishment system, from who gets arrested, who gets sentenced, all of it. This is, though, the first time that it’s been looked at in the context of the execution itself.”

To start with, they don’t “know” that at all. It is a self-perpetuating theory built on other debatable assumptions, such as believing that the disproportionate number of blacks on Death Row, and in the U.S. prison system generally, is because a disproportionate number of blacks commit crimes that legitimately put them there. Second, how exactly does doing a bad job killing a condemned prisoner show racial bias?

More from the Times:

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Recipe for Confusion: Take A Trump Ad-lib, Spoon in a Measure of Tucker Carlson Demagoguery, and Mix Both into JFK Assassination Conspiracy Hysteria

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Again, I must invoke Curmie’s versatile “Oh bloody hell!”

I have been studying Presidential assassination history and conspiracy theories since before I had to shave, and I have little patience with those who misrepresent, distort or exploit these events. Just two days ago, I was pointing out that the much-admired Stephen Sondheim musical “Assassins” was a blight on the culture despite my belief that entertainment should have a wide margin for creative license. The musical—the songs aren’t bad—is based on the absurd premise that John Wilkes Booth’s motivation for his decision to assassinate Lincoln is a mystery, and that, like other POTUS assassins and attempted assassins, he was trying to make a difference in a society that had ignored and marginalized him. That’s just crap for most of the historical killers and wackos portrayed in the show, but especially Booth. “Was it bad reviews, Johnny?” a balladeer croons. Of course not, you idiot: no assassin ever made his motivations clearer than John Wilkes Booth.

He was a dedicated Confederate partisan; he blamed Lincoln (correctly) for not letting the South go its own way, he was crushed that the South was headed for defeat, and believed that if the Union government could be decapitated (the plot was to kill Lincoln, Vice-President Johnson, Secretary of State Seward and General Grant in a single night) the South might yet prevail—and his plan might have worked. No mystery! But our history is constantly misrepresented to the historically ignorant and illiterate, that is to say, most of the public, often for the selfish purposes of rumormongers and worse.

You know, like Tucker Carlson.

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This Time I WANT to Defend Donald Trump…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The almost unanimous mainstream media mockery of former President Trump briefly snoozing during the kangaroo court “hush money” trial isn’t the most noxious example of biased, hostile news media coverage as the Axis attempts to, again, clothesline the American leader so many of them have pledged to destroy (Hi there, NPR!) , but it’s particularly contrived and ignorant. Attention should be paid: these are the people crippling democracy while claiming that they want to save it.

The idea, of course, is tit-for-tat: Republicans and conservatives (along with anyone with eyes and ears who isn’t so biased they can’t think) have been pointing out the obvious crisis that the man supposedly overseeing our government is failing mentally and physically, unable to keep a full schedule or speak coherently, almost certainly operating with a metaphorical hand shoved up into his suit and head to give the (barely credible illusion) that he is really calling the shots, in thrall to a dangerous far left cabal, and too old to be safely entrusted with the Presidency even if all of the forgoing weren’t true. Therefore the counter argument, juvenile as it is (“So’s your old man!”) is to default to “wahataboutism” (as well as the usual anti-Trump Big Lies). Trump’s too old! Trump’s no more able than Biden!

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The Explanation For Everything That Afflicts Americans of Color Is Systemic Racism, Part I: Insomnia

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

…someone just has to figure out how and why. Or just assume how and why. Oh, hell, just hand over the reparations already!

Researchers believe that black Americans are likely to have more trouble sleeping than the white Americans who oppress them. In fact, the darker your skin color is, the less sleep you get, says Dr. Dayna A. Johnson, a sleep epidemiologist at Emory University. “The theory is that racial minorities experience a stress that is unique and chronic and additive to the general stressors that all people experience,” said Johnson, a sleep disparity pioneer. “We all experience stress, but there are added stressors for certain groups. For certain populations, racism fits into that category.”

