ad hominem attacks

It’s Official: “A Nation of Assholes” Has Come to Pass, and Its Herald is Jasmine Crockett

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

The U.S. now has a member of Congress who is regarded as a rising leader of a major political party who talks like this…

“Y’all know we got Governor Hot Wheels down there. Come on now! And the only thing hot about him is that he is a hot-ass mess, honey!”

That was Rep. Crockett speaking at a human rights event over the weekend. The intentionally vulgar, street-talking Texas representative (she was raised in a wealthy family and attended private schools, so her Samuel L. Jacskon imitation is pure cynical artifice) was already being justly criticized for telling Democrats to “take out” Elon Musk, at a time when her party’s loonies are looking for an excuse to move from domestic terrorism against Tesla owners to more direct forms of violence. Now this member of what styles itself as the sensitive, caring party is mocking a man, Texas Governor Abbott, who has been in a wheelchair for decades by calling him “Hot Wheels.” Be proud, Democrats, Texans, women, homo sapiens.

Crockett’s excuse after her cruel ad hominem attack was properly condemned tells us even more about the character of the latest “rising star” of the Left:

“I wasn’t thinking about the governor’s condition—I was thinking about the planes, trains, and automobiles he used to transfer migrants into communities led by Black mayors, deliberately stoking tension and fear among the most vulnerable. Literally, the next line I said was that he was a “Hot Ass Mess,” referencing his terrible policies. At no point did I mention or allude to his condition. So, I’m even more appalled that the very people who unequivocally support Trump—a man known for racially insensitive nicknames and mocking those with disabilities—are now outraged.”

She’s beneath contempt, but Crockett’s “Whataboutism” (#2 on the Rationalization List) argument following her self-evident lie is not without validity. How far is calling a governor in a wheelchair “Hot Wheels” from calling a President obviously suffering from progressive dementia “Slow Joe”?

I’ll accept the utilitarian conclusion that electing Trump President twice was, on balance, important for the nation; I might even agree with it. However, I don’t think it is possible to credibly argue that the destructive decline in civility and decorum in society, and especially in political discourse, should not be laid at Donald Trump’s feet. It is a major cultural wound with implications for democracy as well as social relations in our society generally.

I warned about this on September 10, 2015.

So Apparently “Dick” Is The Newly Approved Axis Term For Trump Allies. Interesting!

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Democrats are apparently seeking the youth vote by talking like vulgar teenagers. Hey, it might work!

I noted that Anderson Cooper, without any serious objection from his employers, CNN, called guest Chris Sununu a “dick” on live TV. Now Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Ca.) has escalated by calling Elon Musk a “dick” during a House hearing on DOGE, aka. the Department of Government Efficiency. Then he went on CNN to smugly defend his uncivil conduct with a string of rationalizations. (Incidentally: talk about “punchable faces!”)

During the hearing, Garcia noted that the subcommittee’s chair, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) had displayed Hunter Biden’s “dick pics” at a July 2023 House Oversight Committee hearing: “I find it ironic, of course, that our chairwoman, Congresswoman Greene, is in charge of running this committee. Now, in the last Congress, Chairwoman Greene literally showed a dick pic in our oversight congressional hearing, so I thought I’d bring one as well.”

Garcia showed a photo of Musk in a tuxedo. Musk is a dick, get it? Then he launched into the current ad hominem talking points the Axis is using to denigrate Trump’s waste, fraud and abuse delegate.

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I Guess It’s Time For Another “Ad Hominem” Lesson

/ Jack Marshall / 51 Comments

There are few topics I have vowed to flag every time they raise their ugly metaphorical heads. The fake statistic about women earning only “76 cents” for every dollar a man earns for the same job. The implication that lawyers are endorsing the conduct or character of their clients. The lie that Al Gore won the 2000 election but that the Supreme Court “handed” the Presidency to George Bush. “Hands up, don’t shoot!” More recently, I have resolved to not let media hacks get away with the statement that the claim that the 2020 election was “rigged” is “baseless.” The rampant misuse of the term “ad hominem” is another one.

