Barack Obama

The Significance of Obama and “Choom”

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Hey! Isn’t that guy a little young to be President?

Conservative bloggers and talk show hosts who should know better are running gleefully with the tales out of David Maraniss’s new biography of the President in which young Obama is revealed as a pothead. “Choom” apparently means marijuana, and at the Punahou School in Hawaii Barry belonged to the “Choom Gang,” the members of which were apparently obsessed with weed.

The Choomies drove around in a Volkswagen bus called the “Choomwagon,” and were especially fond of “roof hits,” smoking pot inside the Choomwagon with all the windows rolled up,  to maximize the amount of smoke they inhaled. Barack Spicoli Obama was apparently known for renowned for his “interceptions”…joining a group of stoners passing around a joint, taking a hit and yelling, “Intercepted!”

All of which tells us 100% of nothing regarding the fitness of Obama to lead the country today. Continue reading →

Integrity Check For Obama Supporters: Is This Really How You Want The Campaign To Go?

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

On the heels of Newark Mayor Corey Booker’s criticism of the Obama campaign’s anti-Bain ad and his subsequent simpering recant, an interesting thing happened: some people actually checked the ad for fairness and accuracy…never mind that it was widely interpreted as an anti-capitalist statement in the world’s most successful capitalist nation. Part of the impetus for the check was loyal Democratic consultant and spin-master Lanny Davis announcing on television that the ad was deceptive in more ways than one.

If you have not seen the spot, here it is:

It tells the story of the demise of  GS Industries through interviews with sad-eyed, salt-of-the-earth workers who accuse Bain of buying their town’s small steel company to destroy it. 30-year steelworker Joe Soptic tells the camera,  “They made as much money off it as they could. And they closed it down, they filed for bankruptcy without any concern for the families or the communities.” Jack Cobb, a another steelworker, calls Bain “a vampire. They came in and sucked the life out of us.” Things were going fine, they all say, until Bain Capital, under the leadership of Mitt Romney, bought the company and soon sold them down the river, laying everyone off and pocketing a huge profit. How that would work…how buying a company and its equipment and then quickly shutting it down would be profitable….is never explained, because actual information is irrelevant to the makers of the ad. The point of the Obama campaign is to contrast the intercut video of Mitt Romney saying he created jobs with the weather-beaten faces of hard-working Americans who say he threw them out of work to funnel money to his rich friends.

Deceit, you’ll recall, is when one uses facts to deceive, usually by omitting other facts that make the revealed facts understandable. Deceit is a form of lying, a very effective and insidious form. President Obama’s anti-Bain ad is, beyond question, deceitful, and deceptive, which means that in this instance at least, so is he. For he, Barack Obama, “approved this message.” Continue reading →

Let’s Play “Spot the Ten Outrages!” (Public School Version)

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Here we have a video, taken with a North Carolina high school (North Rowan High School) student’s cell phone during class. (yes, it just points at the ceiling. It’s the audio that matters):

Now lets’s play…SPOT THE OUTRAGE!

(There are ten!)

OUTRAGE 1: Does this sound like a class in session to you? Students are laughing and joking, barely paying attention. What kind of learning can occur in such a a chaotic environment? Do parents realize this is what school is like today?

Is the fact that a student is recording the class without the teacher’s consent an ethical breach? Once I would be tempted to answer yes: recording without permission is always unfair and a Golden Rule violation unless there are special circumstances. However, special circumstances were present, and may be present in more classrooms than our fragile sanity will permit us to accept. I now think perhaps all public school classrooms should be videotaped, all the time.Then we would quickly know the extent of our education catastrophe, as horrifying as that would be.

