Bill Clinton

“Unethical Presidential Candidates Sunday” (EXTENDED): Hillary’s New Public Corruption Plan? If They Won’t Willingly Vote For Her After They Learn What She’s Like, Make Them promise To Vote For Her No Matter What They Learn

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

Loyalty Oath

From the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review‘ via Mediaite: Attendees at a Hillary Clinton campaign event in Cleveland, Ohio, were asked to sign a pledge promising to vote for the candidate before they were allowed into the venue.

Yes, this is basically a loyalty oath. Loyalty is the most confounding of ethical values, because it so frequently leads to unethical resolutions of ethics conflicts, when loyalty requires the rejection of other ethical values that should be given priority. Many unethical organizations and leaders insist on loyalty even if they will disdain honesty, integrity, responsibility, accountability, fairness and decency. Used like this, loyalty becomes a virtue that enables unethical conduct. A mother refuses to report her murderous son. A wife abets her raping husband (Hello, Camille Cosby!) Another wife supports her husbands lies about his adultery. (Now who could this be?) Blind loyalty directs Southerners to insist that their forebears weren’t rebelling in support of slavery, African-Americans to insist that a black President is a great President, and patriots to spit “Disloyal!” at principled protesters of national policies abroad.

Obviously, loyalty is very useful to leaders who are untrustworthy or corrupt. They seek support out of quid quo pro transactions that insist, “You owe me! I was there for you, so you must be there for me, no matter what happens,” “no matter what happens” meaning “no matter what awful things I do and what unsavory things you learn about me.” It isn’t patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, as Samuel Johnson famously said, but loyalty. Loyalty was the main bulwark of power and survival for Don Corleone, Colonel Jessup (“A Few Good Men”), Auric Goldfinger,  Darth Vader…and in the real world, Richard Nixon, Mao, Jesse James, Bill Clinton…and obviously, Hillary. Continue reading →

Welcome To “Unethical Presidential Candidates Sunday”! First Up, Rationalization 19 A: The Insidious Confession, Or “It Wasn’t The Best Choice”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Presidential cnadidates

I have tired of suppressing legitimate ethics issues regarding the various Presidential candidates, especially the most obviously unethical ones, Hillary and The Donald, for fear of having this pan-ethics blog mired in the swamp of politics. For this day, at least, I’m going to stop wrestling myself to the ground and stop holding back my rising gorge, and focus specifically (though maybe not exclusively: you never know) on the 54—or is it 22? I get the number of Bill Cosby victims mixed up with the announced Presidential candidates sometimes—on the pack of Republicans and Democrats with designs on the White House. So look out, Jeb, Ben, Chris,  Ted, Carly, Jim Gilmore), Lindsey, Mike, Bobby,  John, George, Rand, Rick, Marco, Rick, Donald Trump, Lincoln, Hillary, Martin, Bernie, Professor, Jim (Webb)….this is

Unethical Presidential Candidates Sunday!

First up…Hillary Clinton gave us a new rationalization! Say hello to Rationalization 19A, the latest addition to the Ethics Alarms Rationalizations List, #19A The Insidious Confession, or “It wasn’t the best choice.”

When Hillary Clinton first used her poll-tested, Campaign War Room generated description of her arrogant, defiant, incompetent and irresponsible (and possibly sinister) choice to send official communications on a private email server as not “the best choice,” I recognized it as misleading and dismissive, but assumed it was just a wan variation on my least favorite rationalization, the dreaded #22, “It’s not the worst thing.” Hillary used the same phrase this week, cementing my conviction that it is a talking point, but also making its real meaning clear.

“It wasn’t the best choice” is really a sneaky sub category of Rationalization #19:
 Continue reading →

Give Credit Where It’s Due: Bill Clinton’s Mastery Of Deceit Is Awe Inspiring And Unequalled

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

best-of-the-best-award_MCSAsked by CNN’s Jake Tapper about Hillary Clinton’s lack of trustworthiness according to a recent poll, Bill Clinton replied, solemnly, “I’d trust her with my life.”

Brilliant deceit. His response is completely irrelevant to the question, misleads the audience, bolsters Hillary and may even be true, but it in no way either refutes the proposition that Hillary can’t be trusted, nor contributes any useful information for those who would like to examine the issue.