The annoying issue came up again in the exchange with an EA reader I referenced in this post (#7). He accused me of being a “phony ethicist” because I criticized Clarence Thomas’s flagrant breach of ethics in his accepting (and not disclosing) copious gifts and financial benefits from a well-known conservative billionaire, and yet, he claimed, didn’t criticize Present Biden’s complicity in the profitable influence peddling of his ne’re-do-well son. Of course, I have done the latter, multiple times, and in response to my tart message back that he didn’t know what he was talking about and couldn’t tell an ethic from a writing desk, he shifted his argument to saying I was a “fake ethicist” because I never wrote about Justice Sotomayor’s failure to recuse herself in Greenspan v. Random House.

I didn’t recall whether I had commented on that case or not (the complainer didn’t know either), but it didn’t matter. I resent being told that I am neglecting my mission because I didn’t write about what some reader wanted me to write about. My two standard answers to that complaint are 1) “Start your own damn blog!” and 2) “Bite me.” As I explained in my response,

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OK, After This Ethics Alarms Officially Condemns Cheap Shots At Senator-Elect Fetterman’s Appearance…

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

I’m sorry, but that meme was just too funny to ignore, ethics or not. I’d like to think even Fetterman would appreciate it.

But that’s it for me. Mocking a political figure based on his or her appearance is the ultimate ad hominem attack, and there’s no excuse for it. The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news source that has made useful contributions to public awareness when the mainstream media is in the process of burying a story that hurts its mission, ran a story yesterday headlined,

“John Fetterman Wears Suit to Capitol, Looks Terrible….like a funeral home director on trial for desecrating a corpse (multiple counts)“

Nice.

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Ethics Dunce: GOP Arizona Gubernatorial Candidate Kari Lake

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Boy, there are a lot of horrible, unqualified, inept Republicans running for office! In Georgia, Senate candidate Herschel Walker continues to make little sense while mangling facts every time he opens his mouth. Carl Paladino, the New York GOP’s candidate for Congress who already declared that Adolf Hitler was a “doer” and the kind of leader we needed today, recently said the US attorney general should “probably be executed.” After people had a problem with this for some reason, Paladino swore he was just joking. He’s a funny guy!

In Pennsylvania, where the Democratic candidate for on open U.S. Senate seat is suffering the after-effects of a stroke and still has trouble speaking (though his party’s President has lowered the bar on that score considerably), the GOP is running TV doctor and Oprah acolyte Mehmet Oz because Republican primary voters just can’t resist unqualified celebrities (See Walker above). Oz made his honesty an issue when he was asked an easy question: “How many homes to you own?” Dr. Oz’s reply: “Well I, legitimately, I own two houses. But, uh, one of them we’re building on; the other ones I rent.”

Translation: “Huminahuminahumina…” As a little research rapidly demonstrated, the former TV doctor actually owns ten residential properties (plus as many as eight commercial ones). After this was pointed out by his opponent, Oz “clarified” by resorting to the Clintonesque tactic of distinguishing a house from a home. Obviously Oz wouldn’t give an honest answer because it would make him look like what he in fact is: someone who is, by average American standards, wildly wealthy…not that there’s anything wrong with that.

And now we arrive at Kari Lake, another Trump-endorsed Republican candidate, running for Governor of Arizona. She’s attractive! She’s female! She’s conservative!

She endorsed a raging anti-Semite!

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Is It Fair To Say Kamala Harris “May Be The Dumbest Person Ever Elected Vice President In American History”?

