Bernie Sanders

Hypocrisy Watch…

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

And people wonder why Trump beat the Democrats in 2016. Bernie is, to his credit, open and unrepentant about his hypocrisy, but it is kind of amazing that he still gets away with statements like this. He’s multimillionaire communist who rants about income distribution, and not only has a private jet but who mocks the little people who have to wait in lines for commercial air flights, and he fear-mongers about cliamte change while spewing more carbon into the atmosphere than any random 1000 Americans.

He can get away with this because he correctly assesses the IQ (low) and ethics alarms ( busted) of the average progressive.

And then there is Hillary Clinton. Saying, in effect, “Hold my beer!” the sad, bitter and irrelevant almost-first female POTUS (I feel sorry for Hillary, I really do) went for hypocrisy gold with this post on “X”:

Continue reading →

July 4th Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Light whatever ethics fuses you choose here today. As usual, traffic is minor on a long weekend. I have only one matter to pass on: Sen. Bernie Sanders’ dishonest and aburd criticism of the Paramount/CBS/”60 minutes” settlement, which would be an “Unethical Quote of the Week” if so many Axis hacks and liars hadn’t been saying the same thing. Quoth Bernie,

“Paramount’s decision will only embolden Trump to continue attacking, suing and intimidating the media which he has labeled ‘the enemy of the people.’ It is a dark day for independent journalism and freedom of the press — an essential part of our democracy. It is a victory for a president who is attempting to stifle dissent and undermine American democracy.”

Asshole.

In order:

1. Trump should be “emboldened.” The media has been indulging in fake news, manipulated reports, partisan bias and anti-democratic fact-hiding for far, far too long, and a reckoning is overdue as well as necessary.

2. The press should be intimidated to make it stop abusing the freedom of the press and deliberately misleading the public.

3. The news media is the enemy of the people. The “60 minutes” scandal showed why.

4. The dark day for independent journalism arrived the first time a major news source like CBS set out to elect one candidate over another instead of reporting objectively and fairly on both. Making it clear that journalists face some adverse consequences when they betray their public trust this brightens the day.

5. The essential part of democracy is the public being reliably informed about the world, the nation and its elected officials objectively, responsibly and fairly. so they can competently participate in their own government. When the free press decides to misuse its power and special privileges to mislead the public, that’s an attack on democracy.

6. How can anyone describe what CBS did with the Harris interview (or NBC, with “Saturday Night Live,” giving Harris an illegal free campaign commercial three days before the election) as “dissent”? Answer: They can if they are dishonest, unscrupulous, shameless Machiavellian leftists like Bernie. This is the guy who said outright that Harris was pretending to be more moderate in her views to get elected, and that was fine with him. “By any means necessary,” after all!

Did I mention that Sanders is an asshole?

7. Bernie and anyone else who stood by and allowed a demented Democratic President be manipulated by unelected back-room aides is estopped from ever using the term, “undermine American democracy”again. Channeling Albert Brooks in “Lost in America,” I’d say that they can’t even use the components of that phrase, “undermine,” “American,” and “democracy.”

8. And can we please stop tolerating the “Paramount settled because it wants the merger to be approved” lie, the agreed-upon narrative the news media has pushed to shift the blame from “60 minutes” to Trunp? Paramount and CBS settled because they did not dare go through discovery, which would reveal high level emails in which various executives openly discussed how to make sure Harris won and Trump lost. Those would create a professional scandal from which CBS might never recover.

Ethics Alarms Is Ready To Predict the Winner of the 2024 Election…

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

And it is...Abraham Lincoln!

It’s just one poll, but it’s a New York Times poll, and if any left-leaning, biased polling result is likely to try to bury bad news for the Democrats, it’s this one. The New York Times/Siena national poll was released this morning, and showed Donald Trump starting to regain the edge he had before Joe Biden was forced out and the news media joined the Democrats in a “She Isn’t What She Is” campaign of excitement, joy, and virtually no substance whatsoever.

