2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck

Ten Ethics Observations On The President’s 2020 State Of The Union Message

/ Jack Marshall / 63 Comments

The text of the speech is here.

1. As I mentioned at the end of the previous post, my professional assessment, as a speech coach and a stage director, is that Trump’s delivery–timing, pacing, energy, focus, expressiveness, emphasis, technique–was excellent. Like other politicians (and me, frankly) the President is best, most relaxed, most persuasive and likable, when he is speaking extemporaneously. This time, though the speech was obviously scripted, he delivered it like his more familiar riffs.

And he has improved over his term in office. So many POTUSes have not.

2. As for content, I saw the speech described as “Reaganesque.” That’s high praise, but not far off. There were no ringing catch phrases, but the most important feature was that the speech was positive, optimistic, and upbeat. This was especially remarkable because many expected the President to be combative and defiant, and to directly address his impeachment. Not doing so was wise, and indeed ethical. Living well is the best revenge, and the President’s recitation of his administration’s achievements, no matter how the factcheckers spin them—it’s Trump, so we assume hyperbole—was a virtuoso dismantling of Big Lie #5: “Everything is Terrible.”

It’s not terrible, of course, far from it, and the false narratives constantly repeated by the Democratic candidates about how the middle and lower classes weren’t benefiting  were belied by Trump’s statistics asNancy Pelosi stared.

3. The repeat stunt of having all the female members of Congress on the Democratic  side wear white  was juvenile, incoherent and dehumanizing. I was reminded of the sperms in Woody Allen’s “Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask.” Whatever their chant was, it didn’t work. The President deserves ethics points for specifically condemning late term abortion in front of this group, and featuring a little girl born at 23 weeks was a powerful visual aid.

Most Americans do not approve of late term abortions, and the device of making Democrats explicitly show their disapproval of Trump’s vow to stop it exposes a gaping ethics black hole on the Left.

4. At times I wish Ronald Reagan had never introduced the manipulative technique of using guests in the audience for applause and heart-rending moments, but I have to admit President Trump used it like no one before him, shamelessly but effectively.  I just hope nobody tries to top it, because that was my limit, and perhaps a bit over.

There was the African-American boy who wants to join the Space Force, and his 100 year-old Tuskegee airman great-grandfather, in uniform, having just been promoted to  general by Trump. There was the young African American girl who had been denied her application for a tax credit scholarship to attend a private school in Philadelphia because the state’s Democratic governor had vetoed a funding bill. The President told her she would get her scholarship after all, as she and her mother beamed. There was the new President of Venezuala, symbolizing a capitalist rescuer for a nation wrecked by socialism. Rush Limbaugh, recently diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer, appeared genuinely overcome when Mrs. Trump awarded him the Medal of Freedom on the spot. Also on the spot was a surprise reunion between a military wife and her soldier husband, back from deployment.

Great drama, great sentimentality, great showmanship. It was a combination of Oprah, Maury, and “Queen for a Day,” but schmaltz works, and the President proved himself a master of it.

5. Pelosi’s guests included Fred Guttenberg, the father of a high school freshman killed in the 2018 mass shooting at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. He got himself removed from the audience by shouting something about his daughter as the President pledged to preserve the Second Amendment. Using the victim of tragedies as political props is an objectionable stunt (Trump did this too, with Kelli Hake and her son;  Army Staff Sergeant Christopher Hake, was killed  in Iraq, a victim of the late Iranian terrorist leader Qasem Soleimani. Another guest was the brother of Rocky Jones, the victim of an illegal immigrant in Tulare County, California, and the parents of an ISIS victim, but Trump’s guests didn’t disrupt the event. They had also lost loved ones to bad people, just like Guttenberg, but do not advocate taking away law-abiding people’s rights in their grief. Continue reading →

The Limits Of Graciousness: The President Rejects Nancy Pelosi’s Hand

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

The President in 2018 wearing a different tie.  Pelosi’s hand is the same

Though she offed it, President Donald Trump declined to shake House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s  hand prior to delivering the 2020 State of the Union address tonight. (I’m watching the State of the Union Address as I write this.)

