Ethics Dunce: The Federalist

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

I could easily make this an Unethical Quote of the Month post too.

I had fondly hoped that I had written my last sentence about the disgusting blight on the republic that calls himself “George Santos,” but no: I just read the ethics-free, Machiavellian, “the ends justify the mean” protest by The Federalist titled, “George Santos’ Expulsion Is Further Proof The GOP Is A Potemkin Political Party.” One of the supposed media flagships of conservative thought has announced that if the Republican Party really cared about conservative principles, it would happily allow a dishonest, untrustworthy, and stunningly dumb Congressman elected under false pretenses remain in Congress under their banner, because they need him to “tackle” the “aforementioned”crises plaguing the country.”

It is a disgusting, indefensible, unethical position, demonstrating that the Democratic Party’s ethics rot has spread. Consider these excerpts:

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As Long As We’re Focused On Throwing Unethical And Unqualified People Out Of Bodies Where They Don’t Belong: Meet Bishop Talbert W. Swan II!

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

(He’s the one on the right, next to the Native American…)

Bishop Talbert W. Swan II, the president of the Springfield, Mass., chapter of the NAACP, wrote on social media regarding Israel’s military response to the Hamas terror attack, “Who would’ve thought that in 2023 Jewish soldiers would be the nazis carrying out ethnic cleansing?” Later, he said, “This isn’t a WAR, it’s a HOLOCAUST.” In a sermon this month, Swan excused the Hamas murder of civilians, children and infants, saying “Violence is the language of the unheard.”

Oh…I forgot to mention that Swan is a member of….wait for it!…. the Massachusetts Task Force on Hate Crimes. I’d say that a Hamas terrorist attack on Jewish citizens qualifies as a hate crime if anything does, wouldn’t you? But I’m not enough of an authority to serve on a blue-ribbon task force. Maybe we shouldn’t assume that members of that task force are necessarily against hate crimes. No, no, I now see that the task force exists to advises the Massachusetts governor on “issues relating to the prevalence, deterrence, and prevention of hate crimes.” That would seem to rule out implying that a terrorist massacre is a good thing, or am I missing something?

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On His Way Out, Rep. Santos Kindly Demonstrates Why

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The House just voted 311 to 114 (with two cowardly members voting “present”) to make New York Congressman George Santos only the sixth in history to be deemed unworthy of an elected seat. The GOP members mostly supported the draconian punishment despite facing a tough race in the special election Santos’s disgrace now triggers. If I were a voter in that Long Island and Queens district, I’d be tempted to vote for the Democrat just to make the Republican Party pay for allowing a fraud and a crook like Santos to be its nominee. Of course, the Democrats and the local news media also share some blame for not doing due diligence to uncover important facts about a wildly unqualified candidate, but the GOP has to be first in line to be held accountable after Santos himself.

Yesterday, facing his likely humiliation, the biggest phony ever elected to Congress put his essential sliminess on full display, vowing revenge on his party and, like so many villains in movies about conspiracies and corruption, swearing that ‘if I go down, I’ll take all of you down with me!’

“I will do the same thing that members did to me and go to the Office of Congressional Ethics, all throughout today and tomorrow and report, everything that I think is relevant to the committee for them to look into,” said Santos. He’s already promised to file a complaint about the ridiculous Rep. Jamaal Bowman, the Mad Fire Alarmist. Yes, Bowman should be sanctioned, but compared to Santos he’s John Quincy Adams.

Santos’s reaction to being expelled is a stinking pile of rationalizations, as discussed here. His pledge to get revenge is another bit of signature significance. If Santos had any ethical instincts at all, any concept of why he was being kicked out of Congress, any flicker of conscience, dignity, responsibility or decency, he would have exited with a statement expressing his regret for his past actions, apologizing for soiling (well, further soiling) the reputation of the body he was elected to serve in, and promising to devote his future activities to honorable public service, while acknowledging that there is, at this time, no reason to believe him. Then it might have been said of his leaving Congress, in the manner of Malcolm’s description of MacBeth at his execution,

Nothing in his life
Became him like the leaving it.

