Dishonesty, Cowardice, Fantasy and Hypocrisy in the Democrats’ Response to the Hamas-Israel War

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Could there be a more disingenuous statement than Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer insisting that Republicans are “politicizing” the Gazan conflict and support for Israel? While the Republican Party, and especially Donald Trump as President, have been absolutely steadfast in their support for Israel, Democratic Party support has been equivocal at best, the equivocation highlighted by President Barack Obama’s disastrous deal with Iran returning millions in Iranian assets in exchange for a promise (from one of the most duplicitous regimes on earth) to delay its development of a nuclear bomb. (The most likely recipient of said bomb would be, naturally, Israel.) Iran, as was widely predicted by critics of Obama’s sell-out, used the assets it has to seed terrorist groups in the Middle East, including Hamas.

Although the Biden Administration has dutifully gone through the motions of sending financial and weapons support to the only democracy in the Middle East, it has also been smarting from the clear signs that a large segment of its base sympathizes with the Palestinians, even to the extent of excusing Hamas terror. One of the so-called “battleground” states in the upcoming election, Michigan, has a potentially decisive Muslim population that would be pleased to see a Palestine state extend from the river to the sea. If one would be an eager purchaser of the London Bridge, perhaps one would see no connection between that problem and the ridiculous, self-contradicting decision by Biden (or his puppeteer), announced in the State of the Union message, to go to elaborate lengths to deliver “humanitarian aid” to Gaza. You know: pay for Israeli military attacks on Gaza, pay to help Gaza suffer from those attacks as little as possible. Brilliant! But of course that insane decision has nothing to do with politics—just a desire to undermine Israel’s interests just enough to keep the White House.

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From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: “Nah, There’s No Big Tech Bias!”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Talk about smoking guns…

Big Tech is all in with the rest of the Axis (“the resistance,” Democrats and mainstream media) to rescue President Biden from his own blunders and ineptitude by bringing Donald Trump down by any means necessary. This is no conspiracy theory: they may not “steal” the election, but we can already see that they are doing anything they can think of to rig it. Here’s an example so flagrant that it is almost funny, or would be if it wasn’t emanating from the same people who claim to be “saving democracy.”

On March 16, Trump made his “bloodbath” comment, discussed on Ethics Alarms here and here. Even though his metaphor was unambiguous in its context (the economic plight facing American auto manufacturers if Biden remained President) a memo went out to the Left’s cabal dictating that the comments should be reported as a threat by Trump to encourage violence should Trump not prevail in November. On March 18, FactCheck.org, still biased leftward but perhaps the closest we have to an objective fact-checking service, pointed out that among “bloodbath’s” definitions was “a major economic disaster.” At that time the Google online definition of the word included “a period of disastrous loss or reversal,” and the sentence used to illustrate it was, “A few mutual funds performed well in the general bloodbath of the stock market.”

But that definition exonerated Donald Trump. Thus Google, being good patriots and all, changed the definition! See..

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Now My OTHER Alma Mater Has an Anti-Semitism Problem…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

This story raises the question of when pure anti-Semitism breaches the protection of academic freedom, or if it ever does.

Georgetown Law Center maintains an online “Scholarly Commons,” a portal where faculty members can post law journal articles, completed or in progress, and other papers and materials. Professor Lama Abu-Odeh, who teaches two courses at GULC on “conservative legal thought,” posted “working papers” to the portal with no academic citations, which presumably would be added if the papers ever develop into scholarly treatises. Their subject is what Abu-Odeh calls the “genocide in Gaza,” and her rhetoric frequently crosses into classic anti-Semite tropes

“Gaza Shoah: Zionism’s Efficacious Role as Ideological Supplement in the US,” for example, uses the familiar anti-Israel slur that it is “an apartheid state.” The paper also endorses “resistance to the Zionist project,” excusing Hamas, and even denies that Hamas terrorists raped Israelis during the October 7 terrorist attack. Another anti-Semitic trope that Professor Abud-Odeh embraces is the claim that Jews manipulate the American media and bribe U.S. politicians. “It is true that the American political class, Democrats and Republicans alike, is on AIPAC’s dole,” Abu-Odeh writes. “It is also true that legacy media is dominated by Zionist Jews.”

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Another Democratic Party Strategy to Save Democracy: Blocking “More Choices on the Ballot”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I keep thinking some day, Democrats with ethics alarms and functioning cerebral cortexes are going to wake up, slap themselves sharply in the face, and shout, “This entire party is based on lies, deception, and hypocrisy! What the hell have I been doing?”

If today’s New York Times story titled “Democrats Prepare Aggressive Counter to Third-Party Threats” doesn’t have that effect, however, I wonder if anything will.

