When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring or Perhaps Because You’re an Idiot: U.N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield’s Gaffe

I know I’ve used this song from the musical “Li’l Abner ” recently, but it was all I could think of after hearing about another one of Joe Biden’s incompetents’ latest exploit, so Marryin’ Sam and that big Yokum kid’s duet is back for an encore.

When U.N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield defended the U.S. veto of a ceasefire resolution at the Security Council today (everyone else voted to make Israel stop punishing Gaza, except for the U.K., which boldly abstained), she said,

“We’re eager to continue working with the Council on this proposal – one that would see a temporary ceasefire as soon as practicable based on the formula of all hostages being released and one that would get aid into the hands of those Palestinians who so desperately need it. All told, we intend to do this the right way so that we can create the right conditions for a safer, more peaceful future. And we will continue to actively engage in the hard work of direct diplomacy on the ground until we reach a final solution.

A final solution! The controversy involves Israel, which is being accused of “genocide” for deciding that it can no longer trust a region governed by terrorists after its citizens were slaughtered in a sneak attack. Meanwhile, Palestinian adversaries have made it clear that their mission is to wipe Israel off the map, and the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations describes the U.S. objective in the region as “a final solution,” thus quoting Adolf Eichmann, Hermann Göring and General Reinhard Heydrich.

Thomas-Greenfield didn’t blanch as she read the words, and it wasn’t an off-the-cuff gaffe, but was contained in prepared remarks. A verbal botch of that magnitude would justify firing for cause in my administration and any competent one, but this administration doesn’t fire anyone, no matter how poorly they perform. Maybe Democrats can use the incident to defend Biden’s stream of dementia-triggered gibberish. “See?” they cans say. “Joe’s never said anything that stupid!”

True.

The U.S. is working with Israel on a Final Solution in Gaza.

Brilliant.

The country’s in the very best of hands…

Still More Law and Ethics Matters

Boy, the laws and ethics intersection has been almost constantly in the news lately, led by the Fani Willis controversy in Georgia, which apparently will turn on whether the judge believes the justly beleaguered Fulton County DA really paid half of her paramour and co-Trump prosecutor’s expenses on various platonic < cough> trips and cruises in cash, though there’s no record of such payments. Willis’s father even took the stand to explain that keeping huge amounts of cash on hand is “a black thing.” I did not know that!

As Alice would say, “Curiouser and curiouser!” Then we have much ferment in the legal world over whether the New York County Supreme Court’s order for Donald Trump to pay an unprecedented $355 million for inflating asset values in statements of his financial condition submitted to lenders and insurers was just, cruel and unusual punishment, a bill of attainder, or self-evident partisan lawfare. Gov. Kathy Hochul didn’t help matters by trying to justify the award by saying that Trump is special (wink,wink) and we all know what that means when coming from a Democrat. I confess, I don’t know the New York law involved well enough to weigh in on this one, but the verdict certainly adds to the weight of evidence that there is a full-on press to use the courts to crush Trump before he can crush Joe Biden.

There were two non-Trump law and ethics stories recently worth pondering.

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Nate Silver Probably Comes As Close To Objectivity As a Left-Biased Pundit Can Be Regarding President Biden’s Dementia Dilemma

In sharp contrast to Ezra Klein’s slippery, dissembling spin-fest regarding President Biden’s decline, statistics maven Nate Silver has gifted us with a far more fair, responsible and honest—that is, ethical— analysis on his substack newsletter, “The Silver Bulletin.” (Nate has 45,000 paying subscribers while I have trouble getting more than a few hundred people to read my free blog every day, so attention must be paid.) Nate’s leftward bias crept out into the light periodically even when he was primarily a sports analyst, but to his great credit, he tries to conquer his biases, which is all any of us can do.

His is a sharp analysis for the most part, and a bracing nostrum from all the “it isn’t what it is” Democrats and media pundits who expect us to believe that old Joe is in tip-top shape. Silver writes,

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In Which I Comment on That Absurd Presidential Ranking Poll Without Reading It, Because My Head Doesn’t Need Any More Explosions, Thanks…

Several readers and friends sent me this new poll, described as the product of historians in some sources and a the opinion of political science organization in others. It looks to me like the latter is more correct: the thing was the brainchild (I’m being generous here) of Brandon Rottinghaus and Justin Vaughn, both professors of political science, and that’s what their degrees and credentials are in as well. Calling them “historians” is misleading, but that’s what the Times and others sources are doing. Political science is not the same academic field as history, though of course it involves the study of history. I would never call myself a professional historian. My degrees are in American Government ( the College That Must Not Be Named’s version of political science) and law.

