2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck

“Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Challenge: Defend This Column…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I warn you, however: it you try and are serious, I’ll may ban you for being dishonest, or too stupid to participate in an ethics colloquy.

Aaron Blake, a senior political reporter for Washington Post who hails from Minnesota (oh-oh!) authored this steaming pile of bias for, no surprise, CNN. The title: “Why Trump accepting Machado’s Nobel Peace Prize is no laughing matter.” Somehow, this Trump Deranged mega-hack argues that there is something sinister about the President of the United States accepting a sincere gift from a foreign visitor. The essay itself is the essence of Trump Derangement. It defines the warped thought processes whereby anything this President does is by definition wrong because he did it.

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado has explained, several times, why she handed over her Nobel Peace Prize to the President, saying, graciously, “He deserves it.” A very strong argument can be made that she’s right on the facts, but never mind: Blake jumps immediately to the worst imaginable appeal to authority: he notes in his second paragraph that Jimmy Kimmel, easily the most repellent personality on network television today, made fun of the award. The column, incredibly, manages to go down hill from there…

Continue reading →

Just Because She Can’t Be Sued For It Doesn’t Make Hillary’s Latest Shameless Lie Less Damning

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

My sympathy for Hillary Clinton has finally run out.

For a long time, I have wanted to give Clinton every bit of leeway imaginable since her fluky, statistical anomaly Electoral College loss to Donald Trump in 2016. It’s an ethicist thing; the Golden Rule is strong here. What must it feel like to be that close to achieving your dream and to have it yanked from your grasp at the last moment? Oh-oh…I’m making Hillary sound like Moonlight Graham.

Still, I can understand why she has been so bitter and angry ever since. On the other hand, to go from “Field of Dreams” to “The Godfather”: this is the life she has chosen. “Politics ain’t beanbag.” It’s been 10 years. Time to grow the hell up.

Hillary’s latest outburst of Trump Hate—always wrongly placed because her own ineptitude, corruption and foolishness lost her that 2016 election—-came on the anniversary of Teddy Roosevelt’s death—wait, no, that was the worst thing that ever happened on a January 6th, but Hillary was using the date to misrepresent the stupid January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol. Clinton posted a comment on X, declaring, “Five years ago today, Donald Trump urged his supporters to attack Congress and the Capitol over a proven lie.”

Continue reading →

Inspired By “No Kings,” Sasha Stone Authors the Substack Essay of the Year

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

You’re damn right he is. Because you deserve to be mocked….as Sasha Stone devastatingly explains in the sharpest defenestration of the Axis of Unethical Conduct that I have read this year (current company excepted, of course.) 

You can read it all here. I have been burned all three times I subscribed to a substack, but Sasha Stone’s essay on the implications of the “No Kings” tantrum yesterday was so superb that I may subscribe just to reward her, even if she takes a multi-months long posting vacation like Glenn Greenwald did, or go nuts, like Ken White. Not only was her piece virtually exactly what I would write today, I almost thought I did write it.

Stone is a film industry blogger who has lived and worked in the Hollywood progressive bubble. Naturally she was a Democrat, but was red-pilled in 2020, as rational citizens should have been, and increasingly become a critic of her former party and fellow travelers.

These are some highlights from “No Kings: The Lunatics Are Running The Asylum,” but again, read it all…

Continue reading →

On the Ridiculous “No Kings” Protest

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Late first post again today, for a very good reason: I’ve been researching and pondering what to write about the sad, pathetic, useless (well, maybe not useless, as I will elaborate on later) “No Kings” protests today. It even took me a long time to settled on the most direct and simplest of the myriad hilarious memes on the topic, as you can see above. (Powerline has a bumper crop in its weekly conservative meme collection, here.)