Perhaps those who are frequent readers here expect me to chide the President. He should remember that political disagreements aren’t personal, after all. As America’s leader, he should model the ethical virtues of forgiveness, civility, grace, and the Golden Rule. Our elected officials should always stand for the principle that though we may disagree as a people, we should never be disagreeable. In this case, such symbolic comity is especially essential. The nation has seldom been more divided, or more contentious in its division. Shaking the Speaker’s hand would be a step, albeit a small one, toward healing the rift.

Although this would be my ethics prescription under normal circumstances, this is not such a circumstance, and everyone knows it, or should.  Under Nancy Pelosi’s leadership, the partisan opposition of the Democrats to this President has breached all political norms and ethical traditions. The attacks on him, and not only him, but his family as well, have been directly personal, with Pelosi and her lieutenants using savage and unconscionable rhetoric to embarrass and insult him and, if possible, disable the President’s influence and lawful power. During the reprehensible impeachment burlesque, still ongoing,  the President has been denigrated as no Chief Executive before him, and as no leader of the United States should ever be denigrated by members of Congress, or any citizen. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Saturday Ethics Warm-Up, Feb. 1, 2020: A New Month, Post Fake News Shame, And Impeachment Failure Freakout Edition”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Steve-O-From-NJ authored an epic Comment of the Day, checking in at nearly 1800 words, which may be a record–it will take too long to check. The question is, since it an analysis of the soon-to-be-a-really-bad-memory-that-both-parties-will-constantly -remind- us-of impeachment, or as it is known on Ethics Alarms, Plan S, the Trump Impeachment Ethics Train Wreck, and one more car in the 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck, is this an ethics post?

This was already on my mind, having read today another legal ethics blogger complaining that the impeachment debacle has forced her ethics blog into politics. Yeah, tell me about it.

Yes, it’s an ethics post. The impeachment was the culmination—for now–of what Ethics Alarms has been covering for three years as what I labelled early on as one of the most important and dangerous examples of unethical partisan conduct in decades. Steve-O hits many issues that have been extensively covered here from an ethics perspective, and, frankly, a summary right now is helpful. It also helps lay the foundation for a post I have been working on a while with his phrase–twice!–mixed motives.

Here is Steve-O-From-NJ‘s Comment of the Day on the post, “Saturday Ethics Warm-Up, Feb. 1, 2020: A New Month, Post Fake News Shame, And Impeachment Failure Freakout Edition.”

A few thoughts on the all but over impeachment:

After Friday’s vote, it’s all over but the formalities for the third impeachment and the second attempt at a soft coup by Congress against the president. It’s also the least legitimate of the three impeachments plus the one effort that never got to impeachment because the president resigned.

The Radical Republicans tried to push Andrew Johnson out of office because, as a Democrat and a southerner (he was from Tennessee), he was in the way of their harsh program of Reconstruction they wanted to impose on the South after the Civil War, so they essentially took a policy dispute up to eleven. Nixon oversaw criminal activities and lied repeatedly, so his trust was shot and he could no longer lead. Bill Clinton had a sleazy, but probably not impeachable, affair, but then perjured himself, which is a crime, to cover it up, a classic case of the coverup being worse than the act. The best the Democratic Party could come up with on this one was a phone call with, at best, mixed motives.

Nowhere in the Constitution or the other laws of this land does it say that the president or any other official must act totally selflessly at all times in the discharge of his duties, or he risks being impeached and removed from office. Nowhere does it say that, as chief diplomat of the United States, the president is not empowered to engage in political jiujitsu with other governments. Nowhere does it say that, as chief law enforcement officer of the United States, the president is not empowered to look into dealings by others with foreign governments that he has a question about. Most importantly, nowhere does it say that the president, or any other executive official, must defer to Congress, particularly to the House, in all things.

The Founding Fathers were very clear on the concept of separation of powers when they drew up the Constitution. They did not want any one official, or even one institution, making the laws and then prosecuting and punishing anyone accused of breaking the laws. They specifically did not want any of the three branches of government becoming more powerful than the others. That’s why it’s called checks and balances. The nation is still working out how that is supposed to work in every situation, but that’s the basic concept we all learned back around 3rd grade. They built in the power of impeachment to guard against gross abuses by corrupt officials, but they specifically rejected the idea of a parliamentary system where the legislature holds most of the power and can call a vote of no confidence in the government fairly easily.

