Axis of Unethical Conduct

Friday Open Forum (and a Couple of Other Things)

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Thing I: The most obvious ethics issue going on is, still, the post 2024 election Axis freakout. I’ve never seen anything remotely like it. When Ronald Reagan, whom the Democratic establishment in Washington regarded as a Neanderthal, washed-up actor whose most memorable film had him co-starring with a chimp (“Bedtime for Bonzo”), the reaction of liberals and Democrats wasn’t nearly this hysterical…or demeaning to them. The news media has been equally bonkers. The faces of network news anchors and hosts when a Trump administration supporter is talking are uniformly mask of pure hatred: I started noticing this yesterday. It reminded me of Katie Couric when she interviewed Ross Perot in the “Today Show” with an expression she reserved for people like David Duke…or Satan. Facial expressions and body language that tell an audience that an interviewer detests her interview subject is unprofessional, but it has now become the norm.

The same faces, restrained (and sometimes unrestrained fury) have been on display as the Democratic Senators question virtually all of Trump’s nominees. It says something that Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, who was derided by the Right for running for the Senate after suffering actual brain damage from a stroke,has emerged as the sole voice of reason in his party. “There isn’t a constitutional crisis, and all of these things ― it’s just a lot of noise,” Fetterman said this week. “That’s why I’m only gonna swing on the strikes. I’m still wishing him the best. I’m effectively rooting for [Elon Musk] and all the nominees because they’re working for America.” This should be the position of all Democrats and progressives, especially since, unlike 2017, the majority of American feel the same way, and it is the way Americans have usually regarded newly elected POTUSes and their emerging administrations.

The fury being directed at Elon Musk, a brilliant man who is giving his time to his nation as it tries to solve the problems of government bloat, waste, corruption and abuse that everyone at least claims they want to solve is an embarrassment for the Democrats and their Axis allies. Infamous dim-bulb Georgia Congressman Hank Johnson (he’s the one who worried that Guam would flip over because too much U.S. military material was on the island) raged yesterday, “What does that mean when an unelected billionaire can waltz into our agencies and slash and burn the whole thing to the ground like a Taliban terrorist, This level of corruption is shocking. President Trump and the Republicans in Congress, all of whom have abrogated their legislative power to the King, have handed the keys to the nation’s treasury to unelected co-president Elon Musk. Their actions are taking what we know as corruption to a whole new level. This is Banana Republic style corruption at its ugliest.” I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that this idiot doesn’t know how the Executive Branch works, but the frightening thing is that so many lawyers are behaving similarly based on their social media rants. Is it possible that they are really this stupid.

Thing 2: The guest post submissions I solicited a week ago are finally coming in: another will go up today. I thank you all: what I have seen so far is of excellent quality. This effort to try to keep up with an unprecedented wave of ethics stories while freeing me from a permanent government and politics beat is important; I also want to emphasize that it does not eliminate the Comment of the Day feature here. (I think I have at least one of those languishing).

I’m sorry: that was a longer intro than I anticipated.

The stage is yours.

“Superman II” Plot: After Trump-Deranged Sen. Murphy Makes An Ass of Himself, Vogue Says “Hold My Beer”…

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

The previous post discussed the level of hysteria now being attained by the Trump Deranged, with a U.S. Senator yesterday joining in the bonkers conspiracy theory that the Trump administration is a cabal of actual Nazis . Chris Murphy’s echoing the ridiculous Big Lie that Elon Musk gave a deliberate Nazi salute—you know, like Superman when he’s flying—

….managed to surpass even the late campaign claims by the dumbest sub-species among the Axis of Unethical Conduct that Trump was emulating the American Nazi Party when he held a campaign rally in Madison Square Garden. Yes, the Nazi salute smear on Musk is even worse than that, though redolent of the “OK” secret white supremacy hand signal insanity that the Mad Left used to slime everyone from lawyers to baseball fans during Trump’s first term.

Here is Vogue, writing about the cool necklace Ketanji Brown Jackson (above) wore to the inauguration:

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Unethical Quote of the Month: CNN’s Brian Stelter

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Here is Brian Stelter, making a fool of himself, and CNN, and the Axis of Unethical Conduct, again:

This is the depth to which this cosmic hack will stoop to bolster his propaganda-spewing pals in the Axis. Censoring free speech is the equivalent of putting out deadly fires! Brilliant, but telling. This is CNN!

And this is CNN: CNN “factchecker” Daniel Dale rushed to try to defend the incompetence of L.A. and California Democrats, saying “There is no shortage of water in the LA area,” and babbling that reports of fire hydrants being dry were due to “technical logistical infrastructure,” whatever that means. You can’t check facts before the facts are known: a major investigation will be required to determine exactly what went wrong, what public officials were at fault, and what factors were in play regarding the devastating Palisades fires. Never mind, though: to those brave factcheckers, a lack of facts won’t dissuade them from rushing into debates and drowning opinions that might singe the Woke and Wonderful.