Whether Bill trusts Hillary is as useless to those not engaged in mutually beneficial enterprises with her as the fact that Clyde trusted Bonnie, Wyatt Earp trusted Doc Holiday or the Godfather trusted Luca Brasi. There are very few people whom nobody can trust, even such trusted Clinton henchmen as Dick Morris and Paul Begala. The public wants to be able to trust a leader to do the right thing even when it doesn’t benefit his or her interests, to tell the truth, and to have integrity. None of these character traits apply to Hillary Clinton, or Bill, for that matter. Sure he probably trusts her “with his life,” because he knows his life is useful to Hillary. “I’d trust her with my life” sounds like a ringing endorsement to the easily misled and confused voter, which is the Clinton base. As Bill knows well, the statement doesn’t mean anyone else can or should trust her.

You just have to tip your hat to him. Nobody makes the truth dance like Bill Clinton. He can even make an endorsement from someone more untrustworthy than Hillary—him–sound persuasive.

Wow.

We Have A Winner In The “False Hastert-Clinton Equivalency Sweepstakes”! Congratulate Slate’s William Salatan!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I don’t know when William Salatan jumped the ethics shark at Slate; I used to find him fair, reasonable and perceptive. Now he has apparently gone over the Dark Side, the shadowy, ethics-free realm where the Clintons are victims of a vast right wing conspiracy. Too bad.

There is some compensation for Salatan, though. He just penned the perfect example of the Shameless Left’s attempt to exploit the fall of  former GOP Speaker Dennis Hastert to exonerate Bill Clinton, and by extension, his Lady MacBeth, Hillary, as she tries to complete her rise to power fueled by the public’s acceptance of her husband’s corrupt ways.

You can read it here, and I would hope that most of you would be able to spot, and quickly, the multiple blatant ethics bait-and-switches that Salatan employs. But for those deceived, let me provide some guidance.

Many commentators have made the point that Hastert’s prosecution looks politically motivated and unfair. He is not being prosecuted for the alleged sexual misconduct with a student believed to be the source of an extortion attempt, and paying a blackmailer is no crime. He is being prosecuted for lying to the F.B.I about the reason for his large cash withdrawals. Says Salatan:

“The critics have a point. Lying under oath and evading transaction surveillance are derivative crimes. Usually, they’re prosecuted only if the underlying offense is serious and demonstrably true. You can argue that if the core allegation hasn’t been proved, or if the core issue isn’t grave enough, it’s cheap and abusive to proceed with prosecution based purely on derivative charges. But Hastert can’t make that argument, because he made the opposite argument 17 years ago. He threw the book at President Clinton for lying about sex.”

Thus Slate’s misleading and ignorance-seeding headline, “Hastert’s Hypocrisy.” There is no hypocrisy. Moreover, like Professor Kerr, Salatan mistakenly says that Clinton was impeached for “lying about sex.”  That was a Lanny Davis/Clinton spin talking point, and it is false.. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Week: Law Professor Orin Kerr

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

“If I understand the history correctly, in the late 1990s, the President was impeached for lying about a sexual affair by a House of Representatives led by a man who was also then hiding a sexual affair, who was supposed to be replaced by another Congressman who stepped down when forced to reveal that he too was having a sexual affair, which led to the election of a new Speaker of the House who now has been indicted for lying about payments covering up his sexual contact with a boy. Yikes.”

—Prof. Orin Kerr on The Volokh Conspiracy.

Hatert as coachI thought more highly of Prof. Kerr, who belongs to the left end of the group of provocative libertarian legal scholars who make up the commentariat on the erudite blog, recently annexed by the Washington Post, than to believe him capable of abusing his authority with this kind of hackery. He is endorsing  the deceitful “logic” of Hustler publisher Larry Flynt.

Well no, Professor, I guess you don’t understand history properly, or government, or ethics for that matter. Clinton was not impeached for lying about a sexual affair, though that was the tactical spin placed on the impeachment by Clinton’s defenders.

Bill Clinton  was impeached for lying about a sexual affair under oath, before a judge, in court, an act that would get you, as well as any other lawyer, disbarred. If you don’t obey the law enough to be a lawyer, you don’t respect the law enough to be trusted to defend the laws of the land as President of the United States. He was also impeached for lying to a grand jury, another crime, and using his high office, his appointees and his staff to cover up his lies, which is obstruction of justice.