/ Jack Marshall / 55 Comments

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFAdXJtYeMI

[ Forgive me for using the above clip in the jokey context in which it was presented: It was the best I could find on YouTube, meaning that I could embed it easily. ]

During remarks she made in Sunset, Louisiana this week on a stop to highlight the value of bringing high-speed broadband internet to communities, Harris got herself stuck on the phrase “the importance of the passage of time” in between her usual inappropriate giggles. Then, today, yet another Harris staffer fled the coop, moving former Speaker Newt Gingrich to say,

“You know, he [Biden] may or may not have cognitive decline problems at his age, but at her age, she’s just dumb. Let’s be clear, Kamala Harris may be the dumbest person ever elected vice president in American history and that’s why people keep resigning.If you were her national security advisor, and you were competent, and you’d worked hard, and you knew what you were doing, and you watched her in Poland break up laughing when she’s asked about Ukrainian refugees, you had to feel a sense of total humiliation. So I’m not surprised that that particular advisor resigned because it’s very clear that Kamala Harris should never, ever be allowed to leave the country.”

Is that a fair thing to say?

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Texas’s Clever Anti-Abortion Law

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

abortion Texas

The Texas law, which went into effect yesterday when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to block it on a 5-4 vote. (Guess which justices were on each side. Next question: Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb?) The law bans abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which is after about six weeks of pregnancy. Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that established a constitutional right to abortion until a fetus was viable (by the medical standards of 50 years ago), would seem to preclude such laws, which other states ( Georgia, Mississippi, Kentucky and Ohio) have passed only to have them held in limbo by the courts The Texas law is the first to be implemented, in part because it approaches the issue from a clever (some might say diabolical) perspective.

The law does not make exceptions for rape or incest, as it should not: if the objective is to protect the human life of the unborn child, how that life came into being is irrelevant. It does permit abortions for health reasons, allowing a termination only if the pregnancy endangers the mother’s life or might lead to “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.” The clever part is this: the Texas law doesn’t require state officials to enforce it, meaning that abortions won’t he halted by government action. The Texas law deputizes private citizens to sue anyone who performs an abortion or “aids and abets” a procedure. Any citizen has standing, regardless of connection to the patient, the abortion doctor or the clinic and may sue and recover legal fees along with $10,000 if they win.

This means that the Supreme Court will have to consider not only whether the Texas law in unconstitutional, but whether it can even be challenged in court, what the SCOTUS majority called “complex and novel” procedural questions. Predictably, while the majority opinion was relatively restrained, the dissenters freaked out.

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Sunday Ethics Irony, 1/24/2021: Now Remember, It’s The Trump Voters Who Are Deplorable

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

In “Utopia,” the strange and violent Amazon series about a mysterious graphic novel that turns out to be both true and a coded guide to an upcoming pandemic, the diversity propaganda is so heavy-handed that it could knock out Godzilla with a left cross. Let’s see: all the good couples are mixed race. A middle -class black woman takes in troubled white children. A white husband and wife have a family including multiple black and Asian children, which you would think violates the good couples are mixed-race rule, but it’s a trick: that white couple is villainous, and their white children are too, tough the minority kids seem to be OK. A group of assassins appears to include only whites, and the main heroine is black, though her character in the graphic novel that everyone is chasing after is white. Her female mentor is white, but she is so covered in grime that she looks black. (Why isn’t that blackface?)

At what point does this become so forced and absurd that audiences object to it? None of the race obsession adds a thing to the story except weirdness, and trust me, “Utopia” needs no more of THAT.

1. Welcome to my world! Here is a submitted comment to this post: the proud idiot “RidenwithBiden” (Oooh, clever!) writes, “My God, an entire website dedicated the the sanctimonious and bottomless brainwashed hypocrisy of traitorous right wing nut jobs.”

2. Here are some Biden voters I have no sympathy with whatsoever…President Biden signed an executive order that will require institutions receiving Title IX funding to allow biological males who identify as female to compete in women’s athletic events. This should effectively kill women’s sports while making a joke out of “competition.” Women voted overwhelmingly for Joe Biden, a serial sexual harasser who was accused of rape on the record by a staffer, and he was clearly going to do this. Now feminists and women’s sports advocates are whining?

Bailey tweet

What betrayal? Sorry that you weren’t paying attention, but it was always obvious that the most extreme end of the LGBTQ lobby was pulling Joe’s strings. The one who betrayed female athletes were feminist voters. Own it, ladies.