Trump now leads Kamala Harris nationally among likely voters by a 48–47 margin, and Trump hasn’t received as much as 48% at the ballot box yet, not in 2016 or 2020. Though Newsbuster’s analysis shows Harris getting over 80% positive press coverage in this period (for doing nothing but repeating boilerplate, non-substantive speeches off teleprompters and avoiding any one-on-one interviews with even friendly journalists), and though she has reversed many of her most radical positions (more on that in a second) while saying that “her values haven’t changed,” whatever that means, “the ruse isn’t working,” as Jeff Blehar says at the Never Trump National Review:

Continue reading →

Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck Update: Tells, Hypocrites, Liars And A Jumbo, Part 2…”From The River To The Sea”

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

Yikes. I posted Part I just two days ago, and realized then that I had too many items to cover for a single post. Then anti-Israel demonstrations amassed in Washington, D.C.. and outside the White House, Barack Obama made a fool of himself, “The Squad’s” most anti-Semitic member (but it’s a close race) stopped even pretending she was anything else, and heaven knows what I’m facing today. Well, as Hercules said as he faced the Augean stables, “Might as well start shoveling”….

1. The star of this shit-show is undoubtedly Rep. Rashida Tlaib, elected by a largely Palestinian district, who narrowly escaped an expulsion vote in the House after every Democrat voted her way (and over 20 Republicans too, presumably because they believe that saying disgusting things and holding opinions that defy American values shouldn’t get someone kicked out of Congress by anyone but voters. I have to agree with them). She posted a social media video showing her constitutes chanting “from the river to the sea.” That’s a call for Israel to be eliminated. That’s all it can mean, and that’s all it has ever meant. Formerly Democratic maverick Senator Kristen Sinema, tried to educate her old party’s members, posting this:

The immediate reaction from the Jew Hate gallery was to deny this undeniable fact, using absurd gerrymandered maps to show there might be some topographically possible way to simultaneously have a version of Israel and a Palestine state that reached “from the river to the sea.” These are unethical, untrustworthy human beings who lie routinely. Tlaib, who has already made it clear what she desires for Israel, went full Jumbo: “Me? Anti-Semitic?” “From the river to the sea is an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate,” Tlaib wrote in a post on X/Twitter. “My work and advocacy is always centered in justice and dignity for all people no matter faith or ethnicity.”

Right. As with all of the Left’s wailing about poor, abused Gaza, this gaslighting relies on the utter ignorance of listeners, especially college students marinated in intersectionality. Hamas’s 2017 constitution states, “Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.” It was not “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence,” and Tlaib knows it. It has been used by Hamas and other terrorist organizations for years, and its intent has never been in doubt. 

“From the river to the sea” was devised by Palestinian nationalists in the 1960s, when the entire Palestinian movement openly sought Israel’s destruction. Mainstream Palestinian groups dropped the phrase after Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization formerly recognized one another after the 1993 Oslo Accords, but it was then revived by the Hamas terrorist group and others hostile to Jews.

Continue reading →

Afternoon Ethics Infection, 3/18/2020: Only 3 Out Of 4 Wuhan Viwus Wewated Wefewences! These Days, That’s Not bad…

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Good afternoon!

1. I missed this: Roman Polanski, with his “An Officer and a Spy” won the directing, and screenplay awards at the French Cesar awards last month, and the results were greeted by protests. After Polanski’s best-director award was announced, “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” actress Adele Haenel and director Celine Sciamma walked out of the theater.

It was Polanski’s fifth Cesar in the directing category, He’s scum and a rapist as well as a fugitive from justice, but he is and has always been a great film director. Polanski did  not attend the ceremony because, he said, he anticipated it would turn into a “public lynching.”

Haenel  shouted, “Well done, pedophilia!” as she left the hall. In an interview with The New York Times about his nominations, she had said, “Distinguishing Polanski is spitting in the face of all victims,” she said. “It means raping women isn’t that bad.”

Think about that statement a bit, if you have to. It makes no sense at all, but articulates the logic of the cancel culture. The film is the film, just as a song is a song and a painting is a painting. None of these are the same as their creators. Just as the fact that art created by a saint doesn’t make it any better, the fact that other art is created by vile human beings doesn’t change the quality of the art for the worse.  The law punishes people for bad deeds. Society punishes them in many other ways. What artists build, accomplish, and contribute to society are independent of the artists personally.