He was also impeached because he was President of the United States, the role model and exemplar for good citizenship, lawfulness and good behavior for the entire nation, and because the relationship in question occurred during his tenure in office, during the working day, and  with a low-level employee in violation of the principles under lying the sexual harassment law he had signed into law himself.

None of this was true of Newt Gingrich, Bob Livingston, and Dennis Hastert, the three GOP Speakers Kerr is referring to. Continue reading →

The Progressive Corruption Of And Betrayal By The Democratic Party, PART II: Hillary Denial

/ Jack Marshall / 51 Comments

dead donkey

It is not even June of 2015; the 2016 election is almost a year and a half away. Yet already there is so much smoke—but no smoking guns! Well, no new ones, anyway—around Hillary Clinton’s conduct, finances and character that it would have any major city’s fire department speeding to the source in panic. Her conduct as First Lady placed political expediency above common decency; her financial machinations were never fully unraveled but had the smell of a scam. She became Senator via nepotism rather than merit; she was made Secretary of State in a political deal. In that role, she engineered the fiasco in Libya, a “re-set” with Russia that backfired, and generally left fingerprints all over Obama’s epically failed foreign policy, including the disastrous withdrawal from Iraq.

The nation learned that she violated both her own agency’s policies and national security protocols to control her e-mails, then dumped 30,000 of them before they could be independently examined and subpoenaed by Congress. Her explanations for this ranged from ridiculous to untrue. She violated her deal with both Congress and the Obama Administration regarding accepting contributions to the Clinton Foundation from foreign governments, and attempted to use a Canadian affiliate to cover up some of them. Objective observers regard the Foundation as a huge Clinton Family advancement slush fund and a likely influence-peddling, quid pro quo device, though an uncommonly clever one. The Foundation itself has failed to meet non-profit best practices, and is regarded with suspicion in the non-profit sector by those who monitor charities. Meanwhile, the outrageous speaking fees raked in by both Clintons appear to be naked greed at best—taking scarce money, for example, for speaking to colleges in financial distress—and thinly veiled, plausibly deniable bribery at worst.

Every week–day?— brings more. Yesterday, we learned that shady Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal, whom the Obama Administration refused to allow Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to hire because, well, he is shady, was paid $10,000 a month by the Clinton Foundation to advise her informally on Libya. Foul. The Clinton Foundation is a non-profit charity and operating foundation that supposedly…

“convenes businesses, governments, NGOs, and individuals to improve global health and wellness, increase opportunity for women and girls, reduce childhood obesity, create economic opportunity and growth, and help communities address the effects of climate change”

…not one that “collects tax-deductible contributions under false pretenses so cronies of the Clintons can be paid stipends for work that has nothing to do with the Foundation’s mission.” Continue reading →

The Progressive Corruption Of And Betrayal By The Democratic Party, PART 1: The Return Of Paula Jones

/ Jack Marshall / 41 Comments
"Psst...remember not to smirk when you lie..."

“Psst…remember not to smirk when you lie…”

Paula Jones is speaking out again after almost 16 years. Good.

I can’t say she is an ethics  hero, for she has vengeance on her mind, and maybe even some desire to cash in…or who knows? Maybe she can get a stipend from the Clinton Foundation to keep quiet. Nonetheless, her reemergence is a good thing.  Too many have forgotten, or indeed never learned, about how she was sexually harassed by Bill Clinton when he was a governor and she worked for Arkansas, and systematically vilified and denigrated by Hillary, the Clinton team, and soulless Clinton enablers in the media before her lawsuit exposed the Monica Mess. I had even forgotten how outrageously she was treated, and I had followed the cases carefully.

I had not forgotten, however, the disgusting Democratic and feminist hypocrisy where she was concerned. Back in 1997, I remember confronting a prominent female trial lawyer, outspoken feminist, and then president of The Association of Trial Lawyers (before they changed their name to the stealth “American Association for Justice” to hide the fact that they were lawyers) whom I overheard trashing Jones as a lying, politically-motivated gold-digger. Recalling that during the Clarence Thomas hearings she had sported an “I believe Anita Hill” button, I asked her, in a room full of people, “Why don’t you believe Paula Jones, if you believed Anita Hill?” She just walked out of the room. She believed Anita Hill, whose accusation of  ClarenceThomas was entirely politically motivated and unprovable, because she wanted to. She didn’t believe Paula Jones, who had a much stronger case, because Jones was a big-haired, working-class woman who dared to try to hold accountable a powerful, liberal, serial sexual predator that her association had contributed millions to elect. She was ashamed of the answer to my question. She should have been.