I was originally going to feature a depressing photo posted on Facebook this morning by two of my favorite people, both retired lawyers, both learned, accomplished and intelligent, and catastrophically Trump Deranged. It shows them smiling in a gathering mob of D.C. “No Kings” protesters, as they hold one of the vague protest signs printed up with George Soros’s money. Sure, I was going to blur out their faces, but I don’t want them to take my criticism (or diagnosis) personally. It’s not their fault that they have lost their frickin’ minds. They live in a bubble, they have always been Democrats, they subscribe to the Washington Post, but they had no way of predicting that their powers of critical thinking could ever be so eroded by hate, bias, and misinformation.

Continue reading →

Trump Derangement and Professional Ethics Rot Update: The Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

As the American Bar Association amply demonstrates, the American legal profession is overwhelmingly left-leaning and left-biased, not because lawyers are especially informed or intelligent, but because they overwhelmingly graduate from law schools devoted to progressive indoctrination, with law journals that actively discriminate based on viewpoint bias. State and local bar associations are governed and staffed by similarly aligned individuals; reading these organizations’ flagship magazines is an exercise in wading through progressive propaganda. Fighting for the rights of “migrants.” Celebrations of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.” White men are a minority among bar association presidents.

I belong to association of legal ethics lawyers, including ethics partners, professors, CLE ethics trainers, those who defend other lawyers accused of malpractice or professional misconduct. Most of the time, the topics discussed on the group’s listserv are interesting and pertinent to my practice (legal ethics experts don’t agree on much). Since 2016, however, the Democratic Party bias of the group and its attendant Trump derangement has increasingly raised its ugly metaphorical head. The conservatives on the list as well as those who realize the inappropriateness of political topics generally stay silent (those ethics referrals are lucrative, after all) until the screaming at the sky gets ridiculous, and the moderator steps in to remind everyone that the discussion is supposed to be confined to legal ethics.

I just renewed my membership, and almost immediately a topic titled “Desperate Times” popped up, launched by (of course) the California lawyers in the group. After waking up to another long post about how “we lawyers” needed to organize to fight all of these terrible policies, I replied,

“This topic has nothing to do with legal ethics, and reinforces my conclusion that the legal ethics profession, like so many others, has deteriorated into a partisan, biased, bubble-dwelling  cabal increasingly incapable of objective and trustworthy analysis. The furious effort to spin Fani Willis’s flagrantly unethical conduct was one of many dead canaries in the mine. Is this listserv moderated, or not?”

If you can’t trust ethicists to be objective and unbiased, who can you trust?

From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: The President’s Quick Quip

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Two permanent fixtures of the Trump Derangement narrative are:

  • President trump has no sense of humor.
  • President Trump is slipping into dementia (like Joe Biden), and should therefore be removed via the 25th Amendment.

Both of these are demonstrably false, even absurdly false. Demented people don’t have the quick wit to pick up on a straight line like that. And Trump even had the sense to “go out on the big laugh,” as the old vaudevillians used to say. When you get a big laugh, it’s time to end your appearance.

That incident today doesn’t prove that this President is wise, right, responsible or even well-intentioned. But the fact that the Axis of Unethical Conduct that has been working without pause to destroy Donald Trump since 2016 may be explained by another fact: that their hate and bias makes it impossible for them to avoid underestimating their foe.

As Sun Tsu said (but in Chinese), “There is no greater danger than underestimating your opponent….Never underestimate your opponent or your enemy. Looks can be deceiving. You really don’t know what your opponent knows or what kind of skills he or she may have.” In the same vein, Machiavelli’s writings also repeatedly warned against underestimating an opponent, and to assume that your adversary is “always capable and cunning.”

The ethics values at issue here are competence, prudence, objectivity, professionalism, respect, fairness, and perspective.

Morons…

Boy, And I Thought The Last Times Op-Ed I Criticized Here Was Bad! Peter Baker Says, “Hold My Beer”!

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

If you can read the crap the Times’ Peter Baker threw at us in “In an Era of Deep Polarization, Unity Is Not Trump’s Mission” without getting the dry heaves and being tempted to destroy you computer screen with a hammer, you have a piece missing. Its subhead: “President Trump does not subscribe to the traditional notion of being president for all Americans.” KABOOM. Head exploded, brains on walls and ceiling. How date Baker write that? How dare the Times print it? This is simultaneous smoking gun evidence of Trump Derangement, incurable bias, and denial of reality. The gift link is here. Have a bucket nearby. Here’s the gift link. I don’t think the opportunity to read such malign, intellectually dishonest junk is truly a “gift.”

