Biden Presidency Ethics Train Wreck

Sunday Ethics Warm-Up: “Soul Of The Nation” Hangover Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

Hey…is that a rising sun or a setting sun? Ben Franklin is asking…

On this date in 1886, the legendary Apache leader Geronimo finally surrendered to U.S. government troops. I was thinking about Geronimo last night as I watched “Hot Shots, Part Deux” (the first one is much, much better), by the “Airplane!” guys. In one of the better gags in the film, a special ops team is parachuting into Iraq. Two soldiers shout “Geronimo!” and jump out of the plane, then Geronimo, in full Native American regalia, jumps out shouting “ME!” I found myself wondering if any film maker today would dare to put that into a movie. Isn’t that sad?

In related news, Fox pundit-comic Greg Gutfield is beating all the cookie-cutter all-progressive pandering all-the-time late night comics in the ratings. Imagine: he makes fun of both parties and their supporters! What a ground-breaking concept! He does have a great group of writers, I hear—Mark Twain, Will Rogers, H.L. Mencken, Mort Sahl, Stan Freeberg, Tom Lehrer…

1. Oh, let’s start with the post-Biden Reichstag speech. (My favorite meme inspired by this debacle : that already iconic photo of Biden with his fists raised against the blood-red background with the legend: “It was better in the original German.)

  • Last night, Trump called Biden “the enemy of the people” at his rally. Close one: I actually wrote that description of Biden is a post yesterday, and decided that it was too Trumpy. Not that Trump was wrong…he was also correct to call the mainstream news media “the enemy of the people,” and they are substantially responsible for inflicting Biden on the nation. Their lapdog reaction to the speech is also evidence.
  • Ann Althouse has been in rare form in her blogging about the speech. A liberal Democrat by inclination and belief, she was obviously genuinely offended and angered by it. Apparently progressive historian (well, they are almost all progressives now) Jon Meachum (“American Lion,” which I read and liked very much) had input into the rant, which Politico called the “Democracy speech.” Althouse: “Democracy speech”? Is that what they want it called? The speech where he demonized half of American voters?…Ugh! Warning us about our fellow citizens. Accusing us of “assault.” Claiming to represent “democracy”….it was horrible.” Here, writing about Trump’s rally, she quotes the Times today—“The former president described Mr. Biden’s address as ‘the most vicious, hateful, and divisive speech ever delivered by an American president.’—and comments, “I don’t think the NYT wants us to think Trump is right about that, but I think he is.”

Of course he is. Continue reading →

Further Notes And Observations On President Biden’s “Soul Of The Nation” Speech

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

No, this doesn’t rate “ethics train wreck” status. The horrible episode was already hooked up to two ongoing ethics train wrecks: the extinction level  2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck, and its subordinate Biden Presidency Ethics Train Wreck. Moreover, Biden’s speech has some very positive aspects to it which are becoming immediately apparent. Those who praise it are outing themselves as hopelessly, cripplingly biased, ethically short-circuited and ready to embrace totalitarianism. Journalists who rationalize it are proving the critics of their rotted profession correct. This is all useful information, if depressing.

The speech also exposed the desperation and complete corruption of the Democratic Party for anyone to see who isn’t in an ethics coma. The smoking gun: the fact that Biden and Democrats began denying that Biden said what he said less than a day after he said it, and said it in a carefully (if stupidly) prepared and choreographed production framed as a major Presidential address. This exchange…

Fox News’ Peter Doocy: “Do you consider all Trump supporters to be a threat to the country?”

Biden: “I don’t consider any Trump supporter a threat to the country.”

…was not only a Jumbo, as Ethics Alarms declared last night, but as Professor Jacobson points out, one that makes the vocal knee-jerk supporters of the speech look like the unprincipled toadies they are. He writes, “I bet you thought there was nothing so pathetic as Joe “Wartime President” Biden’s hateful, lunatic, insane, demeaning, and otherwise civil-warish speech last night….Biden was categorical – “MAGA Republicans are a threat.” Immediately, the usual media and Never-Trump sychophants jumped on board with high praise of this eliminationist rhetoric. Guess what? Joe “Where Am I?” Biden just threw them all under the bus by walking back his comments. No, of course he didn’t mean to say that all MAGA-voters were a threat to the nation….” Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Month: Ann Althouse On Biden’s Speech Last Night

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

“I can sum it up in 7 words: We the People, but not you people.”

—–Allegedly non-partisan blogger Ann Althouse (she’s a Democrat), providing a preview of her soon to be posted review of Biden’s “soul of the nation” speech.

As soon as I read that Biden was going to give a prime-time speech on the peril to the “soul of the nation,” I knew exactly what was coming, what motivated it (panic and desperation, plus terrible advisers), and what it would be: the ultimate IIPTDXTTNMIAFB.