But George Santos doesn’t possess those character traits: he’s a throbbing sociopath, and unlike more successful sociopaths in our government, he’s not smart or wily enough to hide it.

First Open Ethics Forum Of December! Let’s Have Anthony Fauci Throw Out The First Pitch…

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Play ball! (The Major League Baseball GM meetings begin this week, meaning that free agent players will be getting contracts that will instantly make them financially secure for life even if they never play an inning. Is this a great country or what?)

Mid-Day Ethics Catch-Up, 11/30/23: “Goodbye November, Glad To See You Go” Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Nothing of ethical significance has happened on November 30 (so far), but this was an especially rotten month for U.S. ethics, low-lighted, of course, by the not-entirely shocking revelation that the progressive movement has spawned a stunning number of anti-Semitics while out college campuses are churning out eventual graduates who don’t know how to distinguish propaganda from history. Isn’t that nice? My own increasingly embarrassing alma mater, Harvard College, under its diversity-obsessed and cowardly new president, continued its support of terrorism, with the Harvard Crimson picking now to again endorse the the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement devoted to ending international support for Israel’s “oppression” of Palestinians. Now Harvard has joined the ranks of schools being investigated by the Department of Education for civil rights violations of its own students, the Jewish ones, of course. Good.

So what ethics horrors do we have to muse over today?

1. Just because I awarded Chuck Shumer an Ethics Hero award because he isn’t excusing his parties bigots doesn’t change the fact that he is a two-faced partisan hack.. Schumer this week took to the Senate floor to warn that a key funding package with Ukraine aid could collapse over battle Republicans pressing for a “partisan border policy” thereby injecting a “decades-old hyperpartisan issue” into the debate. Since when was enforcing existing laws a partisan issue? Old Ethics Alarms friend Joe Concha was unkind enough to point out on “X” that Schumer said in 2009, “People who enter the United States without our permission are illegal aliens and illegal aliens should not be treated the same as people who enter the U.S. legally. The American people will never accept immigration reform unless they truly believe that their government is committed to ending future illegal immigration.”

2. “Was that wrong? Should I not have done that?” To make a dubious point about school security, Casey Garcia (aided by her 4’11” stature) recorded herself posing as her 13-year-old daughter at San Elizario Middle School and posted the results on social media. She dyed her hair, used skin bronzer, wore a hoodie and had a pandemic-hysteria mask on to pass for her teenage daughter. In the video, Garcia claims to have “exposed the dangers of our schools and I am trying to protect my children and yours. If you want to come after me for that, there’s really nothing else I can say.” Because the real problem in schools is short parents pretending to be students, or something.

Casey was convicted of criminal trespassing, and must perform 100 hours of community service and pay a $700 fine.

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Ethics Hero: Senator Chuck Schumer

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Schumer, as the nation’s highest ranking elected official of Jewish heritage, is the ideal official to call out the Left’s rampant anti-Semitism that has been exposed since the October 6 Hamas attack on Israel. Doing so involved considerable political risks, and frankly, I didn’t think he had the guts to do it. Yesterday, however, Schumer delivered an impassioned speech in the Senate condemning members of his own party and ideological persuasion for “unknowingly aiding and abetting” anti-Semitism in the name of social justice, and thus fueling bigotry against Jews as Israel battles for its survival against Hamas.

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Hey, I’m Calm! Stuff Like This Doesn’t Bother Me At All. I’m Just An Uninvolved Observer.

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

And happy!

See?

Stories like this one coming up—another Great Stupid epic, again with links to the George Floyd Ethics Train Wreck—have been proliferating lately. When I first saw the headline on a report that D.C.’s black, woke, totally incompetent mayor Muriel Bowser had “re-painted” her insane giant Black Lives Matter mural, confirmation bias kicked in: I read it to mean that she had finally removed the insulting monstrosity by having it painted over. I was even preparing a post about how trying to undo a massive ethics botch often calls attention to what was so wrong in the first place, and that in this case, Bowser was in ethics zugzwang because so many of her residents are still blind Black Lives Matter supporters, aka. anti-white, anti-police, anti-America racists.

