Barack Obama

“Titan” Submersible Tragedy Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

Debris from the OceanGate Expeditions Titan submersible was found Yesterday. As feared, all five of those on board perished. There has been a splash of ethics-related matters in the wake of the disaster:

1. Former US President Barack Obama, once again proving the hoary “stopped clock” metaphor’s accuracy, criticized Western media hypocrisy for making a missing submersible carrying five wealthy would-be adventurers on a tour of the Titanic’s wreckage a sensational news story while giving little coverage to a refugee-filled trawler sinking off Greece with up to 700 people on board. At least 82 people died in that tragedy this week, and hundreds more are feared to have drowned. The incident off Greece was completely overshadowed by the Titan rescue operation as soon as news of its disappearance surfaced. BBC, CNN, the New York Times covered the Titan rescue operation minute by minute. Meanwhile, no survivors or bodies have been found since the trawler sank carrying an estimated 750 men, women and children from Syria, Egypt, Palestine and Pakistan.

Of course the disparity in news coverage is due to commerce and profits blotting out journalism as well as decency. “Titanic” is a magic word that generates clicks and TV ratings, and despite their pretenses at other times, the news media knows that its readers are more interested in the fate of five rich people on a high-priced, high-tech junket than 750 poor refugees on a trawler. If journalists were the professionals they claim to be, they would report the news according to its obvious human and international priorities, and let the clicks fall where they may. But they aren’t. As we know.

Obama is right.

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Ethics Dunce And Unethical Tweet Of The Week: Barack Obama

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

How many ex-Presidents have revealed themselves to be far bigger jerks than anyone suspected in their post-White House years? Until relatively recently, most Presidents died so soon after their terms were up that the situation didn’t arise. John Tyler joined the Confederate cabinet; Teddy Roosevelt torpedoed his own party and his old friend Taft in a fit of ego, but that really wasn’t out of character. Most have stayed relatively quiet and inoffensive. I think Barack Obama wins the booby prize for post-POTUS jerkism.

The tweet is gold medal pandering: the shooting and Floyd’s death have no nexus at all, except that they have both been exploited for their progressive agenda value. More dunder-headed still, these two issues are contradictory. Democrats have been crippling law enforcement in many cities and communities, putting law abiding citizens at risk; that was one of the results of the excessive and cynical frenzy over a single bad policing incident in Minneapolis. Now that police are sufficiently terrified and reluctant to police, Obama wants to make it harder for Americans to protect themselves. But hey, anything to help promote Black Lives Matter! Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month (And Signature Significance): Barack Obama

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“Few people have done more for this state and this country than this driven, brilliant, sometimes irascible, deeply good man from Searchlight, Nevada.”

—-Former President Barack Obama, speaking at former Democratic Party Senate leader Harry Reid’s funeral.

Harry Reid was asked about his repeated lie during the 2012 Presidential campaign that Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney had not paid any taxes over the previous decade.  Reid even made that allegation from the floor of the Senate.

Reid’s accusation was an outright, brazen lie. Romney released his tax returns for those years. In 2011, Romney paid $1.9 million in taxes; in 2010, he paid slightly more than $3 million in taxes. The Washington Post Fact Checker, a reliable defender of unethical conduct by Democrats, gave Reid Four Pinocchios for his “no taxes” claim. Another inveterate left-biased factchecking group, PolitiFact, gave the claim a “Pants on Fire” rating.

Reid’s answer to the query became infamous: he responded, “Romney didn’t win, did he?” Later, he insisted  that the lie was “the best thing he ever did.” Continue reading →

More On The Obama-Springsteen Exchange, Since Apparently Its Significance Isn’t Sinking In…

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Obama Boss

I don’t understand why the recent televised comments by Barack Obama about white citizens haven’t been a major news story. I don’t understand why it isn’t the topic of dozens of columns and commentary pieces in newspapers, on broadcast news outlets, and on the web. There have been few comments about the episode here, and most of those have consisted of virtual shrugs: ‘Oh, as usual, the Obama worshipers and the news media will just look the other way, because he can do no wrong in their eyes.’ End of issue, apparently.

On the site that first publicized the exchange during CBS Sunday Morning, RealClearPolitics,there are no comments at all as I write this. None. A post called “Pét-Nats Are Champagne’s Funkier Cousin. Are They Here to Stay?.” also posted yesterday, has 29, and I have no idea what the hell its about. I know what the Ethics Alarms post is about, though. The former President of the United States looked upon as the most respected leader of the Democratic Party and who received about 98% of the black vote when he ran for President revealed himself as an anti-white bigot.