And wildly unethical, of course: irresponsible, disrespectful, unfair, and un-American, as well as hypocritical, indeed a betrayal, from a leader who promised on his Inaugeration Day, “We can join forces, stop the shouting and lower the temperature. For without unity there is no peace, only bitterness and fury. No progress, only exhausting outrage. No nation, only a state of chaos. This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge, and unity is the path forward.”

Was I wrong?

I haven’t read the various pundits about the speech yet, and I haven’t read the text yet; I have a doctor’s appointment and I don’t want to be nauseous. I am curious about whether any of the usual Biden cheer-leaders will have the integrity to state the obvious, and what was obvious the second the speech was announced. This is deliberate divisiveness. It is the essence of totalitarian messaging; it is more fascist in intent and substance than anything Donald Trump ever did or said.

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“Freefall” Ethics Reflections: “Is This It?”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

British novelist William Golding, whom you probably know best as the author of “Lord of the Flies,” wrote a disturbing novel the year I was born called “Freefall.” It was on the reading list of a literature course I took as a college junior, and though it was easily the least well-known of the novels we studied (and is one of Golding’s least-known books as well), “Freefall” is the one that has most echoed back to me at various times over the decades.

The first-person narrator is a miserable and depressed man, an artist, imprisoned in a German prisoner of war camp during World War II and awaiting torture in a small, dark store room. In fear and isolation, he finds his mind reviewing the minutiae of his life, as he searches for the exact moment when his life went horribly and irretrievably wrong and he lost control. In flashbacks, he constantly stops, sometimes after re-living what seems to be the most trivial event, and asks “Was this it? Was this the moment?’

I thought about “Freefall” once again this morning, as I tried to process a series of absurd and incomprehensible recent occurrences and statements. “Is this it?” I found myself wondering, like Golding’s pathetic hero, “Is this it? Is this the moment The Great Stupid completely obliterates all reason and leaves the United States public wandering around aimlessly moaning like the zombies in ‘The Walking Dead’?”

No, it’s not a particularly momentous chain of events, just one that can’t happen anywhere that has sturdy values, trustworthy leadership, and functioning ethics alarms.

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Leadership Ethics: The First Lady’s Ignorant Whine

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Dr. Jill is having a difficult month. I almost put her latest post-breakfast taco remarks under the “Unethical Quote” heading, but her infuriating comments during a private Democratic National Committee fundraiser in Nantucket, Massachusetts qualify as more ignorant and incompetent than anything else.

Attempting to defend her husband’s miserable performance as President over the past 18 months and to rebut the public’s overwhelmingly negative assessment of his Presidency so far, the First Lady whined—and yes, that is a fair characterization—

“[The President] had so many hopes and plans for things he wanted to do, but every time you turned around, he had to address the problems of the moment…He’s just had so many things thrown his way. Who would have ever thought about what happened [with the Supreme Court overturning] Roe v Wade? Well, maybe we saw it coming, but still we didn’t believe it. The gun violence in this country is absolutely appalling. We didn’t see the war in Ukraine coming.” 

Awww, poor Joe! He’s had to deal with the same challenge as every other President since the beginning of the Republic! Damn! It’s just one thing after another! Who could have predicted it?

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Ethics Estoppel: Awww, Do The Poor Democrats Regret Putting Biden In the White House? They Can Shut Up And Bite Me…

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

I have standing to complain, but they don’t.

A New York Times/Siena College poll just out purports to show that 64% of Democratic voters don’t want Joe Biden to be President after his current term expires, and the reason is that even they can tell the country is falling apart. Biden has been President for less than two years, and yet it has come to this already.

Assuming the poll is accurate (you know…polls) this result warrants a dirge from the tiniest violin in existence. How dare Democrats say this, when they foisted Biden on the nation with full knowledge that he was too old, declining mentally, and was a career mediocrity on the smartest day of his life? It was an epic example of irresponsible citizenship and a breach of trust, motivated, like most actions by members of their party since 2016, by pure, primitive, unreasoning, unquenchable hatred of Donald Trump. They would have voted for an inanimate carbon rod for President in 2020 if polls showed it to have the best chance of winning.

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Failures Of Proportion Make Failed Leadership Inevitable

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I am torn: this post screamed out for a Major Clipton introduction though the head-exploding tweet above by President Biden’s Chief of Staff (or head puppeteer) arguably needs no introduction. I think I’ll settle on both: we haven’t heard from the major for a while…

Proportion is an important ethical value that we don’t talk about enough. That idiotic tweet demonstrates a disastrous ethics flaw—not the only one, heaven knows–that underlies so much of the ongoing tragedy that is the progressive movement currently being inflicted on the nation by Biden and the Democrats.

Inflation is reaching crisis levels, harming virtually all Americans not candidates for a reboot of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” The national debt has reached and exceeded and then exceeded more any rational level that a responsible country should tolerate. Yet the White House wants a victory lap because two women instead of the traditional one will have their signatures on the currency. Continue reading →

End Of A Bad Ethics Week Sign-Off, 5/6/2022: Espy, Psaki, Chappelle, And Terrible Movies

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Is it unethical to make really bad movies? I’m talking about irredeemable garbage, not inspired lunacy like Ed Wood films, so mind-blowingly terrible that they are hypnotic as well as unforgettable. Isn’t it irresponsible to spend money and mislead audiences when you have no talent whatsoever?

