Trump’s NATO Comments and the Contrived “Axis” Freakout

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The Axis of Unethical Conduct, or AUC, the collective leftist and antiTrump allies consisting of “the resistance,” Democrats and the mainstream media, certainly had themselves a pounce orgy when Trump said over the weekend that he wouldn’t allow the U.S. to protect a NATO nation that didn’t contribute its fair share of defense funds to the alliance.

“You don’t pay your bills, you get no protection. It’s very simple,” Trump said at a South Carolina campaign event. “Hundreds of billions of dollars came into NATO, and that’s why they have money.” He also claimed that he told NATO members this when he was in office. This was the part that really caused Trump’s foes (and some of his supporters) apoplexy:

“One of the presidents of a big country stood up, said, ‘Well, sir, if we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?’ I said, “You didn’t pay. You’re delinquent?” He said, “Yes, let’s say that happened.” “No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.”

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A Valentine’s Day Ethics Catastrophe

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

In large part because a large percentage of women rationalize the killing of human beings in their wombs as a “right,” and also because so many of them are programmed to be suckers for arguments like “They’re only seeking better lives for their children!” to excuse open borders,” “If this gun law only saves one life, it’s worth it,” and “All Joe Biden is guilty of is being a good father” (in response to undeniable evidence that the President enabled Hunter’s influence peddling), the women of the younger generations particularly are overwhelmingly woke, extremely progressive, and inclined to tear up when they hear “Imagine.” 

Hence a majority of Millenial and GenZ femmes, 54%, reported to pollsters cited by the New York Post that it is a “relationship red flag if a partner listens to ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’ podcast.” or refuses to see the “Barbie” movie.

Well, I’ll go to any movie my wife wants to see, and had the same attitude when I was dating. And then came “Looking for Mr. Goodbar’….

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Oh NO! I Missed “Black Love Day”!

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

The New York Times, which when it isn’t using its reputation and influence to promote leftist agenda items and Democratic politicians can still be a source of useful information, explained a new black holiday that I had been mercifully unaware of until now. Meet “Black Love Day,” February 13:

On Feb. 13, 1993, Ayo Handy-Kendi, a community organizer and native of Washington, D.C., created the holiday to celebrate communal love and pride in being “unapologetically Black.” …Handy-Kendi…felt compelled by a higher power to bring her community together, she said in an interview with The New York Times…A decade prior, Ms. Handy-Kendi founded the African American Holiday Expo in Washington to promote Black businesses and the observance of holidays celebrating Black history, like Kwanzaa. She then created the African American Holiday Association, a nonprofit that encourages the celebration of alternative holidays focused on Black history and the preservation of Black culture, in 1989. In 1993, “the [C]reator,” Ms. Handy-Kendi told The Times, instructed her to organize the first Black Love Day. She hosted the event, which resembled the expo’s gathering of Black vendors and artisans, at Mayor Sharon Pratt Dixon’s office in the Northwest quadrant of Washington, D.C., drawing from her own experiences and the history of the Black community…Black Love Day and its rituals are guided by the original five tenets: love for the creator, love for self, love for the Black family, love for the Black community and love for Black people.

Celebrating Black Love Day is about acknowledging those tenets throughout the day, Ms. Handy-Kendi said, and can involve a ceremony to honor Black love and relationships. “It’s not where you go on Black Love Day, it’s what you do on Black Love Day,” she said. “The Black Love Book” by Ms. Handy-Kendi outlines ways to practice those values…

You can read the rest if you want, but you get the idea.

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“This is What Happens…”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Except that this was no shark attack, and it wasn’t a boating accident or Jack the Ripper. This is what happens when an entire political party decides that it will never give an elected official the minimal bi-partisan support required to make our three Branch system work, and will ignore, breach or distort basic, core essential democratic principles and traditions to destroy him for as long as it takes.

That arm belongs to Lady Liberty.