They also specifically rejected the idea of one branch of government encroaching on the prerogatives of the others. Congress can pass all the laws it wants, but, unless the president signs them and later enforces them, they mean nothing. Congress can also do all the overseeing it wants, but, its power to demand testimony, documents, or anything else can be checked by the courts. That’s how it works. That’s how it’s supposed to work. Continue reading →

Don Lemon’s Apology Proves He’s A Liar And A Coward As Well As Biased And Unprofessional. Now What?

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

CNN? Hello?

CNN’s Don Lemon’s joking and guffawing with his panel about the rubes and yokels who support the President has been an immediate source of criticism, and not only from conservatives. The RNC also quickly made a TV ad out of it,and if I were in charge, we would see it all year. Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!

For anyone who has  been paying attention, and definitely who’s been reading Ethics Alarms, this is all poison frosting on the cancer cake. It has been undeniable for years that Lemon is a foolish, juvenile, arrogant, unprofessional progressive hack who has become more reckless over time, convinced as he is that he would have to sexually assault Anderson Cooper on the air before CNN would even consider firing a black, gay favorite of the woke and Trump Deranged. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Open Forum!” Dating App Thread

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Same tradition, different groups…

This Comment of the Day alerted me to a despicable aspect of national polarization being sent into hyper-drive by the web. It concludes, “It’s terrible,” and I agree.

I was just defriended by someone else on Facebook. I know why. I’ve been pointing out  and dissecting the repetitive anti-Trump derangement when it turns up on my  timeline.  As usual, however, whoever this was didn’t have the guts and common courtesy to tell me that he or she was metaphorically slapping me in the face. Others, equally cowardly, just block my posts from their feed, or me from seeing theirs. Such individuals voluntarily create a bubble and actively seek to close off their minds. They should be ashamed of themselves, and when I get the chance, I’ll tell them so.

Here is Jeff Valentine’s Comment of the Day from the weekend’s Open Forum. It depressed me so much that I took this long to read it again. If you want to end up with a nation of armed camps, this is the way to do it.

Jack recently wrote about the tipping point where he may need to vote for Trump based on the Democrat’s various vile decisions.

I read it and wondered aloud, “What the Hell took you so long, Jack.” I was there within a year after the last election.

They really have disgusted me for the last three years.

It gets, actually, significantly worse. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere- my marriage fell apart. I am a full time custodial Dad, so I, out of necessity, use the awful apps for dating- Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, Facebook Match. The number of women (and possibly men too- I don’t play for both teams as they say)- who say things like “Swipe left if you voted for Trump” or “Trumpsters Get Lost” or “Republicans need not apply” would appall you. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Month: Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

“The real problem here is the increasingly common practice of trial courts ordering relief that transcends the cases before them. Whether framed as injunctions of ‘nationwide,’ ‘universal,’ or ‘cosmic’ scope, these orders share the same basic flaw—they direct how the defendant must act toward persons who are not parties to the case….

“Equitable remedies, like remedies in general, are meant to redress the injuries sustained by a particular plaintiff in a particular lawsuit. When a district court orders the government not to enforce a rule against the plaintiffs in the case before it, the court redresses the injury that gives rise to its jurisdiction in the first place. But when a court goes further than that, ordering the government to take (or not take) some action with respect to those who are strangers to the suit, it is hard to see how the court could still be acting in the judicial role of resolving cases and controversies. Injunctions like these thus raise serious questions about the scope of courts’ equitable powers under Article III”…

It has become increasingly apparent that this Court must, at some point, confront these important objections to this increasingly widespread practice. As the brief and furious history of the regulation before us illustrates, the routine issuance of universal injunctions is patently unworkable, sowing chaos for litigants, the government, courts, and all those affected by these conflicting decisions…

“If a single successful challenge is enough to stay the challenged rule across the country, the government’s hope of implementing any new policy could face the long odds of a straight sweep, parlaying a 94- to-0 win in the district courts into a 12-to-0 victory in the courts of appeal. A single loss and the policy goes on ice— possibly for good, or just as possibly for some indeterminate period of time until another court jumps in to grant a stay. And all that can repeat, ad infinitum, until either one side gives up or this Court grants certiorari.”