Bill Cosby’s albums are still funny, and nobody is saying that raping women isn’t that bad by enjoying those classic performances or by honoring Cosby as a performer. Harvey Weinstein produced too many great films to boycott.

Personally, I refuse to support Cosby, Woody Allen, Polanski and others who disgust me, but their work remains what it was and is, and burying it punishes the culture. Continue reading →

Ethics Notes On The CNN/Univision Bernie-Biden Debate

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The showdown  was supposed to be Sanders’ last stand, with his sole hope of stopping the Biden surge being to dazzle viewers and show Slow Joe to be too far gone to be a viable candidate. Sanders didn’t do that; he didn’t even come close.  The major ethics takeaway is that this time, at least, Joe Biden did not appear especially more addled than Vice President Joe did, in marked contrast to his quickly aborted cyber-town meeting, in which he often seemed confused and at one point wandered out of camera range.  I know that it seems pathetic to make “not looking senile” an accomplishment in a debate to determine who should be President, but that’s the corner the Democratic Party painted itself into.

Other Observations:

  • Sanders says the same thing over and over again, indeed the same things he said in his debates with Hillary Clinton. To some extent clearing the stage of the flotsam and jetsam candidates just exposes the formulaic and rote nature of his candidacy.

I don’t understand how anyone sentient could seriously support this man for any elected office. With the kids I could understand it, but I know lawyers in their forties without closed head injuries who are Bernie Bros.  It’s inconceivable.

  • Conservative pundits were slamming CNN for not confronting Biden about his fantasy meeting with Nelson Mandela, which was exposed since the last debate. It isn’t the news media’s job to come up with gotchas!…where was Sanders? As with his debates with Hillary in which he adamantly refused to raise her email deceptions, Sanders seems to be less interested in winning than in making his various Marxist talking points. It’s peculiar. It’s also a betrayal of those passionate, if deluded, young supporters who have worked so hard for him.

Why doesn’t Bernie mention Biden’s groping and sniffing problem? Same thing. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 3/11/2020: Bad Marks…

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Good morning!

Time for Gordon MacRae again. It’s been a while…

1. The mark of a poor loser. No doubt about it, the Democratic Party losers are terrible at that accountability thing. Now it’s Bernie Sanders. Before him, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar blamed sexism for their own inadequacies; Harris and Cory Booker blamed racism. Sanders has all sorts of villains, anything to avoid admitting that he and his campaign have been talking irresponsible, undemocratic nonsense for months, indeed years…

  • The “corporate media”
  • The Democratic Party establishment
  • His own youthful (read naive, deluded and ignorant) supporters, who just don’t vote as often as old people.

Maybe this is Presidential conduct now. Obama blamed everything he could on President Bush, and his followers blamed every critique on racism. President Trump is hardly any better at accepting accountability. The all-time winner, or rather all-time loser who beats them all at blaming others for losing is Hillary Clinton.

Perhaps the single most persuasive reason to leave up all those Robert E. Lee statues and memorials is to remind current leaders and future generations of the general who, as his battered, bleeding and defeated troops returned from the field of battle after Pickett’s Charge, one of the worst debacles in U.S. military history, met them saying, “It was all my fault.”

I could respect a leader like that. Are there any?

The “corporate media” bit also is annoying. A Facebook friend, mainstream media bias-denier used Bernie’s lament yesterday to mount a false dichotomy, saying that conservatives blame left-wing media bias while the Left blames the “corporate media.” Sanders indeed received negative coverage, but not because “the corporate media” fears his brand of social justice. The progressive mainstream media is desperate to defeat Trump, and to preserve the Democratic Party, and any idiot can see that running a pro-Castro, Soviet Union rationalizing Marxist would be toxic to both objectives. Even running a deteriorating dementia victim is a better bet, though not an especially good one. Fox News loved the idea of Bernie running against President Trump.

2. The mark of a coward. Sanders  declined to address his disheartened supporters last  night after Joe Biden pretty much ended his hopes of prevailing at the Democratic National Convention by winning decisive primary victories. Before the results were called for the Western states of North Dakota, Idaho, and Washington, the Sanders campaign announced that  Bernie would not be addressing his supporters that evening. Continue reading →

The Democratic Party Debates And The Appearance Of Impropriety

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

If the Democrats want their nominating convention to descend into chaos and result in a disastrous split, I’d say they are making all the right decisions. If they want to bring a united and confident organization into the 2020 battle with the GOP and President Trump, however, they are botching things badly.