I’ve been thinking about this ever since we tried to watch “Birdemic: Shock and Terror,” which we were counting on to be amusingly bad, and it was, instead, bad beyond all expectations. Though it was obviously modeled on “The Birds,” no birds appeared until half-way through the film, and they may have been the worst special effects I have ever seen anywhere. The sound quality was poor, and the writer-director makes Wood seem like Orson Welles by comparison. The movie also makes Mystery Science Theater 3000’s “Manos, the Hands of Fate” seem like “Casablanca.” (That famously awful film, at a $19,000 budget, was still almost twice as expensive to make as “Birdemic.”) We had to bail on the film when the birds appeared, because screeching woke up Spuds and put him in a panic.

Here’s the whole film. The “birds” appear at the 47 minute mark, but the acting and dialogue really has to be experienced to be believed:

There is a sequel.

1. Is Jen Psaki the worst weasel ever to serve as a Presidents paid liar? It’s hard to say, but her exchange with Peter Doocy on the doxxing of the Supreme Court justices is truly despicable. (No wonder MSNBC wants to hire her.)

Doocy: “[Y]ou guys spent some time…talking about what you think are…extreme wings of the [GOP]. Do you think the progressive activists that are now planning protests outside of justices’ houses are extreme?”

Psaki: “Peaceful protests? No. Peaceful protest is not extreme.”

But the question wasn’t about peaceful legal protests. It was about illegal protests that violate the privacy—how’s that for hypocrisy?—of Suprem Court members and their families.

Doocy: “Some of these justices have young kids. Their neighbors are not all public figures, so would [Biden] think about waving activists that want to go into…neighborhoods in VA and MD?”

Psaki: “Peter…our view is that peaceful protests, there is a long history…of that.”

What? A long history of harassing and trying to intimidate SCOTUS justices at home? Even if that wasn’t an outright lie, the fact that there’s a long history of misconduct doesn’t excuse the misconduct. She could have given the same answer regarding tar and feathers.

Doocy: “Is [protesting outside the homes of justices] the kind of thing [Biden] wants to help your side make their point?”

Psaki: “Look, [his] view is that there’s a lot of passion, a lot of fear, a lot of sadness…We want people’s privacy to be respected.”

Translation: “Emotion justifies everything, and I don’t want to answer your question.”

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Comment Of The Day: “Signature Significance: Washington Post Editorial Board’s Fantasy,” And Thoughts About The Worst Presidents

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Steve-O-in NJ was inspired by the EA commentary on the Washington Post editors’ batty contention last week that Joe Biden was a “huge” upgrade over President Trump to write this Comment of the Day. I was reminded of it—I had intended to give Steve’s opus COTD honors earlier, but got distracted— when I realized that MSNBC was pushing the same gaslighting, prompting the previous post. The historical truth is that Joe Biden’s White House tenure so far wouldn’t give him a claim to being as a “huge upgrade” over any President using objective standards rather than partisan ones, as in “all Republican Presidents are worse than all Democrat Presidents,” which is the kindest way to explain the Post’s absurd assertion.

I am always interested in the topic of Presidential rankings, so after Steve-O has had his say, I’m going to follow up with an examination of how to assess who is the Worst POTUS Ever. Remember, leadership is also an official area of concentration for Ethics Alarms.

But first, here is Steve-O-of NJ’s Comment of the Day on the post,“Signature Significance: Washington Post Editorial Board’s Fantasy”…

***

Just more proof that a lot of folks are so blindly partisan that they would not only vote for a ham sandwich if it had a D next to it, but wouldn’t vote for God Himself if He didn’t. Biden is so far headed for being 46th of 46. Grant probably no longer occupies the bottom of the ratings list. Harding was a corrupt, philandering son of a b****, but he had the wisdom to stand back and let the economy correct itself after the Panic of 1921. Obama was pretty feckless, but thankfully didn’t face any big new crises. Clinton was a pig, but the economy didn’t crash on his watch. So far, I can only compare Biden to Carter, the only president in recent history and even not so recent history who I can honestly and truly say has no strengths. Continue reading →

The White House Gets Another Jumbo

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

You know, at some point, this has to matter, doesn’t it?

For four years, the mainstream media, Democrats and the Trump-Deranged claimed that anything that President Trump said or tweeted, whether it was gaffe, a mistake, a joke, hyperbole, puffery or, as was indeed often the case, deliberately misleading, was a democracy-threatening lie. This media theme was an exaggeration on its own, and a damaging one, diminishing Trump’s public trust and making it difficult for him to do his job—as indeed was the whole point of the “Trump lies” obsession.

So what is the American public supposed to conclude when President Biden says something that is clear and unequivocal, and the official White House position is that he didn’t say it?

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