But that’s not what the story said. The real story is that Bowser chose now to spruce up the huge, infamous street mural shouting “Black Lives Matter” that she had painted in 2020 as BLM mobs were “mostly peacefully” demonstrating through the city and the nation, at times confronting white D.C. diners and demanding that they pledge fealty to the Marxist movement. The refurbishment cost $271,231, including $217,680 in labor costs and $53,551 in paint supplies.

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Incompetent Elected Official Of The Week: Rep. Roger Williams (R-Tx.)

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

George Santos, the lying, fraudulent, criminal Congressman from New York who was elected to Congress by almost completely fabricating his résumé, is likely to be expelled from the House at the end of this week in a bi-partisan two-thirds vote. Good.

Santos will be the first House member to be jettisoned without having first been convicted of a crime or being a supporter of the Confederacy. The bi-partisan effort is even more remarkable because House Republicans have so small a majority including Santos. But George is special. He is an embarrassment to the party, his district, New York, the House, the nation and his species.

Some Republicans, however, don’t comprehend that “integrity of the institution” stuff. Meet Roger Williams of Texas, who explains why he is not inclined to vote against Santos. noting that he has serious reservations about voting to remove a fellow member and saying, “I think we set a really not a good example if we can just pick and choose who comes and who stays. I don’t agree with what he’s been accused of, but at the same time it’s not our job here in Congress to decide who the congressman in some state or some district is. I just don’t like the idea of that.”

This is the quality of analysis offered by an elected official who helps make our laws. Ugh. Let’s see…

1. Congress isn’t picking and choosing “who comes and who stays.” Congress, like all institutions with any integrity and respectability, is enforcing minimum standards for its members. If it won’t do that—and it usually doesn’t—it forfeits the trust of the public.

2. Not only will Congress be setting a good example by ridding itself of an unqualified, dishonest phony who was elected under false pretenses, it is an essential example that should be repeated more frequently. All Americans, the unfortunate districts that elect unqualified representatives, and Congress itself are harmed when sociopaths like Santos are elected. Citizens should be on alert that if they vote irresponsibly and end up with a toxic representative, he or she might end up being rejected. I can think of at least 10 other members of the House—none quite as bad as Santos, of course—who would benefit Congress by their absence. It’s ridiculous that so few Representatives have been expelled in three centuries.

3. “I don’t agree with what he’s been accused of…” Can you be any more equivocal, Congressman? Santos’s lies about his background are a matter of record. The scathing report from the House Ethics Committee earlier this month concluded after a thorough investigation that he “sought to fraudulently exploit every aspect of his House candidacy for his own personal financial profit.” The fact that Santos also has more than 20 criminal charges pending against him doesn’t even need to come into consideration.

4. Congress isn’t deciding “who the congressman in some state or some district is.” Santos’s New York district will do that in a special election after Santos is metaphorically kicked out the door and down the Capitol steps.

Williams’ rapier-like analysis reveals him as a dim, dim bulb, but at least he might be honest…unlike Rep. Santos.

The Big Lies Of The “Resistance”: A Directory, Updated (11/29/2023)

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

[When I wrote the previous post adding Big Lie #10 to this compendium, I decided to read the whole thing again. That occasioned numerous updates (and repaired typos, of course.). I found it worth reading again; heck, I wrote it, and I had forgotten most of it. So I’m re-posting the revised version now…]

Introduction

The “Big Lie” strategy of public opinion manipulation, most infamously championed by Adolf Hitler and his propaganda master Joseph Goebbels, has, in sinister fashion, become a routine and ubiquitous component of the Left’s efforts to remove President Donald J. Trump from office without having to defeat him at the polls, and subsequently after his defeat, to attempt to prevent him from defeating a hopelessly inept failed successor. One of the most publicized Big Lies, that Trump had “colluded” with the Russian government to “steal” the Presidential election from Hillary Clinton was eventually exposed as such by the results of the Mueller investigation, the discrediting of the Steele Dossier, and the revelation that Democrats (like Adam Schiff) and the mainstream news media deliberately misled the public. and Democrats, with blazing speed, replaced it with another Big Lie that there was a “Constitutional crisis.” I could have added that one to the list, I suppose, but the list of Big Lies is dauntingly long already, and this one is really just a hybrid of the Big Lies below.