I was tempted to dissect the poll, which famously ranks the spectacularly incompetent Joe Biden as the 14th best President and Donald Trump dead last as the worst, in order to add to previous posts in which I described how ruinously political and untrustworthy the field of history has become. I decided that this would be unfair, since these biased history dummies are not a group of historians. I also decided that such an obviously partisan and politically motivated poll was not worth dignifying by treating it as anything but.

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Shock Ruling: The ADA Doesn’t Require an Employer to Keep Someone in a Customer Service Job Who Can’t Help Calling Customers “Fucking Assholes” or Worse.

That this case even got this far is depressing.

Cooper v. Dolgencorp, LLC, decided by the Sixth Circuit this week, involved a Coca -Cola delivery merchandiser who delivered products to customer stores, and who also suffers from Tourette Syndrome. Tourette Syndrome, a rare malady that TV writers find infinitely amusing, causes unwanted, involuntary muscle movements and sudden, often loud verbal outbursts. Cooper, the plaintiff, has a rare Tourette Syndrome problem known as coprolalia, which causes him to shout out obscene, profane, or other inappropriate words, including racial slurs. As you might imagine, this behavior sparked many customer complaints.

Cooper’s employer, Coca-Cola, felt that it had to reassign Cooper to a lower-paying non-customer-contact warehouse position. Cooper’s doctor had advised that while Cooper could work as a driver, another employee had to be with him to handle customer contact. That was not feasible.

Cooper sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act, arguing that that Coca-Cola was not accommodating his disability, and violating the law by taking him out of his more lucrative job just because he might suddenly call a customer a “nigger.” Coca-Cola won in a summary judgement.

The Court stated that it was clear Cooper’s Tourette Syndrome made doing his job at the level the job description required impossible, and that there were no reasonable accommodations Coca Cola could make that would allow someone likely to shout out “Cunt!” while dealing with a customer a safe employee to place in a customer service environment. Because customer service was an essential function of Cooper’s job and the driver’s malady made it impossible to perform it, there was no violation of Americans with Disabilities Act.

In my view, an ethical, competent lawyer should have informed the plaintiff that he had no case. However, the comments on the story at the link below are surprising, for many commenters seem to think Cooper was the victim of “discrimination.”

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Source: Volokh Conspiracy

Biden Scores Yet Another “Bottomless Pinocchio,” But I Guess It Doesn’t Count.

President’s Day on Ethics Alarms continues with another Biden Presidency Whopper. Once again, Biden, his mouthpieces at the White House, and VP Kamala Harris have stated in public that “Gun violence is the leading cause of death of children.” It isn’t. They keep saying this and it keeps being repeated by the mainstream news media, but the stat is as much of a lie as other hoary progressive myth narratives, my favorite being that women only earn 70 cents for every dollar men earn for the same jobs.

The reason for the fake gun stat is almost too obvious: it feeds neatly into “Think of the children!” hysteria and the media fearmongering narrative that every child is risking his or her life by going to school. It is an example of the tried-and-true fallacy the appeal to emotion. By all means, lets gut individual rights of self-defense, because if it only saves one child’s life….!!!

Washington Post “Fact Checker” Glenn Kessler, as I’ve noted before, seems to really want to be a fair and objective commentator but somehow can’t quite manage it. That’s Kessler’s
“Bottomless Pinocchio” above—if you can’t see it, it’s because WordPress’s image embedding feature stopped working a few minutes ago. If you recall, it shows a pile of little Pinocchio heads, which Kessler uses to denote a lie that the same public figure uses no matter how many times it’s proven false. The device was created for Donald Trump. In contrast, Biden’s repeated lies are seldom flagged by Kessler or anyone else. As Kessler has explained it, Trump lies, but “Biden loves to retell certain stories. Some aren’t credible” .