Janisse Quiñones, chief executive and chief engineer at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said that the fire response put immense strain on the water system. That would seem to suggest a shortage of water, no? Or the fact that many fire hydrants were dry, according to the firefighters who tried to use them. The Santa Ynez Reservoir the Pacific Palisadeshas been out of commission since February 2024, meaning 117 million gallons of water was missing, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Meanwhile, Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, desperately saying anything he could come up with to preserve his presumed status as the front-runner for the Democratic Party’s 2028 Presidential nomination, told NBC News that the state’s reservoirs are full. He also said, more accurately, there will be an independent investigation of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

It should come as no surprise that these essential public servants, the Axis factcheckers, didn’t choose to factcheck shameless Biden paid liar Jan Psaki, now a paid liar on MSNBC, who told viewers. completely without facts, that the California fires weren’t the fault of anyone in California at all, but Donald Trump for not doing enough to combat climate change. The Axis of Unethical Conduct (that’s the “resistance,” Democrats, and the left-biased mainstream media for those unfamiliar with the Ethics Alarms term) sense that accumulated incompetence and bad progressive policies on display as homes burn might be a tipping point for ridiculously woke California, causing millions of voters to suddenly slap their foreheads and exclaim, “Why have we been voting for these liars and idiots?” I have my doubts that anything short of mass deprogramming can achieve that result, but still what we are getting from Stelter, Psaki and others reeks of panic and desperation.

The New York Times Unveils (and Retracts) An Early Contender For ‘Headline of the Year’

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

This is wonderful in so, so many ways

The headline went up on the Times website around 3:30 pm yesterday as a follow-up to this story, and, if I had seen it, be assured that I would have posted on it then. I would have seen it too, if I hung out on Twitter/”X” all day, which is apparently what amazing numbers of supposedly busy people do.

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A Nelson For All The Progressives, Democrats and Trump-Haters Freaking Out Over Biden’s Pardoning His Son

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Didn’t everyone know that Joe would eventually pardon Hunter? The fact that they didn’t shows the depth of Woke-World’s delusions.

EA had an Ethics Quiz on this topic yesterday but the point was to determine what Biden’s most ethical course was, not to suggest that it wasn’t obvious what he would do despite all of his “promises.” I stated that for me the ethical course was clear: the President has an obligation to do what is in the best interests of the nation regardless of its effects on his family or himself. Just as I was preparing a post on how the EA ethics decision-making systems would help the President to the right thing, I heard about the pardon, rendering the issue moot, or at least too moot to justify an hour of my time.

The Axis really exposed its stupidity on this one. Here’s a supercut of the Left’s propaganda merchants praising Biden’s integrity for promising not to pardon his son..

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Trump Derangement Friday Begins….

/ Jack Marshall / 45 Comments

The hysterical, fearful diatribe below came from my Facebook feed. This is a friend. A very nice guy. I don’t have the energy or heart to fisk it; if you feel like making the effort, even if you just do part of it, go ahead. It won’t be hard.

I am very angry at the people, officials, celebrities and publications responsible for doing this to my friend. I’m sure he really believes everything he has written. He’s an innocent, caring, trusting soul who was a sitting duck for the diabolical propaganda the Axis marinated good people like him in for almost ten years for their own political agendas.

It can’t feel good believing you and your friends are at “mortal risk.” Deceiving people like my friend so they are terrified of the future is despicably cruel. Yes, my friend is an artist and artists are emotional and often politically unsophisticated and under-educated (and our civic education is terrible anyway.) It is not just artists though. I know lawyers who are expressing essentially the same fears.

Bad, cynical, ruthless and unethical people are responsible for all this crazy panic. Today, the execrable Karine Jean-Pierre was pressed on this point by a Fox News reporter: If Biden was telling the truth about how a Trump administration would create an existential danger to the republic, that if he was elected “rights would be stripped away” and “democracy would crumble,” why did the President say in his remarks today that everything is going to be okay?

Karine, who would have a hard time answering a question about what her favorite color is, gave a rambling non-answer, then complained that the question was unfair, and left the room in a huff. But we know the answer, don’t we? Biden and the Democrats always knew all of that Hitler fearmongering and the “last election ever” warnings were pure nonsense, but they thought it might win the election. If trusting souls like my friend were reduced to permanent anxiety, eh, well, so what? Collateral damage. The ends justifies the means. Screw ’em.

This is who today’s Democrats are. Remember.

How here’s my poor friend….