——Justice Neil Gorsuch, concurring in the grant of the stay of a nationwide injunction imposed by a district judge in New York against the implementation  of the Trump administration’s new immigration standards.

The new rules impose additional criteria for determining which potential immigrants  are likely to be dependent on the U.S. government for benefits  and therefore ineligible for green cards and eventual U.S. citizenship. These were proposed in October, 2019, but have been blocked by Democratic judges until today’s decision. Continue reading →

Unethical Tweet Of The Month, “Enemy Of The People” Division: CNN Reporter Joe Lockhart

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Yup…a CNN journalist tweeted out a lie , let it go viral, then came back later and said he made it up, but we “know” it’s true.

A trustworthy news organization would fire a reporter who did this immediately. CNN has not and will not, because CNN is  not a trustworthy organization.

On a related track, Matt Laszlo, a journalist who works at The Daily Beast and NPR, tweeted, 
Continue reading →

Late Morning Warm-Up, 1/22/2020, Because I Wasted Two Hours Arguing With Trump Deranged Lawyers On Facebook, And Yes, I’m An Idiot

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

That’s me. The bee is Facebook…

Bah!

A really low blow (among the other low blows, like the jerk who accused me of getting all of my ideas from Drudge) came from a former commenter here, who accused Ethics Alarms of being an “echo chamber.” That truly ticks me off. If the Trump Deranged don’t have the wits or open minds to test their biases where intelligent, informed, articulate adversaries are likely to  respond, that’s not my fault, and it’s exactly what the left side of the blog’s commentariat did. They didn’t rebut the position here, proven correct, that the Justice Department’s handling of The FISA warrants were part of a dangerous effort to undermine the Trump campaign and his election: they just accused me of “drinking the KoolAid” and quit, or were insulting. They never tried to argue away the smoking gun evidence of the soft coup plans A through S that I have meticulously documents since 2016, they just act as if the current impeachment excuse is justified and offered in good faith, when it is so clearly not. It’s all denial, spin, dishonesty and mob mentality. I ended up in today’s piranha tank by pointing out to a lawyer that the the fact that Trump was intemperate at a meeting of generals was not sufficient to trigger the 25th Amendment, and that lawyers, like her, shouldn’t be misleading the public by making such lame arguments. I posted the amendment, and said that “Unable” to perform the duties of the office doesn’t mean, as she and others are arguing, “Unable to perform the duties that way she and other would prefer them to be performed” and stating that approval polls do not reflect the degree to which the impeachment charade is helping to re-elect Trump.

These are the smart Deranged. Imagine what the others are like.

1. Resistance porn. “A Very Stable Genius” is the latest “tales out of school” anti-Trump book. In this it is no different from those that have gone before, from Omarosa’s tell-all on up the ethics evolutionary scale. This one was authored by Pulitzer Prize winning journalists, so naturally the news media is celebrating it as if it is somehow different. What it is a collection of mostly anonymous accounts of people who have axes to grind and scores to settle against Donald Trump, and are violating basic professional ethics to do it. Are all of the stories true? I’m sure some are, maybe most—they don’t sound out of line with what we knew about this President before he was elected. Yet they are by very nature distorted by the theme of the book and the presumed anti-Trump bias of the book’s audience. What is so alarming about Trump’s eagerness to have a meeting with Putin?  So what if he questions why U.S. businesses shouldn’t be allowed to engage in bribery abroad, when it is the accepted norm in many countries? There’s an answer to the question, but it’s not a dumb question; in fact, its one international ethicists still debate. And do you really think Trump saying to Indian prime minister Narendra Modi,  “It’s not like you’ve got China on your border” wasn’t a joke?  Taking it as otherwise is classic conformation bias and disrespect. It sure sounds like a typical Trump joke to me. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “The Many Species Of Fake News”

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

Few things make me happier than when a commenter relieves me of the duty of writing about a topic.