Since the Times here is carefully trying to inform readers about an organized effort by their readers favorite party that should be received as an indictment on its face, the article proceeds as if there are legitimate arguments pro- and con. “An army of lawyers aims to challenge the steadily advancing ballot-access efforts of independent candidates, who Democrats fear could peel votes away in swing states,” begins the Times. “The aim ”is to ensure all the candidates are playing by the rules, and to seek to hold them accountable when they are not,’ “the Times explains quoting one of the leaders of the party’s efforts. It doesn’t mention that this is pure deceit, as the paper has already explained the motivation for the assault on ballot access:

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Another Example of Why the Death Penalty Is Necessary

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

My go-to case for defending the death penalty is the Cheshire home invasion, though the surviving Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is an equally strong, indeed I would say irrefutable case. I now have another one.

Read with care.

Kristel Candelario left on a summer vacation in Puerto Rico with a male friend, leaving her 16 month daughter Jailyn alone in a playpen with a few bottles of milk. The neighbor’s doorbell camera recorded the baby’s anguished screams as she suffered from abandonment and separation, hunger and dehydration. After a few days at the beach and another stopover in Detroit, Jailyn’s mother returned tp her Cleveland home to find her daughter dead, though she had the gall to call 911 in a panic. She’d been gone for about 10 days. I wonder what she expected to find.

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Ethics Dunce: Don Surber

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Don Surber is a former journalist and current conservative pundit whose blog and substack I occasionally peruse, usually without too much alarm. However, he has issued a substack essay that, if I had to summarize in three words my objections to it and any culture wars guerilla who cited him as authority would be, “This doesn’t help.” A longer version follows.

Surber’s piece is called “In praise of ties” and carries the subheading, “They helped build a society that we are destroying.” If Glenn Reynolds had not endorsed the link, I would have stopped reading right there. I know ties are going to be used as a metaphor for the decline of elegance, respect, adulthood, civility, dignity, elan and eclat, blattity-blah, but still. Don’t insult my intelligence. This is the equivalent of “In praise of stovepipe hats,” “In praise of spats,” “In praise of derbies” or “In praise of bustles.” These are all fashions, and fashions rise and fall like steam and autumn leaves. We get used to them, if they hang around long enough, and yes, sometimes their demise are linked to cultural factors that have little to do with fashion. Nonetheless, longing for a time when men wore ties as a matter of societal conformity makes one seem like Grandpa Simpson, screaming at clouds. Worse, in fact.

Surber writes, “Chuck Berry always wore a tie. Gas station attendants wore them. You could trust your car to the man who wore the star because he had a tie on. Men wore ties to ballgames because men were civilized. Ties were important because they gave a sense of authority but ties also showed that a man wants to belong in society. As Benjamin Franklin said, “Eat to please thyself, but dress to please others.”

Sure, Don. I always thought those pictures of men wearing ties at baseball games were ridiculous. Ted Williams, one of my father’s heroes whom he passed on to me, famously refused to wear a tie: he had a very long neck and didn’t think ties looked good on him. Ben was right, but when the tie as a symbol of wanting to appear formal and serious wane—it hasn’t waned completely —then people will adopt other ways of “dressing to please.” It is the way of the world, and there is nothing about these transitions to lament.

But Surber was just getting started. Here he is at full speed:

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Speaking of Defamation, Ethics Villain Christine Blasey Ford Has Resurfaced. Yecchh.

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

After embarrassing herself, a distinguished Supreme Court nominee and Senate Democrats with her despicable late-hit testimony impugning the character of now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Christine Blasey Ford was good enough to disappear for five years. Unfortunately, that time was apparently occupied with the process of cashing in. Her “memoir”—if collected dubious re-discovered memories can be fairly that, “One Way Back,” is out on Amazon and book stores.

Like Anita Hill before her,Ford was dredged up by unethical Democrats to try to derail the Supreme Court nomination of a conservative jurist by a Republican President by an accusation of sexual misconduct that was decades old and never reported at the time. Compared to Ford, however, Hill was the epitome of rectitude. Ford’s tale, conveniently “recovered” in therapy, was more than thirty years old and involved an alleged attack by Kavanaugh when he and she were both teenagers, at a party nobody could place in locale and time (besides the year, 1983). Not one witness claimed by Ford has confirmed her allegations. Kavanaugh denied them.

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Trump Sues ABC and Stephanopoulos For Defamation. Good.