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The 2024 Election Ethics Train Wreck Births the “Puerto Rico Is An Island of Garbage” Caboose

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

So it’s come to this.

The 2024 election is its own, massive ethics train wreck, as the tag will show you. It officially began with Democrats (and the news media, but I repeat myself) spending too long lying to the public about Joe Biden’s deteriorating mental state and deciding to select a Presidential nominee Soviet-style bypassing all democratic norms and processes. The party broke all previous campaign records for hypocrisy by taking this course while already making the dangerous claim that Republicans are the threats to democracy, and that Donald Trump as President would never allow another free election again. Amazingly, the campaign has gone downhill ethically since that point.

Just as tornadoes sometimes spin off little baby cyclones that still are deadly enough to kill people, the big Ethics Train Wrecks (or ETWs) as designated by Ethics Alarms, like the 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck, the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman Ethics Train Wreck and the Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck (which spawned the Biden Presidency Ethics Train Wreck), often generate related ethics train wrecks that cause a lot of their own damage.

But I did not foresee that a Don Rickles-style “roast comic’s” jab at an ongoing news story would or could, even in the Age of the Great Stupid, turn into a controversy dominating headlines when the election is so near and serious matters should be the public’s focus.

I’ll summarize the events as efficiently as possible to get to the main point:

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“Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Here’s What the New York Times Has For Readers This Morning [Updated]:

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Main article: “Trump at the Garden: A Closing Carnival of Grievances, Misogyny and Racism. The inflammatory rally was a capstone for an increasingly aggrieved campaign for Donald Trump, whose rhetoric has grown darker and more menacing.“

#2: “Inside the Movement Behind Trump’s Election Lies”

#3: “Far-Right Figures Escalate Talk of Retribution and Election Subversion“

A ways down the page we see, “A Trump Rally Speaker Trashed Puerto Ricans. Harris Reached Out to Them.” Added: I didn’t read the piece, but the headline was misleading and deliberately so. The “speaker” was a comedian, and he was doing a routines. Ah. So the idea is that his jokes were meant seriously, and because it was a Trump rally, Trump endorsing the jokes as if they were serious positions.

Now for the columns:

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“Perfect!” Axis Election Desperation and “Win By Any Means Necessary” Update

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I doubt that Ethics Alarms will be able to keep up with the predicted (and coming to pass) pre-election hysteria and ends justify the means overload that the Axis of Unethical Conduct (“the resistance,” Democrats and the mainstream media) are inflicting on the nation as they fear their fake DEI candidate for President will lose, as she so richly deserves to. It is almost entire fueled by Big Lies, fake news, ad hominem attacks, and anything that might distract from Harris’s increasingly obvious incompetence and dishonesty.

I am serious when I say that I only drop by Fox News, CNN and MSNBC for about five minutes each day, and it’s a amazing the garbage I see anyway. I just heard Kamala Harris tell Anderson Cooper, in last night’s CNN “town hall” (Who believes Harris didn’t have the questions in advance?) that she believes that the border must be secure and that there should be “serious consequences” for illegal immigration…this in the same campaign where she has said that she supports amnesty for illegals as well as citizenship! See, if the “consequences” of illegal immigration are exactly what illegals want, that’s called an “incentive.” Naturally, Cooper didn’t call Harris on this self-evident—stupid, really— contradiction.

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“A Nation of Assholes” Update: “I Fart In Your General Direction” Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Back in 2015 when I wrote that having a vulgarian like Donald Trump serve as our national role model (for that is one of the crucial jobs of American Presidents) would spawn “a nation of assholes,” I was tragically correct (“I’m smart! I’m not dumb like everybody says, I’m smart, and I want respect!”). However, I did not foresee how aggressively others in high profile positions—Robert De Niro, Nancy Pelosi, The Squad, Madison Avenue, athletes, Hollywood, journalists, singers and so many more—would rush to assist Trump in soiling our national civility, manners and discourse.

The latest new low—I did not see us reaching this subterranean level —comes from former NFL linebacker and current podcaster Will Compton. He and fellow ex-NFL player Taylor Lewan recently interviewed to Donald Trump on their podcast, “Bussin’ with the Boys.” They asked the once and future President about his sporting participation, and Trump revealed that he had played a little football in his youth.

“I played football, too. I didn’t particularly like it. I played tight end,” Trump said. “I could catch the ball good, but I didn’t particularly like having some guy that was lifting weights all day long and came from a bad neighborhood … and he sees me.”

The two ex-jocks laughed at Trump’s characterization, which of course meant they are racists, since obviously the reference to “bad neighborhoods” was a coded anti-black message. At least this was the narrative the Axis media was certain to adopt, and sure enough, a Washington Post reporter inquired of the pair, “What is amusing about Trump’s remark?” because it had received “a lot of attention online.”

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