What he said on CBS to his new pal, Bruce Springsteen, was signature significance: nobody who isn’t an anti-while bigot says it or thinks it. Let me refresh your memory: Obama said to “The Boss,” speaking about a black E Street Band musician that Springsteen admired, “But most of your audiences were primarily white. And they can love Clarence when he’s onstage, but if they ran into him in a bar, suddenly…the n-word comes out.”

Do you know what Obama’s statement reminded me of? It recalled a line from “12 Angry Men,” when Juror 10 says, asserting that it only stands to reason the the young defendant, who is a member of an unstated minority group, killed his father, the victim in the murder trial,

“Look, these people are lushing it up and fighting all the time, and if somebody gets killed, so somebody
gets killed…they don’t care. Oh, there are some good things about ’em too. Look, I’m the first
one to say that!”

Juror 10 is the repulsive, stereotypical bigot on the jury.

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Unethical Quote Of The Year: Barack Obama, And I Still Am Amazed He Would Say This Out Loud

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Obama and Springstein

“But most of your audiences were primarily white. And they can love Clarence when he’s onstage, but if they ran into him in a bar, suddenly…the n-word comes out.”

—-Former President Barack Obama, talking with Bruce Springsteen on CBS Sunday Morning about the rock star’s partnership with the  E Street Band’s late black saxophonist Clarence Clemons.

And there it is. That’s how Barack Obama, just like his racist wife, thinks of white people like me. When “they” see a black man at a bar, even a famous musician like Clemons, they just can’t restrain themselves. The “n-word”—that’s nigger, you know—“comes out.”

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Unethical Quote Of The Week: Barack Obama

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

 

Obama portrait2“Trump is for a lot of white people what O. J.’s acquittal was to a lot of Black folks — you know it’s wrong, but it feels good.”

—Barack Obama, quoted in “After the Fall,” a new book by former Obama aide Ben Rhodes

James Traub, who reviews Obama acolyte Rhodes’ book for the New York Times Book Review, calls the quote “funny” and an example of the ex-President’s “almost unearthly equanimity.” I guess that’s one way of describing it. I tend to think the quote is more evidence that Obama is a bigoted asshole.

Despite being labelled a racist by the “resistance”/Democrat/ mainstream media alliance for his entire four years in office, Donald Trump has never had any quote attributed to him as clearly racist as this one. Nor, despite being a undisputed narcissist, has Trump revealed the level of narcissism necessary to equate rejection of his policies or leadership with allowing a double murderer to escape punishment, which is what Obama literally was saying.

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Ethics Quote Of The Month: Andrew Sullivan

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

CRT2

“[T]he sudden, rapid, stunning shift in the belief system of the American elites…has sent the whole society into a profound cultural dislocation. It is, in essence, an ongoing moral panic against the specter of “white supremacy,” which is now bizarrely regarded as an accurate description of the largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history.”

—-Blogging pioneer Andrew Sullivan, yet another exile at substack, in his eloquent, brave, important and accurate essay, “What Happened To You?”

That’s probably not the best ethics quote in Sullivan’s latest essay. It’s just the earliest. There is also this bitter truth, as Sullivan’s brief approaches it’s climax:

“Look how far the left’s war on liberalism has gone. Due process? If you’re a male on campus, gone. Privacy? Stripped away — by anonymous rape accusations, exposure of private emails, violence against people’s private homes, screaming at folks in restaurants, sordid exposés of sexual encounters, eagerly published by woke mags. Non-violence? Exceptions are available if you want to “punch a fascist.” Free speech? Only if you don’t mind being fired and ostracized as a righteous consequence. Free association? You’ve got to be kidding. Religious freedom? Illegitimate bigotry. Equality? Only group equity counts now, and individuals of the wrong identity can and must be discriminated against. Color-blindness? Another word for racism. Mercy? Not for oppressors. Intent? Irrelevant. Objectivity? A racist lie. Science? A manifestation of white supremacy. Biological sex? Replaced by socially constructed gender so that women have penises and men have periods. The rule of law? Not for migrants or looters. Borders? Racist. Viewpoint diversity? A form of violence against the oppressed.” 