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One More Time: Yes, President Trump Is Qualified To Be President, And The Electorate Decides Who Is FIT To Be President

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

“OH NO! TAKE IT AWAY! IT’S EVIL!!! EVIL!!!

Ann Althouse does a nice fisking job with a New York Times column by Gail Collins called “Let’s Fret the Night Together/The Biden campaign and the world it’s playing out in are making us all nervous wrecks.”

I saw it in my print Times, and wasn’t going to waste time with it: it’s another smug media bubble scream about how horrible the President is (just like they decided before he was sworn in) and how essential it is to elect a sexual harassing dementia case to replace him and restore honor to the office. Isn’t it amazing how so many people keep saying this as if it isn’t completely hypocritical and actually makes sense? That’s what hate and bias does to you.

A genuine friend on Facebook recently went on a rant about how “unfit”President Trump is. I’m also amazed that people keep saying this as if the fact that the people who didn’t vote for him think he’s unfit should matter at all. So vote against him in November then! The victory of a candidate you thought was “unfit” means you lost the argument, and you don’t get a chance to deal with that supposed lack of fitness until the next election. Democrats never accepted that, despite the fact that it is the way our system has always worked. They, like my friend, convinced themselves that they have a unique right, indeed a mission, to remove an elected President before an election, or, failing that, to make it impossible to govern, because their assessment of what constitutes fitness is the unquestionable right one.

Assholes. This is the beating, rotten heart of the totalitarian impulse that has divided the nation and now threatens our strength as a nation and liberty as a people.I am sick of hearing, reading about and watching it, but it is important to realize what it is. My friend is too marinated in a biased and emotional peer group to see the phenomenon for what it is. Continue reading →

End-Of-Week Ethics Inventory, 11/24/19: Really, Really Bad Mood Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 44 Comments

Worst…Ethics Alarms…Week…Ever!

Or so it seems, anyway. Have people already started ignoring life for Thanksgiving? Or am I being punished for not being able to squeeze enough posts out while driving, flying, typing in crowds and moving in and out of various abodes while trying to work? To make it worse, there was a lot going on that required some time and solitude to research and analyze, and I just didn’t have it. I also managed to make myself sick. Tuesday and Wednesday had the worst non-holiday mid-week traffic of 2019, and Saturday had the lowest number of visits for that day in three years.

Well, as Andy Kinkaid, my late, cynic-philosopher college roommate, a ruined Vietnam veteran,  used to respond several times each day to every argument, disappointment, tragedy, catastrophe, and piece of bad news as he smiled and retreated to his darkened room to get stoned, “Fuck it, right?“

1. Apparently there is a copyright battle over the obnoxious catch-phrase “OK, Boomer!,” the viral dismissive insult being hurled at Baby Boomers who dare to question the wisdom, passion, and hive-mind beliefs of Gen. Z-ers and Millenials. It looks like all such efforts to “own” the phrase are doomed, because it has rapidly become so ubiquitous as a put-down so quickly that nobody can prove it originated with them.

Has it occurred to any of the smug little snots brushing aside their elders that this is nothing but a personal ad hominem attack without substance, no more fair or valid, and just as rude and bigoted, as “Shut up, bitch,” “Go home to your mother, Pee-Wee,” or “Get a job, Pedro”? As a Baby Boomer, I think we ought to agree on a standard retort to “OK, Boomer” of equal substance and wit, and I hereby nominate “Keep flailing, Dumb-Ass!”

2. Speaking of Millennials, a New York Times social columnist informs me that they have decreed that on-line the term “OK” or “Okay” is now considered rude, and the proper term is “k-k,” which sound to me like a Klan chapter short of members, or someone with a stutter. Just because you want to create ugly and pointless new conventions to metaphorically mark your cyber-territory doesn’t mean I have to assent.

And no, I never have and never will use LOL or LMAO. They’ll have to shoot me first. Continue reading →