I want to thank everyone who pitched in to make the emergency Open Forum earlier this week as lively and interesting as it was. Now don’t rest on your laurels, though: as usual, there’s a lot out there in the ethics trees and underbrush to chew on…
What ever happened to the Doublemint Twins? I worry that they ended up like this…
That was Dean Obeidallah, long an extreme deranged leftist featured on the air and on the web by MSNBC (because extreme deranged leftists are the only alleged journalists and pundits that MSNBC deems worthy of a public platform), confirming again the totalitarian impulses of Democrats and the progressives of 2023. In an interview with Mediaite’s most left-biased reporter, Obeidallah ranted in part,
Trump MUST die in prison because I don’t care if he was 45 years old, you should get life in prison if you attempt a coup, and there should be no chance of parole. I don’t care who it is….That’s why I’m so passionate about, like with every fiber of my being, that Donald Trump has to live out his natural days, his last days of natural life in a prison cell…….And people accuse me like, oh, you say things that get people riled up like, nope, I or get what you said. I get organically riled up about this because I believe in this system. And, and if you don’t believe in it, so be it. But if you believe in it, I don’t think there’s any conclusion could bring that. Donald Trump has to end up in a prison cell and live his last days out in that prison cell.
In those three dots, Obeidallah claimed that the riot at the Capitol was an “attempted coup,” which is legal, factual and linguistical nonsense, and that’s what he thinks Donald Trump should be locked up for without a chance of parole. I’ve instructed my family that if I ever say anything that stupid in private they should bash in my head with a brick, and Obeidallah is paid by MSNBC for to give that level of ignorant, hysterical, inflammatory and irresponsible commentary over the air. I guess I owe Tucker Carlson a mea culpa: I thought he was too much of a demagogue to be allowed on TV. Continue reading
I don’t know what you call this, but whatever it is, “ethics dunce” just isn’t enough.
That’s Susanna Gibson above with her husband (I don’t know where those annoying stars came from) performing on a porn website while she was already running as a candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates. The 40-year-old Democrat, along with her lawyer husband, have been appearing in flagrante delicto on an X-rated website, and offering to perform sundry sex acts in front of the camera, including those involving violence and bodily excretions, in exchange for money—not that there’s anything wrong with that.
But after the conservative Washington Free Beacon was tipped off to this rare proclivity on the part of a political candidate and wrote about it, Gibson announced that she was shocked—shocked!—that anyone would feel that a candidate for the legislature soliciting money for sex acts was something the public had a right to know about. She found a lawyer willing to try to use Maryland’s “revenge porn” law to punish such people. Daniel P. Watkins of the Meier Watkins Phillips Pusch firm, argues that “it’s illegal and it’s disgusting to disseminate this kind of material”and says that he is “working closely with the F.B.I. and local prosecutors to bring the wrongdoers to justice.”
Sure, Danny, good luck with that! It’s a ridiculous idea for a law suit, but ya never know, so it slips under the wire as “ethical,” though any lawyer bringing such a suit should have to wear a bag on his head.
Ugh. Where to begin?
The first stunned Ethics Alarms story about a cabal of idiots with education degrees persecuting a little boy for making a crude imaginary gun out of his fingers was in 2013, just as the Post Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck got rolling and the anti-gun hysterics were going off the rails (to which they, obviously, have never quite returned). I wrote of the first incident, which was in Montgomery County,
The NBC story concentrates on “whether the boy understands the implications of the gesture.” What implications of the gesture? That he is about to shoot bullets out of his finger? That he intends to kill someone with all the firepower an unarmed 6-year-old can muster? That he is making a mimed reference to a Connecticut school massacre he probably doesn’t know a thing about? Why should it matter what his “intent is? It’s a hand gesture! It isn’t vulgar or threatening except to silly phobics in the school system.
I concluded that it was child abuse by the school, and that “such irrational fearfulness, bad judgment, panic, disregard for the sensibilities of the young, lack of proportion and brain dysfunction forfeits all right to trust, and such fools must not be allowed to have power over young bodies and minds.”
But the finger gun lunatics struck again the next year, as Ohio crazies punished a 10-year-old boy for wielding an imaginary gun without a license. This time I figured out what was really going on—political and cultural woke indoctrination— writing in part,
The radical gun-hating progressives who disproportionately occupy administrative positions in the schools are willing to endure some ridicule as well as to victimize some children if it helps make guns and gun-related play less attractive, thus pointing to a Nirvana where the NRA is a shadow of its former self, and the only ones who own guns are criminals, the police and the government….Is public school political indoctrination more sinister than the proliferation incompetent teachers and administrators? Yes.
I also should have realized that this was the dawning of The Great Stupid.
This hilarious episode pushed itself ahead of two other posts because its almost too good to be true, and by good, I mean “Yecchh!”
Let’s begin with the Republican House majority, led by jerks like Rep. Matt Gaetz, forcing Speaker Kevin McCarthy to begin an impeachment inquiry against President Biden. This is incompetent, irresponsible and unethical. To begin with, it’s a waste of time and the public’s attention, which is too divided and limited already. Second, as the GOP proved the last time it executed a futile impeachment, it is more likely to lose votes than to gain them. Third, there is no chance of conviction in the split Senate, zero. If the impeachment is supposed to be some kind of an official rebuke, it won’t be seen as one or taken as one, so the mere impeachment itself will have no substantive consequence or significance. Finally, Republicans impeaching Biden will look like revenge and “tit-for-tat” rather than responsible statesmanship, because it is revenge to a great extent.
