April 11 has a relevant leadership and ethics history lesson for today’s times, and it is also  a nice segue from the previous post involving a mega-jerk. For this, in 1951, is the date where President Harry Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur from command of the U.S. forces in Korea.

After MacArthur had assured the President that pushing into North Korea would not bring Red China into the Korean conflict, hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops rushed into the North and battled American troops, driving them back into South Korea. MacArthur reacted by demandingpermission to bomb Communist China and use Nationalist Chinese forces from Taiwan against the it. President Truman, finding himself unimpressed with MacArthur’s wisdom and not wanting to expand the so-called “police action” further, flatly refused. MacArthur then engaged in a public lobbying campaign, openly challenging Truman’s decision as well as the traditional civilian command of the U.S. military. Finally, in one of the many gutsy (if not necessarily correct) decisions that marked his tenure in the White House, President Truman fired the popular MacArthur and replaced him with Gen. Matthew Ridgway.  Harry told the nation in a televised address, “I believe that we must try to limit the war to Korea for these vital reasons: To make sure that the precious lives of our fighting men are not wasted; to see that the security of our country and the free world is not needlessly jeopardized; and to prevent a third world war.” General MacArthur was fired, he added, “so that there would be no doubt or confusion as to the real purpose and aim of our policy.”

Truman stuck to his metaphorical guns, even as MacArthur returned to the United States to a hero’s welcome, parades, and declarations from politicians and others designed to undermine Truman’s authority and popularity, which was already on life support. MacArthur was invited to speak before Congress, and gave his maudlin “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away” speech. (You could trigger my old soldier father into a rant by just mentioning MacArthur.) Surprising many, MacArthur did “fade away.”

Good.

1. In ethics zugzwang, Texas blinks. One of the central ethics conflicts in the abortion problem is that a life is a life, and if it is unethically, morally and illegally ending a life to abort an unborn child, it is difficult to justify treating the mother differently from a doctor or anyone else. Gocha Allen Ramirez, a district attorney in Texas, exploded heads all over the state and nation by filing murder charges against Lizelle Herrera, who allegedly committed a “self-induced abortion.” Yesterday he backed down, dropping them. “In reviewing applicable Texas law, it is clear that Ms. Herrera cannot and should not be prosecuted for the allegation against her,” Ramirez, the DA for Starr, Jim Hogg, and Duval counties, said in a press release. Continue reading →

Ethics Alarms already featured two telling episodes from the just completed “Disinformation And The Erosion Of Democracy” at the University of Chicago. The first [Item 3, here], widely reported by conservative mews media and ignored by the mainstream media, was the head-blowing answer by Ann Applebaum, leftist historian and pundit for the predictable publications,when asked about  (Speaking of disinformation!) the mainstream media’s deliberate burying and falsely discrediting of the Hunter Biden laptop revelation in the final weeks of the 2020 Presidential campaign. When a student asked a panel about that rather timely topic (since the New York Times and Washington Post both suddenly decided to admit the laptop was genuine), Applebaum said,

My problem with Hunter Biden’s laptop is I think it’s totally irrelevant. I mean, it’s not whether it’s disinformation… I didn’t think Hunter Biden’s business relationships have anything to do with who should be President of the United States.

The fact that the emails on the laptop seemed to suggest that Joe Biden’s coke-head, ne’re-do-well son, in the course of his influence peddling, offered direct assistance from his father and even implied that Joe profited from his under-the-table deals was irrelevant to the election and not newsworthy? Fascinating! That should have opened up a great discussion, but panel moderator David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s advisor and campaign manager, cut the topic off the second “United States” had left Applebaum’s lips.

Writing on his blog, Prof. Jonathan Turley was aghast (I also should have devoted a whole post to this): Continue reading →

And neither does the law.

Ethics Alarms first flagged this perfect example of the Facts Don’t Matter phenomenon here, on Valentine’s Day. Amir Locke, an aspiring hip-hop artist, was asleep on a sofa in an apartment where he was staying as a guest when Minneapolis police burst into the room on a no-knock warrant. Understandably alarmed, the groggy young man, who was not involved in the crime that was the subject of the police search, tentatively raised his (licensed and legal) revolver from under the blanket. One of the officers, seeing the gun, fired his own weapon, killing Amir.

Because of the presumption that the police are all racist murderers seeking to kill innocent blacks, a Black Lives Matter core position especially in Minneapolis where George Floyd died, protesters shouting “No Justice, No Peace” again flooded the streets. It didn’t matter that any objective examination of the facts, including a film of the shooting, made it clear that neither the officer nor the victim had done anything wrong. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a professional race-baiter since his days in the U.S. Congress, predictably made an inflammatory statement that was a pure appeal to emotion:

Amir Locke’s life mattered. He was a young man with plans to move to Dallas, where he would be closer to his mom and — he hoped — build a career as a hip-hop artist, following in the musical steps of his father.

Of course his life mattered, but the statement was a deliberate call for civil unrest. It doesn’t matter how unfair it was that Locke was dead: the officer, Mark Hanneman, committed no crime, and if Ellison couldn’t discern that, then he has no business being a state attorney general. (He has no business being a state attorney general.)

Continue reading →