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More Smoking Gun Evidence of Where “Advocacy Journalism” Leads…

I almost framed this post as a parody of those public service ads begging us for donations to help “Johnny,” who is suffering from some dread disease. Read the Times op-ed titled “Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden.” It’s like a parody itself, so I decided another layer of satire would be excessive. The author, Ezra Klein, was one of the pioneers of so-called “advocacy journalism.” He founded JournoList (sometimes referred to as the J-List), a private Google Groups forum where 400 progressive journalists, academics and others could plot how they would spread the Left’s propaganda and slant the news. He founded Vox, the all-progressive bias all the time website, which is approximately as trustworthy as a news source as MSNBC or Breitbart.

His Times piece (it’s out from behind the paywall) is both sad and funny. This is whistling a symphony past the graveyard—he’s obviously terrified that his favorite party will lose the White House in November and the evil Donald Trump will undo all of Joe Biden’s good works. I’d feel sorry for him if Klein wasn’t such a long-running dissembling, manipulative hack. The piece is funny, because it is so transparent and Klein’s spinning is so desperate. For example:

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Yes Indeed, Most Presidents Have Had Emotional, Mental or Serious Physical Problems, But That Doesn’t Make Joe Biden Fit to Be One

I’ve been holding on to this post for a while now, waiting for Presidents Day. An old “Psychology Today” article has been dredged up lately by various pundits desperately seeking a way to deny what is now undeniable. President Biden is in the throes of serious mental decline, and allowing him to run again, at an advanced age and when his memory, stamina, and cognitive health are rapidly receding into the fog, is irresponsible—which doesn’t mean that the Axis won’t do it anyway. The argument being mounted to justify such a desperate and stupid course is a version of the #1 rationalization on the list, “Everybody does it!” Joe’s problems are no big deal, you see, because, as Dr. Guy Winch wrote in 2016: “a study by Jonathan Davidson of the Duke University Medical Center and colleagues, who reviewed biographical sources for the first 37 presidents (1776-1974), half of those men had been afflicted by mental illness—and 27% met those criteria while in office, something that could have clearly affected their ability to perform their jobs.”

Whew! Well, that’s a relief!

I hadn’t seen the study, but it was heartwarming, since its findings echoed those of my American Government honors thesis, now deep in the stacks of Widener Library. I hypothesized that being outside the norm emotionally, mentally and physically was among the factors that selected out the extraordinary individuals who become Presidents of the United States. Leaders, to give an even shorter version, are not normal by definition.

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Update: Recent Law and Ethics Matters….

Wow, Colbert, that was hilarious! What a great satirical take-down of ignorant and biased Democrats who somehow can’t perceive how abnormal it is—well, not in Russia— for an entire party to seek to eliminate the primary threat to its power by searching for ways to send him to jail! Brilliant! He even perfectly evokes their disdain for due process: “everybody” knows Trump is guilty, so what are the courts waiting for? Wait, what? Colbert wasn’t trying to be funny? But I thought he was a comedian!

Meanwhile, in other ethics news involving law, courts, judges and lawyers—

1. Glenn Greenwald tweeted, “How someone reacts to the Fani Willis testimony yesterday is a litmus test for if they’re a complete partisan hack. Anyone who denies that she clearly lied, could not respond to basic questions, acted inappropriately, and corrupted this prosecution is a mindless Dem partisan.” Almost my entire legal ethics listserv basically reacted to the Fani Willis hearing by concluding that nothing she did was relevant to the prosecution of Donald Trump. The few bold souls among the legal ethics experts who are inclined to dissent are doing so timidly at best. The anti-Trump bias in my sector is shocking, and the rationalizations being grabbed onto to defend Willis are embarrassing. One very prominent legal ethics specialist wrote that he believes the Fulton County DA hiring her lover was innocent because “she couldn’t find any qualified lawyer”—David Wade is not qualified— to take the job.

2. Meanwhile, both ABC and the New York Times adopted Willis’s insulting “This is only happening because I’m a black woman!” defense.

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From India, the Case of the Ethical Burglars

I am at a loss as to how to categorize this strange story, as Mallory’s outburst above suggests.

Thieves broke into the opulent home of celebrated Bollywood film director M. Manikandan, escaping with gold, silver and cash. A few days later, however, someone left a small plastic bag outside the mansion’s gates. It was carefully fastened shut, and contained an object wrapped in a white handkerchief. Upon unwrapping it, the director discovered a medal he had won in 2021 for one of his acclaimed films. Accompanying the prestigious award was a handwritten note from the burglars (in Tamil, one of India’s many regional languages). “Sir, please forgive us,” the note read. “Your hard work belongs to you alone.”

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