Next come the Democrats and their news media agents screaming that there aren’t constitutional grounds for impeachment. I think there are, but it doesn’t matter: the Democrats killed impeachment as a useful Constitutional tool of democracy deader than a frozen mackerel when it concocted two unjustified and purely political impeachments of Donald Trump. There was no impeachable high crime with the first, and the Democrats were so determined to slap Trump before he was out the door that they didn’t even follow due process with the second. Both were obviously partisan, and since members of the party and its allies had been advocating the impeachment of Trump for something literally before he served a day in office, there was no way either impeachment could be objectively viewed as legitimate.
Ethics Alarms has pointed out too many times since Phony Impeachment #1 that the Democrats have guaranteed not only that their next President—Biden, unfortunately—would be impeached as soon as the GOP had control of the House, but that every President hereafter would probably be impeached when the opposing party has a House majority in an endless cycle of payback. Yes, somebody should be standing up for the importance of legitimate impeachments, but the Democrats forfeited that privilege when they broke the system. (What? I thought Trump was the one who threatened constitutional government by defying “democratic norms”!) They are complaining that there aren’t proper grounds to impeach their President? This is as perfect an example of Ethics Estoppel as I can imagine. Democrats cannot make such an argument, not without provoking mockery and contempt. They asked for it, and now, having guaranteed that it would arrive as ordered, they are whining about insufficient evidence.
by Curmie
It would seem that prevarication has supplanted baseball as the national pastime. Name a politician you’d trust to tell you the truth if a lie would be more convenient. I can’t, and if there’s one out there, it sure as hell isn’t one of the frontrunners in the next Presidential election.
My most recent post concerned getting lied to by the post office, and their subsequent bewilderment that I didn’t appreciate their mendacity. It’s not just those with ties to the government, though. Companies feel the need to get in on the act, too. So, here’s Part II of my rant.
We’ve been in our current house a little over 22 years. The garage door opener wasn’t new when we moved in. A few days ago, the chain snapped. So I went to the local Lowe’s, checked out the possibilities, came home and discussed the options with my wife, and ordered a new opener online. So far, so good.
Paul Landis, one of the Secret Service agents near John F. Kennedy when he was assassinated in Dallas in 1963, has suddenly decided to reveal relevant actions and observations from that terrible day 60 years ago. His new perspectives, as the New York Times puts it, may “rewrite the narrative of one of modern American history’s most earth-shattering days in an important way,” and “encourage those who have long suspected that there was more than one gunman in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, adding new grist to one of the nation’s enduring mysteries.” The appropriate responses to Landis’s sudden urge to tell all are 1) “What took you so long?” and 2) “Oh, shut up.”
This is progress, I suppose, and it doesn’t auger well for President Biden’s 2024 campaign if the most Democratic propaganda-minded members of the mainstream media (like CNN) starts actually critiquing his persistently embarrassing performance as President. Some of the usual suspects mentioned Biden’s increasingly typical imaginary story, but most buried it in their news report. MSNBC was one of the few that did headline the lie, but did so to explain that Biden did visit the site of the tragedy nine days later (the White House “explanation”) so don’t be so nit-picky. It also had Lawrence O’Donnell engage in a bit of obvious whataboutism, as he ignored Biden’s falsehood but ranted about “Donald Trump’s most vile lie about 9/11” that he “lost hundreds of friends” on 9/11. Otherwise, Biden’s false claim was highlighted by the New York Post, the National Review, Fox News (of course), and other conservative media, plus the least biased and most reliable (but still left-leaning) of the fact-checking services, Fact-check.org.
by Curmie
Jack’s posts about his experiences at local CVS, 7-11 and McDonald’s outlets have emboldened me to discuss my own recent dealings with respect to a couple of recent purchases. I’ve experienced two separate incidents over the past few days. What they share is not simply that someone failed to provide a service they were obligated to provide, but that they lied about it and showed literally no remorse for having done so.
So… here’s incident #1; more next time.
Although I’m retired from teaching, my university has a provision that <i>emeritus</i> faculty are entitled to an office if one is available, and one is. Because I’m still doing some academic writing, I’m grateful for the workspace, the use of a computer, access to a printer and scanner, etc. We’re now back in the building we occupied from the time I came here until the summer of 2020, when we were displaced to across campus while renovations and expansions were happening to our “home.” (We were told we had to move out by the end of May 2020 or we couldn’t move back in the fall of 2021; we couldn’t move in at all until August of this year, and the building won’t really be ready for at least another few months. But that’s a rant for another day.)
The problems are two-fold. First, my new office is less than half as big as the one I moved out of three years ago. Second, it was designed by an idiot, or, more likely, a committee of idiots. The desk, made of cheap but heavy material, is far too big for an office of that size. There are permanently mounted cabinets above the desk, but no place for files. I could go on. The biggest annoyance is that the offices on my side of the hallway (the smaller ones, with windows offering a view of the convenience store across the street) got only a single bookcase. I seriously doubt that whoever decided that has ever as much as met a faculty member in the humanities, let alone listened to one.
Ethics Alarms 