Yesterday, two of the terrible consequences of the Democratic mania to destroy Donald Trump, first as President, then as ex-President and Presidential candidate, became especially vivid. Let me say, because if I don’t blow my metaphorical horn no one else will, that Ethics Alarms warned about all of this, tirelessly and repetitiously.

WordPress shows me the 10 tags I have used most frequently since Ethics Alarms began in 2009. Nine are what you would expect on an ethics blog: fairness, ethics, responsibility, integrity, trust, respect, hypocrisy, honesty…and the 2016 Post Election Train Wreck. That tag originated in 2016 when Ethics Alarms first blew the metaphorical whistle on the Democrats’ (along with “the resistance” and the news media) destructive, divisive, unprecedented and totalitarian-tending reaction to the (greatly deserved) loss by Hillary Clinton in a presidential race they thought was a sure thing. I have said repeatedly that the 2016 Post-election Ethics Train Wreck is the most serious and important ethics story in the 21st Century, and one of the five or so worst in our nation’s history. We survived the others, but were lucky. There is a substantial chance that this time, our luck will run out.

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Observations on Being Forced to Watch Network and Cable TV

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

A lost remote (it’s got to be around here somewhere!) has trapped me in Direct TV for the last two days, and I noticed…

1. I saw yet another unclever, gratuitous example of those working in the once ascendant, now gutter-level medium of television (Edward R. Murrow would be so disappointed…) thinking that using code for “fuck” is hilarious and appealing. [This recurring topic was discussed again just about a week ago]

The local Fox channel was promoting the syndicated “Family Feud” show, itself now almost continuously obsessed with smutty questions and answers, with the catch phrase, “What the Feud!” Does the letter ‘F’ now automatically suggest “fuck?” Is the implication that “fuck” is intended, buried somewhere or barely implied intrinsically hilarious to the average TV audience? The depressing phenomnon reminds me of when my theater did a special performance of “Moby Dick Rehearsed” for middle-school kids and a lot of them couldn’t stop giggling and making wise-cracks every time an actor mentioned the whale—“Dick,” you know—or said “she blows.”

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More on the Hur Report, the President’s Brain, and the 25th Amendment

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

A lot more, in fact. I tried to figure out how to stitch all this together, but I’m resorting to bullet points:

  • Jonathan Turley issued an excellent blog post explaining why the 25th Amendment is highly unlikely to be successfully employed to send our declining President into retirement. Do read it, but the short version is that if a President is sufficiently compos mentis to object to his removal for being incapacitated (or has staff acting on his behalf to do it), the 25th Amendment’s elaborate procedures all but guarantee that the effort will fail because going forward would require a 2/3 majority in both Houses of Congress. The amendment contains significant safeguards against the 25th Amendment coup scenario that “the resistance” and Democrats were pushing when Trump was President.(I should have made this point back when Ethics Alarms was analyzing the dishonesty of 25th Amendment arguments by the Trump-Deranged during his term.) One particularly significant statement by Turley: “The various experts and pundits who called for Trump’s removal under the 25th Amendment are notably silent this week, even after [Biden’s] own Justice Department cited his diminished faculties as a reason for not charging him.”
  • Professor Alan Dershowitz, a progressive legal expert relegated to Fox News and other conservative platforms because he refuses to warp his analyses to “get” Trump,  harshly criticized Special Counsel Hur’s report on President Biden’s handling of classified documents as “unfair to both sides” yesterday. I believe his analysis is correct. He said in part,

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Super Bowl Ethics Dunces: The San Francisco 49ers

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

To be fair to the losing Super Bowl team’s players, it is quite possible that the brain damage they have suffered by their repeated concussions while collecting millions to entertain US gladiatorial combat fans and enrich NFL owners, sponsors and conspirators was responsible for the fact that they didn’t know the rules of the game they were playing (!). Nonetheless, the term “professional” in “professional football player,” in addition to meaning that the Super Bowl participants are compensated monetarily, is generally taken to also mean that they know what the hell they they are doing.