OUTRAGE 2: The teacher of the social studies class presents as the“fact of the day” the Washington Post sliming of Mitt Romney based on his mistreatment of a fellow student in his prep school days. In itself, this is not an inappropriate topic for discussion by a high school class, as the story raises many fascinating issues. How much do the students feel their conduct during their tender years should count against their character 50 years hence? Is it relevant to the presidential election in any way? How have attitudes toward “sissies,” gays and less-than masculine boys changed since the early Sixties, if at all? How have attitudes toward and awareness of homosexuality? What does this story say about the objectivity of the  press? Is it fair? None of these legitimate and discussion-worthy questions, however, seemed to occur to the teacher, who was simply trying to show that “Romney was a bully in high school” in a clumsy and transparent effort to indoctrinate her students in her own political views. Continue reading →

Time and Newsweek: Reaching The Dregs, and Ethics Be Damned

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

Dishonest or tasteless? Irresponsible or sensational?  A lie or a crime? The nation’s two, sad, archaic, useless, shameless, diminished news magazines, Time and Newsweek, both reached new lows this week as both magazines desperately brayed for readership with eye-catching covers that are to good journalism what Britney Spears will be to good judging in her new gig as a panelist on “X-Factor.”

I was going to make this an ethics quiz—which is more unethical?—but decided it was futile. The Time cover is colorable kiddie porn, using a (God, I hope!) photoshopped image* that no child should  be permitted to see on a news stand. The Newsweek cover, in addition to continuing the publication’s unconscionable deification of Barack Obama no matter what he does, is a lie. Obama isn’t gay. Newsweek is making a rhetorical link between Obama’s (vastly over-praised and still tepid endorsement of gay marriage) empathy with gays and Bill Clinton’s faux-status as the nation’s “first black President, but it is fatally flawed, logically and graphically. Everyone knows Bill Clinton isn’t literally black (except, perhaps, in the way Elizabeth Warren is Native American), but we can’t see that Obama isn’t gay from his image on the cover. All there is the copy: “The First Gay President.” There are people who will believe that, and who will see the cover without buying the magazine, since almost nobody buys either magazine any more.

Neither cover is responsible journalism. Both are graphic desperation, with neither magazine showing respect for readers, their topics, or their own distinguished pasts.

* Boy, was I wrong.

____________________________________________

Graphics: Time and Newsweek

Did Any Journalists Actually READ Obama’s Autobiography?

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Today Rush Limbaugh was fuming over a Politico report that the President had admitted to biographer David Maranis that “Genevieve Cook,” the New York girlfriend depicted in his 1995 autobiography “Dreams From My Father,” was not a real person but a composite of several girlfriends. Rush’s point: the book was widely represented, by the President as well as others, as true. What else in the book is a lie?

Politico, however, did something novel: its reporters went to the book itself. They found that Obama had written, right up front, that some characters were composites, though he didn’t say which. Limbaugh’s larger point is still valid: if it contained fiction, and composite characters are that, the book is not reliable, and is not truly a work of non-fiction that can or should be trusted. Obama did not hide that fact, however…if anyone had been paying attention. Continue reading →

NOW the New York Times Is Going To Be Fair And Objective?

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

I nearly entitled this “Jaw-Dropping Confession Of The Decade.”

Stop, you're killing me! My drink just came out my nose!

In his column today, Arthur Brisbane, The New York Times’ timid ombudsman (the Times calls him its “public editor”), writes a long post about widespread accusations that the Times has not applied the same objective rigor to Barack Obama that it could have, should have, and typically has done to other politicians despite its openly liberal tilt. Oh, Arthur’s defensive about it, all right, but his defense boils down to “it wasn’t intentional.” Brisbane appears to be convinced by an assortment of media scholars he respects that the accusations on the Right that the Times has been “in the tank” for Obama is not that far from the truth after all. Bias can be overcome, though, he concludes. Yes we ca…uh, well, you know.

Brisbane writes, Continue reading →

Joke Ethics: The Obama Dog Jokes Dilemma and The Gut Test

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

The question: how should fair and ethical people regard the viral “the President eats dogs” jokes? This depends on the standards we choose to apply—and remember, double standards are banned.

  • Is it a humor standard? Political jokes don’t have to be fair; most of them aren’t. They have to be funny. If they are funny, they don’t have to be especially tasteful, either.
  • Is it a motive standard? If the real motive for the flood of jokes is to undermine the President in an election year by using absurd images to make him look ridiculous, should that be condemned? Continue reading →

Tit For Tat Ethics, Canine Division

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Rugby For President!