To state the obvious, Baker has the utter gall to make his fatuous assertion following a sort-of President who did this…

Continue reading →

Melania and Vanity Fair

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

One of the nauseating Axis catch-phrases is that Trump’s is not a “normal” Presidency. That is true, but it is the people saying that who have made it so. A particularly petty example, which I rank near the organized effort to stop Trump in his first term from participating in the Kennedy Center Honors program (that worked out well!) is the catty, mean girls decision to keep Melania Trump, obviously one of the most attractive and glamorous of all First Ladies (she makes Jackie Kennedy look like a Muppet) of all the women’s magazines, when covers featuring the First Lady had previously been routine. Puppet President enabler Jill Biden was judges worthy of several covers, but not Melania Trump. Nah, there’s no ladies magazine media bias!

The snotty boycott reached its apotheosis earlier this month, when sources reported that staffers at Conde Nast’s “Vanity Fair” threatened a walk-out over the possibility of a Melania Trump cover. A “mid-level editor” supposedly said that she’d “walk out the motherfucking door, and half my staff will follow me” if the magazine tried to “normalize this despot and his wife.” “Normalize.” “Despot.”

Nice. How fair and rational. Also reportedly, Melania told the magazine to get lost when it proposed a cover after snubbing her (because her husband is eeeevil) all this time. Good.

Just because the Trump-Haters have been trying to tear the nation apart doesn’t obligate the victims of their vendetta to prostate themselves to make peace.

A Little Compassion, Please, for Jill Ciminillo…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

A young woman and Chicago resident named Jill Ciminillo has become the target of coast-to-coast mockery and ridicule after she reacted to President Trump’s stated intention of making Chicago next on his list of urban hellscapes to make safe with federal intervention.

The conservative media (including Fox News) and blogosphere gleefully pounced, digging up her old social media posts…

and pronouncing Jill the poster girl for irrational Trump Derangement. “Dear leader trying to protect me,” one social media wag wrote in a tart “translation,” “I admit there is a serious problem here with crime and violence, but because of my hatred of you, we would rather suffer in our own self inflicted suffering. Signed – A Liberal white woman.” Ciminillo quickly deleted all of her social media accounts, surely hoping against hope that her 15 minutes of infamy won’t last any longer than that.

I feel sorry for Jill, and while it is appropriate for the absurdity of her post to be discussed and debunked, she is a victim, not a villain. She is infected with the Trump Derangement Virus because she has been the target of relentless, irresponsible, dishonest fear-mongering by the Axis of Unethical Conduct, including some once-admirable Americans who have allowed themselves to be pulled into the conspiracy.

Here, for example, was Ralph Nader, in many ways an American hero (who, like so many narrow-focus activists, got way out in front of his metaphorical skis), in March of this year. This is long, but it is the kind of unhinged hysteria from a once respectable liberal voice that convinces people like Jill (and my once astute Facebook Friend who just posted it) that “resistance” is the only moral, ethical and patriotic course. Here’s Ralph… Continue reading →

Return of the “2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck”

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

Here is another important news story that the mainstream media (or Democratic operatives, per Instapundit) is ducking, spinning and warping like mad in order to protect its totalitarian allies in the Axis of Unethical Conduct (“The resistance”and the Democratic Party): the emails and other material recently declassified and released by Tulsi Gabbard backs up the contention Ethics Alarms began putting forward in the first Trump administration when it christened the 2016 Post-Election Ethics Train Wreck.

This morning I stumbled on Fox News contributor and former GOP House member Trey Gowdy flipping out in frustration over the revelations and pretty much quoting Ethics Alarms from years ago. I can’t find a video of his explosion that will embed, and I can’t type well enough to make a transcript, but here’s the link, and here is a close approximation of the key quote:

Continue reading →