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

EA discussed George Stephanopoulos’s unethical, partisan, and thoroughly biased interrogation of Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC.) about her endorsement of Donald Trump during the March 10 interview on ABC’s Sunday talking heads show, “This Week.” It was one of the more blatant examples of how the mainstream media’s partisan biases and “Get Trump!” slant has rampaged through U.S. journalism like a cancer, but nobody should have been shocked r surprised. Stephanopoulos was a Democratic operative and a Clinton minion when he was hired. His performance against Mace was George being George; it was not the first time his biases and dishonesty were put on display. ABC should never have hired him, but then ABC, like NBC, CBS, NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post et al. have virtually abandoned ethical journalism for partisan advocacy.

Yesterday Trump’s lawyers filed a lawsuit over Stephanopoulos saying that Trump had been found “liable for rape.” The jury specifically found Trump liable for sexual abuse under New York law, but not rape. Under classic defamation law, falsely stating that a woman has engaged in illicit sexual activity was per se defamation, but 1) Trump isn’t a woman 2) defamation by a news source against a public figure is measured by a tougher standard under the New York Times decision, requiring “actual malice,” and 3) George was carefully tip-toeing around the edges of acceptable (under the law) celebrity smearing. I highly doubt that Trump can prevail. Nonetheless, I’m glad he filed the lawsuit…hell, I’m not paying for his lawyers. If significant numbers of Americans who have been metaphorically sleep-walking for the past 30 years or so finally see Stephanopoulos for what he is, and can connect the dots to realize what this tells us about American journalism, it will be a good thing.

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A Popeye: Sorry, I Can’t Let Trump’s Presidential History Nonsense Go Unflagged…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The latest kerfuffle spawned by Donald Trump’s loose lips ensnared Keith Olbermann. In an interview with Newsmax’s Greg Kelly last week, Trump blathered about persecuted Presidents, “I was always told that Andrew Jackson was treated the absolute worst. I heard Abraham Lincoln was second. I don’t care,” Trump said. “Andrew Jackson or anybody else. Nobody, when you think of the fake things, nobody’s been treated like Trump in terms of badly.”

Olbermann, being the jerk that he is, re-tweeted the Biden Campaign’s “Trump says he has been treated worse than Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated,” with the comment, “There’s always the hope.” This isn’t the point of this post, but 1) Trump was referring to Lincoln’s vilification in both the South and much of the North when he spoke of bad treatment, and 2) Olbermann’s snark was inevitable, in character, and obviously not a “true threat.”

But then people, including some Fox talking heads, started calling for him to be kicked off Twitter/”X,” and Keith pulled his tweet. Then he lied about what he meant, tweeting, “I know nobody with an IQ greater than a halibut’s has believed @FoxNews since 1996 but even from their whores this is idiotic The RT clearly shows I’m hoping Trump’s right, that he IS treated worse than Lincoln. As I’ve said for 9 years: THAT HE’S CONVICTED, THEN DIES IN PRISON ”

Sure Keith. Do you really believe anyone but a few halibut, Fox News, and the nearly million idiots who follow you on Twitter give a fig what you tweet, ever?

But I digress. What I want to point out is that neither Lincoln nor Andrew Jackson top the list of mistreated Presidents. It’s an especially dumb thing to say about Jackson. Jackson was the most popular President since George Washington, cruised to re-election, and left office an icon. I assume what Trump is alluding to is the scandal over Jackson’s wife Rachel, because of her inadvertent bigamy when she eloped with Andy. Jackson didn’t take any criticism well, but he was still mostly worshiped as President, though roundly hated by his political foes for consistently besting them.

Trump has a slightly stronger case with Lincoln, but Abe still was re-elected, and almost immediately deified after he was killed. The following Presidents were treated much worse than Jackson; whether they were treated worse than Lincoln is a matter of perspective: John Adams, Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, Andrew Johnson, Rutherford B. Hayes, Herbert Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon. I could even make an argument for Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

Trump has a strong case that he was the most unfairly and viciously treated of all, but the two Johnsons, Hoover and Nixon have strong cases as well. I do give Trump the award for knowing less about American Presidential history than any other POTUS.

That’s something.

Behold the Corrosive Effect of Living and Working in Hollywood’s Progressive Bubble

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Director Jonathan Glazer was warmly received when he delivered a repulsive and ignorant acceptance speech at the Oscars on March 10 after his Holocaust film “The Zone of Interest” won the best international film award. With producer James Wilson and financier Len Blavatnik standing with him, Glazer said: “All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present, not to say look what they did then, but rather look what we do now. Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It’s shaped all of our past and present. Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October — whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”

Despite the positive reaction this fatuous virtue-signaling outburst attracted from the Hollywood glitterati, more than 450 Jewish artists and executives signed an open letter denouncing the speech. The group’s statement says: “We refute our Jewishness being hijacked for the purpose of drawing a moral equivalence between a Nazi regime that sought to exterminate a race of people, and an Israeli nation that seeks to avert its own extermination.”

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