Becoming addicted to relying on Big Lies as a political strategy is not the sign of ethical political parties, movements, or ideologies. Perhaps there is a useful distinction between Big Lies and “false narratives,” but I can’t define one. Both are intentional falsehoods designed to frame events in a confounding and deceptive manner, so public policy debates either begin with them as assumptions, thus warping the discussion, or they result in permanent bias, distrust and suspicion of the lie/narrative’s target. For simplicity’s sake, because I believe it is fair to do so, and also because “Big Lie” more accurately reflects just how unethical the tactic is, that is the term I will use.

Big Lie #1. “Trump is just a reality TV star.”

This is #1 because it began at the very start of Trump’s candidacy. It’s pure deceit: technically accurate in part but completely misleading. Ronald Reagan was subjected to a similar Big Lie when Democrats strategically tried to denigrate his legitimacy by  referring to him as just an actor, conveniently ignoring the fact that he had served as Governor of the largest state in the nation for eight years, and had split his time between acting and politics for many years before that, gradually becoming more involved in politics and public policy. (Reagan once expressed faux puzzlement about the denigration of his acting background, saying that he thought acting was an invaluable skill in politics. He was right, of course.)

In Trump’s case, the disinformation was even more misleading, He was a successful international businessman and entrepreneur in real estate, hotels and casinos, and it was that experience, not his successful, late career foray into “The Apprentice” (as a branding exercise, and a brilliant one), that was the basis of his claim to the Presidency.

The “reality star” smear still appears in attack pieces, even though it makes even less sense for a man who has been President for four years. The tactic is ethically indefensible . It is not only dishonest, intentionally distorting the President’s legitimate executive experience and success,  expertise and credentials, it is also an ad hominem attack. Reality TV primarily consists of modern freak shows allowing viewers to look down on assorted lower class drunks, vulgarians, has-been, exhibitionists,  idiots and freaks. Class bigotry has always been a core part of the NeverTrump cabal, with elitist snobs like Bill Kristol, Mitt Romney, the Bushes, and George Will revealing that they would rather capitulate to the Leftist ideology they have spent their professional lives opposing (well, not Mitt in all cases) than accept being on the same team as a common vulgarian like Donald Trump. Continue reading →

The 10th Big Lie Of The Resistance, And More…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The Ethics Alarms accounting of the Big Lies weaponized by the “resistance,” Democrats and the mainstream media in order to, in the uncomfortably direct words of Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-N.Y.), “eliminate” Donald Trump, stopped before the 2020 election with “Big Lie #9: “Trump’s Mishandling Of The Pandemic Killed People.” (That oft-repeated whopper now looks even more outrageous than the other eight.) I have been meaning to add the obvious #10, “Trump is an Insurrectionist” for years now, and should have as that counter-factual, law- and language-defying slur has appeared daily in the media and was the focus of the Democratic House’s kangaroo court “investigation” into the January 6 riot at the Capitol.

What finally spurred me to action was a typically fatuous essay in New York Magazine’s “Intelligencer” column, “Melania Trump Adds Awkward Touch to Rosalynn Carter Funeral.” (Doesn’t a column with that name have some obligation to present intelligent commentary?).

The article was just another of the millions of installments of the Left’s mantra since the 2016 election: Donald Trump does not deserve the base-line respect, honor, fairness and decency that every other President has been automatically granted by virtue of simply holding the office. The truth is that Melania Trump was quite appropriately included among those honoring former First Lady Rosalynn Carter, she was invited, and there was nothing “awkward” about it. That her husband at various times has said uncomplimentary things about several of his predecessors made her presence no more “awkward” than the presence of Michelle Obama, whose husband broke previous established standards of White House decorum by repeatedly criticizing his immediate predecessor, President Bush. Then came the last snarky paragraph, “There’s no clear answer here; it seems we’re going to debate whether the Trumps should be included every time there’s a high-profile political event,” Margaret Hartmann wrote. “Unfortunately, Emily Post doesn’t cover what to do when the former president is a boorish insurrectionist.”

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