A Johnson-headed study published in the journal “Sleep” claims to find that experiencing racism and can cause people to have problems falling asleep. (What did the researchers do, hire people to racially discriminate against their subjects before bedtime?) The study also concluded that people who anticipate racism may experience interference with their sleep-wake cycle because the dread causes their body to be in a heightened state of anxiety, with higher blood pressure and accelerating heart rate. By this, I glean that being told by the media, politicians and race-hucksters that American society is all racist all the time causes black Americans to lose sleep. Got it. And being white, this is my fault.

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Ethics Dunce: Mississippi

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves declared April 2024 as Confederate Heritage Month in the state, following a 31-year-old tradition that began in 1993. Beauvoir, the museum established in the home of Confederate President Jefferson Davis in Biloxi, announced the proclamation in a Facebook post on Friday, April 12. Governor Tate’s proclamation read,

“Whereas, as we honor all who lost their lives in this war, it is important for all Americans to reflect upon our nation’s past, to gain insight from our mistakes and successes, and to come to a full understanding that the lessons learned yesterday and today will carry us through tomorrow if we carefully and earnestly strive to understand and appreciate our heritage and our opportunities which lie before us. Now, therefore, I, Tate Reeves, Governor of the State of Mississippi, hereby proclaim the month of April 2024 as Confederate Heritage Month in the State of Mississippi.”

I have argued vigorously on Ethics Alarms against toppling the statues of important historical figures associated with the South’s disastrous and misguided attempt to secede from the Union and the bloody war that resulted. That is because erasing history is a form of public mind-control and totalitarian to its core. Moreover, many of the figures now being denigrated and “cancelled” with their memorials defaced or eliminated and their names erased from buildings and institutions had complex lives and careers worthy of honor, study and memorializing despite their participation in the rebellion.

Most of all, perhaps, the practice creates a dangerous precedent and a slippery slope: today Robert E. Lee, tomorrow Thomas Jefferson. When I first posted that warning here, many ridiculed it. Not long after, Jefferson, Madison, Jackson and even Washington became targets of the statue-topplers.

But those were human beings. The Confederacy was a movement, deadly and and unethical, rooted in a theoretically legal defense of an inhuman and evil practice. There is no way to commemorate the Confederacy’s “heritage” without appearing to justify and celebrate the slavery it represented, as well as the scars it left on America. Declaring Confederate Heritage Month in Mississippi might not be intended as coded racism, but then again it might.

Starting the tradition was tone deaf and suspicious in 1993. It is divisive and offensive to continue the tradition in 2024. The next step down the same slope would be “Jim Crow Heritage Month,” wouldn’t it? After all, we can “gain insight from our mistakes and successes” and “come to a full understanding” of “the lessons learned yesterday and today” from the South’s post-Civil War system of apartheid and discrimination too.

Frankly, I am amazed that Mississippi is still romanticizing the Confederacy.

Catchy tune, though.

From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files…(Really Stupid and Careless Mistake Corrected)

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Wow.

Letitia James really is an idiot, isn’t she? How could the New York Attorney General be so reckless as to go on camera and deny what is a matter of record? I guess one answer would be “She’s a dead-eyed, arrogant and Machiavellian political operative who lacks the necessary integrity to be a prosecutor…and she’s an idiot.”

This video should be used extensively by Trump, the Republican Party, and to whatever extent possible where the other Trump cases are proceeding. It vividly and revoltingly demonstrates the partisan nature of the Democrats’ lawfare against the former President. Nah, it’s not selective prosecution! How could anyone think that? Criminalizing politics? What are those conspiracy-spouting conservatives talking about?

James isn’t is uniquely repellent—Fani Willis, the equally dishonest Fulton County DA, is arguably worse— but still is an appropriate face to put on all of the Democratic Party’s efforts to win the 2024 election not on merit but by the time-tested totalitarian device of charging political opponents with crimes. (Trump is a fan of Putin?) You never know: there may even be some progressives with integrity who will decide they don’t want to be associated with such anti-democratic tactics…and that is exactly what they are.

Thanks, Letitia!