I hate to drop spoilers with a master essay like Sullivan’s but I know a lot of people don’t follow links, and attention, as Willy Loman’s wife said, must be paid. Sullivan writes like an angel, so I quote him in fond hopes that readers will allow his persuasive prose to unfold as he designed it. Andrew begins by writing,

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Pre-Weekend Ethics Prep, 3/5/2021: Obama Disses Pete, John Defends The Redcoats, Harvard Beats Crump, And Zoom Strikes Again

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Massacre-jpg

1. Today this post, from two years ago, is suddenly getting a lot of views. The reason: there was a resolution of the long-shot law suit by the descendants of two slaves in photographs owned by Harvard University. The slave’s descendant, Tamara Lanier, had employed Benjamin Crump, legal race-hustler without peer, to sue on the Hail Mary theory that

“the images are the “spoils of theft,” because as slaves Renty and Delia were unable to give consent to being photographed., and that Harvard is illegally profiting from the images by using them for “advertising and commercial purposes.” By keeping the photos, the lawsuit claims, Harvard has perpetuated the hallmarks of slavery that prevented African-Americans from holding, conveying or inheriting personal property.”

Sure, Ben….from the post:

“Harvard and other universities set themselves up for this by caving to historical airbrushing demands by the students they have helped indoctrinate, such as when Georgetown University established a policy giving an edge  in admissions to descendants of slaves who were sold to fund the school. I would say they have this coming and let them sleep on the bed of nails their laziness and cowardice have made, but therein lies a real danger. Harvard, which of late has been devising and defending one bad progressive idea after another (like discriminating against Asian Americans as Harvard’s own way of helping African Americans get admitted to the college), might just decide to be woke rather than responsible, and let Mrs. Lanier take the photos, thus setting a precedent with endless potential to cause havoc.”

Justice Camille F. Sarrouf of Middlesex County Superior Court this week acknowledged that the daguerreotypes had been taken under “horrific circumstances” but said that if the enslaved subjects, Renty and Delia, did not own the images when they were made in 1850, then their descendant who brought the lawsuit, Tamara Lanier, did not own them either.

Duh.

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Ethics Warm-Up,12/10/2020, Even Though You’re Probably Warm Already From Your Head Exploding

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

head explosion

Gag me with a spoon. The Times this week published yet another dreamy, worshipful portrait of Barack Obama…

Obama yecchh

… along with the kind of journalistic fawning we became used to during his eight years of weak and feckless leadership:

“A Promised Land” uses his improbable journey — from outsider to the White House and the first two years of his presidency — as a prism by which to explore some of the dynamics of change and renewal that have informed two and a half centuries of American history. It attests to Mr. Obama’s own storytelling powers and to his belief that, in these divided times, “storytelling and literature are more important than ever,” adding that “we need to explain to each other who we are and where we’re going.”

Has the Times ever published a single paragraph, much less an entire article, about the current President with such an admiring tone? Has anyone published a photo like that of President Trump, rather than one which made him look sinister, manic or brooding? I’m trying to think back and determine if any President has been as insufferably smug as Barack Obama, or acclaimed despite such a dearth of positive accomplishments. Clinton would be the closest in the first category, Kennedy in the latter.

1. Don’t encourage him. Donald Trump will be a disqualifying 78 years old when 2024 rolls around. He will have no business running for President at that age, but if trend hold, he will do it anyway, essentially playing Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 and letting his unrestrained ego wreck any chances the Republican might have of finding new leadership and defeating whoever the Democrats run. Trump will be back where he was in 2012 and 2016, running for President without any concern for the damage it may do.

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Sunday Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 12/6/2020: Euphemism, Epidemiology And Epistemology

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Blazing Sun

1. Unfortunately, the University of Chicago is not typical of American educational institutions. Smith College is. When Jodi Shaw, a Smith administrative staff member, criticized the college’s critical race theory-based “sensitivity training” required of all staff members and posted here own YouTube videos on the issue, the president of Smith College, Kathleen McCartney, felt it necessary to issue a formal statement that said in part:

This past week, an employee of the college posted a personal video to express their concerns about the college’s programming to promote racial justice….This employee does not speak for the college or any part of the college. Further, we believe the video mischaracterizes the college’s important, ongoing efforts to build a more equitable and inclusive living, learning and working environment.

You should know that the employee has not violated any college policies by sharing their personal views on a personal channel. The National Labor Relations Act protects employees who engage in concerted activities, including speech, with respect to workplace conditions. All members of any workplace, including Smith College, have the freedom to criticize the policies and practices of their employer.

Nevertheless, I am writing to affirm that the President’s Cabinet and I believe we have a moral responsibility to promote racial justice, equity and inclusion at Smith College. To the people of color in our community, please know our commitment is steadfast. And especially to our students of color, please know we are here for you always.

All members of Smith College, have the freedom to criticize the policies and practices of their employer; they just risk having the president call them racists.

“Racial justice” is now an Orwellian phrase and euphemism (like “black lives matter”) to avoid discussion and to cut off dissent before it starts. After all, what kind of person objects to “justice”?

2. But wait! There’s more! In an open letter to the Smith community authored by an alumnae group, Shaw is being targeted for “re-education”:

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