The ethics issues at play here are fairness and competence.

The Democratic National Committee now says that the next debate,  finally a  head-to-head showdown between socialist Bernie Sanders and whatever-he-is-at-the-moment Joe Biden, will have both candidates seated as they take unplanned <cough!>questions from undecided voters in the audience, unlike the previous debates which had the candidates  challenged by questions from professional journalist moderators while standing behind  podiums for hours.

Brilliant! What could go wrong? Except that some in the Bernie Sanders camp are convinced that the format has been deliberately engineered to minimize the exposure of Joe Biden, who appears to be aging as quickly as  poor Walter Donovan after he chooses the wrong chalice in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.” Continue reading →

Sunday Ethics Warm-Up, 3/8/2010: Daylight Savings Time Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

Well, It SHOULD still be “Good Morning!”, but it’s not…

1. The most unethical Presidential campaign in recent history.  This profile of in Wisconsin, nicely illustrates the central ethics rot at the core of the Sanders campaign and his appeal. Michelz, we learn, is desperately in debt. He is therefor banking on Sanders to solve his problems by taking money from other people and giving it to him.

This is where the hyping of “income inequality” leads, and it is the basis of Sanders’ unethical message. It is inherently unfair that other people make more money than you do, so the government should use its power to “equalize” income and wealth. We learn in the course of the piece that in last week’s California primary, 47 % who said income inequality was their most important issue picked Mr. Sanders. 13% voted for Joe Biden.

How do individuals brought up in the United States, a nation built on the belief in personal liberty and the responsibility for choosing and making one’s own path in life, come to believe that there is an intrinsic right to a level of wealth and success, regardless of personal choices, industry, talent and character?  We don’t need to ask how we came to have a Presidential contender whose strategy is to appeal to such people and exploit their unhappiness with their current state in life. That is a market-tested approach to acquiring power that has been effective around the world, with disastrous results.

2. Thank you, 1960s! From the res ipsa loquitur department: A new Pew Research Center study of 130 countries and territories shows that the U.S. has the world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households. From the study:
Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 3/3/2020: Super Tuesday Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Excited?

1. The Super Tuesday tragedy. I can’t find it online, but this supposedly crucial day in the 2020 Democratic Party nomination race yanked out of my mental archives a cartoon in the old National Lampoon that ran in 1972. It showed Richard Nixon saying, “Vote for me! I’ll make Southeast Asia look like the bottom of a used Shake ‘n’ Bake bag!”, and on the other side, showed George McGovern saying, “Vote for me! I have a spine like a wet bed of kelp!” That was the first election in which I could vote, and I refused to do so as a matter of principle. I had good friends who were passionate about McGovern, and I felt sorry for them. He was decent man, but so obviously not a rational choice for President of the United States.

All four of the Democrats (sort of…two of them are pretending to be Democrats) still in the race today are just awful options for anyone with their eyes open and not overcome with hatred of Donald Trump, which, it is clear, a distressing number of once-intelligent people are.  In the end, the Democratic Party is accountable for allowing things to come to this, just as the Republican Party was accountable for allowing itself to be swamped by Donald Trump, a real estate mogul who began his campaign as just one more branding opportunity, and hit the jackpot. How can any Democrat defend a vote for Michael Bloomberg, when part of the “resistance’s”  hate for President Trump is based on his alleged autocratic ways and threat to a free press, and they know that the former New York mayor has ordered his own news agency not to criticize him and is betting that his money alone will give him the White House? How can any Democrat defend a vote for Joe Biden, after that  party has claimed for three years that President Trump is mentally unfit and sexist,  and hearing Joe Biden sound more and more like Grandpa before he was put in a home, and seeing  photo after photo of women and girls wincing as Joe exploited a photo op to kiss, hug, grope or sniff them? How can any American defend a vote for Bernie Sanders ( and if I have to elaborate, you’re hopeless)? Finally, how can any Democrats filled with hate for  the President because of his lies, real or imagined, vote for Elizabeth Warren, whose career and campaign have been built on a foundation of lies?

Continue reading →