Bitter, Pathetic, Miserable Hillary Clinton

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Yes, I know I’m breaking my own rule about not using unflattering photos of Hillary Cinton, a pledge I made during the 2016 Presidential campaign I think—it might have been earlier. She deserves it in this instance.

I feel genuine compassion for Hillary, just as I do for Al Gore (and Samuel J. Tilden) up to a point. It must be terrible to win the popular vote for President of the United States and lose the election. I think it must be a little like what I am trying to deal with right now after waking up one morning and finding my wife dead.

Hillary is bitter and angry, and I understand that. The ethical mandate in such a situation is to strive to deal with these emotions with dignity, and, in her position as a public figure that many Americans admire and respect (mistakenly), to serve as a role model for everyone else who finds themselves suddenly losing something or someone that assumed they had firmly and safely in their embrace.

She’s failed that mandate spectacularly and repeatedly. Clinton lost the Presidency, not only by the quirk of the Electoral College, but also through her own perfidy, arrogance and incompetence, yet she refuses to take responsibility for any of that. In her view, at least publicly, it is all Donald Trump’s fault, along with the”deplorables” who voted for him. From the moment she learned that she had lost the 2016 election in a stunning upset, Clinton has set out to do everything and anything she can to hurt him, beginning with declaring his election illegitimate, spawning the Russian collusion investigation that crippled his Presidency, and using every opportunity to trigger the Trump Deranged with inevitably diminishing returns.

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American Historians Becoming Woke, Biased, and Corrupt

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Jack Henneman operates an excellent podcast called “The History of the Americans.” In his latest installment, he varies from his usual format to give us an editorial on the topic of the corruption of American history scholarship. Regular readers here would assume that I would approve, for Ethics Alarms has been deploring the ethics rot among American history academics for many years. Introducing his podcast, Henneman explains that he recently attended the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association in San Francisco. “I learned a lot,” he writes, “especially how transparently politicized so many professional historians seem have become.”

“This episode recounts some of what I saw and heard, and concludes with my many thoughts on the greatest benefit of learning history, whether history should be ‘useable,’ and,” he adds, “why deploying history for partisan political purposes, as is now happening widely and overtly, corrupts history absolutely.”

The podcaster/historian does an excellent job, and it is work enhanced by his keen understanding of ethics. I listened to the podcast yesterday, and today read the truly nauseating partisan propaganda spewed on Bill Maher’s HBO show by once respectable historian Jon Meacham. Meacham wrote, among other celebrated tomes, “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House.” (I don’t know why I’m promoting this traitor to his profession’s book, except that it is excellent, and he wrote it before he jumped the ethics shark, in 2008). He has since become a partisan Democrat to the point where I would view it as a conflict of interest, and one that he has not been forthcoming in disclosing.

It takes a lot for MSNBC to punish anyone for being unethical, that being one of the far, far left network’s missions, but Meacham was fired as a paid MSNBC contributor after he failed to disclose to the network that he was a Biden speechwriter. Before he was caught playing the role of objective scholarly analyst who was secretly being paid to endorse one party, he had made such obviously slanted claims as asserting on MSNBC that the Clinton impeachment process was wholly partisan, while Trump’s first impeachment was not. That’s not just biased, it’s counter-factual: Clinton’s impeachment had a bi-partisan House vote of 258-176, with 31 Democrats joining the Republicans. No Republican voted for Trump’s first impeachment. This is in the same category of dishonest historical analysis for partisan gain practiced by CNN’s pro-Democratic “Presidential scholar” Michael Beschloss, who just makes stuff up now.

Meacham is always described as a “Pulitzer Prize winning historian,” so it is prudent to recall that Nikole Hannah-Jones also got a Pulitzer for the fake history in her “1619 Project.” But when he’s being a pundit, which is apparently most of the time lately, Meacham just skips the facts as it suits him. He tweeted, for example, in 2019, that Trump’s mean tweets about “the Squad” meant that he “has joined Andrew Johnson as the most racist President in American history.”

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