There has been entirely too much written about this topic already, but I do have a pedigree here. I wrote disapprovingly about Mitt Romney’s now infamous episode of dog cruelty way back in 2007, concluding…

“For me personally, the incident is enough to convince me that I don’t like the man, and probably never will. And my feelings as I look at the sweet-tempered and loyal Jack Russell terrier now sleeping on my desk, with his small head resting on my forearm, tell me that me that I would write Rugby’s name on a ballot before I would give Mitt Romney my vote for President of the United States. But that’s not an ethical decision, only an emotional one.”

My feelings about Romney strapping the pen containing his Irish Setter on the roof of his car from Boston to Canada haven’t changed much. Now as then, I think his callousness to the animal who loved him is relevant to his fitness to be President but not dispositive of it. Again from 2007: Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The Problem of the Buried Video

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

"He stole my vote!"

The video is meaningless. It shows college student Barry Obama speaking at a 1991 rally for radical college professor Derek Bell. At one point, the future president hugs Bell. So what you say? No kidding. That doesn’t mean that the anti-Obama truth squad wouldn’t try to make something out of it; indeed, they are now. The video has surfaced as Andrew Breitbart’s farewell poke in the eye to Democrats, and it’s not much of a poke.

The only interesting aspect of the tape is that Harvard Law professor Charles Ogletree said that he had the video and buried it during the 2008 campaign.  “I hid this during the 2008 campaign,” Ogletree said. “I don’t care if they find it now.”

Your Ethics Quiz: Is it unethical for an individual to hide theoretically damaging material relating to a presidential candidate he favors until after the election, if the material in fact contains nothing that would affect the vote of any individual with  intelligence superior to that of the average civic-minded horseshoe crab?

My answer: Definitely. I don’t care whether the information is extra-marital affairs, drug use, a DUI or appearing at a frat party in a tutu. No one has the right to withhold information, even stupid and useless information, from the media and electorate.  If the information is relevant, then the public has a right to know about it. If it isn’t, as this tape appears to be, then why hide it? If the tape was intentionally kept from the public, the conduct can’t be defended on the basis that it did no harm—the intent was to do harm. If one person would have changed his vote because he doesn’t want a President who ever hugged Derek Bell, even though that person is probably a fool, no one had no right to take away that vote through deception.

It’s all hypothetical, apparently, because Prof. Ogletree has explained that his “confession” was a joke, and was understood as such when he made it, if not reported that way. [Thanks to Barry Deutch for the link.]

So nobody hid anything, and those those horseshoe crabs who voted for Obama weren’t deceived after all.

Charles M. Blow’s Bigoted Anti-Mormon Tweet, Chapter 2: Ironies, Regrets, and Hypocrisy on the Left

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Charles M. Blow, trapped in regret-apology hypocrisy. Fortunately for him, his paper doesn't care.

Charles M. Blow, the New York Times columnist who sent his followers an uncivil, unprofessional and bigoted tweet regarding Mitt Romney and his faith during Wednesday’s debate [“Let me just tell you this Mitt ‘Muddle Mouth’: I’m a single parent and my kids are *amazing*! Stick that in your magic underwear.”] issued a fascinating…something...today in response to criticism, which did not come from the supposedly bigotry-sensitive left. He tweeted:

“Btw, the comment I made about Mormonism during Wed.’s debate was inappropriate, and I regret it. I’m willing to admit that with no caveats.”

It is fascinating to me that this is being called an apology by Blow’s supporters and conservative critics alike. If it is an apology, and that is open to dispute, I’d like someone to explain to me how Blow can use “regret” as a stand-in for “I apologize,” and yet the same commentators who are interpreting the word that way have insisted that President Obama’s repeated use of “regret”to refer to past U.S. foreign policy actions was not the equivalent of apologizing, and have in fact stated that this interpretation by conservative critics is “a lie.”

Among those who have defended the President in this way, I believe, is Charles M. Blow. Continue reading →