In 2017, after the New York Times published a spectacularly dishonest list of President Trump “lies” since his inauguration,  I wrote a post demonstrating just how outrageously the Times was warping the meaning of “lie,” and also applying a biased standard to Trump’s statements. I wrote,

In presenting this unethical project, the Times took unethical advantage of its readers’ confirmation bias. When the “Lie” list was printed, the Times made certain that it would require super-human dedication and extraordinary eyesight to read it, through the devices of listing every item and the Times commentary in horizontal sequence and in half the usual size type-face. (See above) This ensured that almost no readers would make the Herculean effort to read the whole thing , especially since the well-trained Times reader already “knows” that Donald Trump is a liar. In addition, the explosion of tiny words created the visceral response of “Wow! Look at all those lies!” which is exactly the effect the Times editors wanted.

But that isn’t reporting, and it isn’t journalism. The “list” was a page-size, visual, ad hominem attack. The Times wasn’t seeking close scrutiny of its list, nor was it interested in making any rebuttal easy or likely.

We have learned that the Times list was largely assembled from various fact-checker columns. That is a red flag, and explains many of the most embarrassing inclusions on the list. None of the fact-checkers are trustworthy. All of them are biased, Snopes and PolitiFact worst of all, and they consistently register opinions that the writer disagrees with as “false.” Many, many of the items on the Times list are in this category.

The entire exercise was an extension of #16 on the Fake News list, “Dishonest Factchecks. Here was a typical “lie” according to the Times, and its “proof”:

Jan. 21 “A reporter for Time magazine — and I have been on their cover 14 or 15 times. I think we have the all-time record in the history of Time magazine.”

Says the Times, “Trump was on the cover 11 times and Nixon appeared 55 times.”

Trump was making the general point that he had been on TIME’s cover a lot. He guessed that the number was 14 or 15; it was 11. That is what is known as a  non-material misrepresentation: it’s meaningless and harmless, and certainly not an intentional deception. (“Heh, heh…I’ll make those poor, gullible fools think I was on TIME”s cover 14 times when it was ONLY ELEVEN!! BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!) Then he said he “thinks” that’s a record. When someone says “I think” it means the speaker is acknowledging that he may be wrong. But Trump is not accorded the usual leeway given to everyone else, including other elected officials.

When a list includes something this clearly contrived, that list has no credibility. I found going through the Times list annoying, then shocking, and finally infuriating. So when the Washington Post pulled the same stunt, I kept putting off giving it the same treatment that I did the Times’ exercise in lies about lying.

Thus I was thrilled to receive this Comment of the Day from stalwart Steve Witherspoon, on the post, The Many Species Of Fake News: Continue reading →

From The Increasingly Stuffed “Nah, There’s Mo Mainstream Media Bias!” Files: Politico Changes A Headline

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

What’s going on here? Apparently either a Politico editor or a representative of the Democratic Party/”resistance”/mainstream media alliance to bring down the President (aka The Axis of Unethical Conduct, or AUC) realized that the headline on the left conveyed an unequivocally positive message regarding Trump. That was a violation of the three-year plan, so the change was ordered. It was especially egregious since impeachment is the objective now, based on the narrative that President Trump is a threat to all that is good and right. Can’t have a positive headline now. Come on!

The USMCA is the new United ­States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

[The near unanimous vote in the Senate didn’t include Bernie Sanders (he’s Statler, Joe Biden is Waldorf…or is it the other way around?) because, Bernie says, there was “not a single damn mention” of climate change.]

Can anyone point to an example in the Obama administration where a positive headline regarding a victory for the President was replaced in order to suggest that it was less impressive? Does anyone think there ever was such a case?

Hell, I might even post this one on Facebook to see all the rationalizations and excuses my deranged friends come up with. It should be a hoot. Once again I miss the self-exiled “resistance” commenters here, a bright bunch whose machinations and comical pretzelling in their denials that the news media was biased and no more trustworthy than a rabid honey badger were always worth admiration and mirth.

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Pointer: Erin Perrine

Please use this link to post on Facebook, because Mark Z won’t let Ethics Alarms links appear there. Not fake enough, I guess…https://twitter.com/CaptCompliance/status/1218336309955256322