Apparently, they did not. That’s unforgivable.

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Ethics Quote of the Week: Nate Silver

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

“You don’t demonstrate your seriousness that Trump is an existential threat to democracy by going through the motions to renominate an 81-year-old with a 38% approval rating who 75% of voters think is too old without giving anyone a choice because that’s just how things are done.”

—-538 founder Nate Silver on Twitter/X, reacting to the Democratic Party attempting to keep RFK Jr. off state ballots

Silver has proven himself to be generally left-biased, but he’s not stupid, and he’s not corrupt. He can see the clear hypocrisy in the party’s conduct and rhetoric, and doesn’t even have to reference its other totalitarian moves, like weaponizing the justice system to try to stop voters from choosing its most feared adversary.

Oh…Nate’s observation was just two days ago, and 75% is already out of date. The first post Hur report and Biden old man rant poll shows 86% of the public convinced that the President has passed his metaphorical pull date.

Incorrigible Harvard Professor Larry Lessig Strikes Again!

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

I love that photo of Lessig! As a director, if I wanted to stage a pose that screamed “pompous jerk,” that’s exactly what I would tell an actor to do.

But I digress…Prof. Lessig is an unusually unethical faculty presence even for Harvard, as Ethics Alarms has documented since 2015 . That is when he ran for the Democratic nomination for President promising to be a “referendum President” who would serve only as long as it took to pass the Citizens Equality Act of 2017, a potpouri of progressive agenda items of varying wackiness. Once he had persuaded Congress to pass that dog’s breakfast, Lessig would step down, and his Vice President would become President. And who did the esteemed government prof regard as qualified for that position? Oh, just Elizabeth Warren, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Robert Reich, Van Jones, Jon Stewart, Sheryl Sandberg, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Martin O’Malley, and Joe Biden, among others.

What a great plan!

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The Super Bowl Produces an Early Nominee For Ethics Alarms “Asshole of the Year”: KC Chiefs Tight End Travis Kelce

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Cowabunga! This goes beyond the mere jerkish behavior one (or at least I) expects of NFL players.

Kelce has been getting nationwide publicity because of his romance with superstar pop artist Taylor Swift. He knew all eyes would be on the couple during the annual concussion-fest that is always the most viewed single event network TV offering, the Super Bowl (won in thrilling fashion, or so I was told, by the Chiefs in only the second overtime game in SB history). So how did Kelce, fully aware that his fans young and old would be watching, handle his moment in the spotlight?

You see it above: After the Chiefs lost a fumble in the second quarter of the game, Kelce was seen on live TV yelling in Coach Reid’s face and even bumping him. In any other sport, and usually this one, the disrespectful player would be benched, fined and suspended. One NFL player, seeing Kelce’s outburst, tweeted that if he did something like that, he’d be kicked out of the NFL.

Oh no, it was all in good fun, we were informed afterwards. Even though he embarrassed his coach and taught young NFL and Taylor Swift fans that it’s just fine to treat your superiors, bosses and authority figures like dirt, “sources” on the team assured the media that the player “respects Coach Reid. It’s really just about the passion of the game. It wasn’t anything serious.”

Right. Making hostile physical contact with your boss in front of team mates on national TV is nothing serious. I remember Reggie Jackson doing something similar to Yankees manager Billy Martin in the dugout during a game in Fenway Park, and Martin had to be restrained from attacking Reggie, who was immediately suspended.

But Martin had some self-respect, and Reggie wasn’t dating Taylor Swift, I guess. And Kelce? Asked about his actions, he told ESPN. “I was just telling him how much I love him.”

Ha. Funny.

What an asshole.

To be fair to Kelce, he probably already is suffering from brain damage, so that’s something of a mitigation. He and Taylor shouldn’t worry: Donald Trump is still the odds on favorite to win “Asshole of the Year,” as he usually does.