Here’s Paula on the “most admired living President” and the presumptive standard bearer for the Democratic Party in 2016, who will be running on a pro-women platform and accusing Republicans of waging a “war on women”:

‘There is no way that she did not know what was going on, that women were being abused and accosted by her husband. They have both lied…She should not be running with the terrible history they have.  Who would want Bill Clinton back a second time, doing the same stuff he was doing before, philandering with women?…He does not have a right to be in the White House to serve the people the way he treated women, sexually harassing women. There were many women that came out and spoke out about what he did to them. He does not have a place in the White House to serve the American people.”

Have you forgotten? Here was the key section of Jones’s deposition that the Clinton team, guided by Hillary, claimed was all fabricated: Continue reading →

And Now, A Rueful Parody: “Hillary, Brady and George”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

hillary-brady-george

I’ll let Dion set the mood first…

Now my updated version, in its own way even sadder than the original. (You can sing along, if you like…)

Does anybody here care ’bout influence peddling?
Can you tell me why it’s wrong?
She got a lot of money
And it sure looks like quid pro quo
But Hillary’s prospects stay strong.

***

 Anybody here care ’bout conflicts of interest?
Can you tell me why they’re wrong?
George gave a lot of money,
To Hillary’s foundation
(He’s been a supporter all along.)

***

Anybody here care ’bout lying and cheating?
Do you think that they’re wrong?
The quarterback messed with
The balls that he scored with
And still is cheered by the throng.

 ***

Should we admire the values they stand for?
Won’t their lies corrupt it all for you and me?
And society
Some day soon, if we don’t make them sorry…

***

Everybody here see our old friend Bubba?
(I can’t stop my rising gorge)
As I watch  him walkin,’ and laughin’ at all of us…

With Hillary, Brady and George.

Unethical Clinton Quote Of The Week: Hillary Clinton

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

“I have said repeatedly: I want those emails out. Nobody has a bigger interest in getting them released than I do…[A]nything that [the State Department] might do to expedite that process, I heartily support.”

—Hillary Clinton, lying her head off and, as usual, assuming nobody will notice,but, to be fair, being funnier than usual.

I’m sorry…is there a typo in that headline? Is my description overly arch? There answers are “no” and “yes, but I can’t stand much more of this.”

I think we are at the point where Clinton’s campaign has become a national ethics, integrity and intelligence test for the media, pundits, your friends and family members, and especially for Clinton supporters. For the Clintons, it’s a matter of how gutsy they can get in saying ridiculous things they know are ridiculous and expecting everyone to shrug it off…except those bad conservatives, Republicans and Clinton haters, of course. You can recognize them by the fact that they don’t shrug those statements off with a smile and a “That’s our Bill!” or “Don’t talk to my brain about the election, I’m voting with my vagina!”

The tipping point for me came a long time ago, but for anyone late to the party and capable of fair thought, it should at least have occurred when Bill Clinton justified his continued acceptance of obscene speaking fees (from likely corporate supplicants for U.S. favors and bounty after his wife becomes President) by saying “I gotta pay the bills!” This is just rubbing the public’s face in Clinton’s shamelessness, greed and corruption, and expecting everyone to like it.

Do you like it? If so, I’m disgusted with you.

The quote above by Hillary was just as outrageous; it just wasn’t quite as funny. (I’m saying that analytically: I am no longer capable of laughing at this kind of stuff from either Bill or Hillary, and I find my friends’ willingness to tolerate it tragic and diminishing.) To appreciate just how outrageous, you have to understand that it comes in the wake of the State Department announcing that it would take at least until January of 2016 to release the official emails that Hillary Clinton had to hand over because she used her own personal email server while Secretary of State in violation of government policies, including her own agency’s. (These weren’t all the e-mails, you’ll recall. She decided which she wanted the nation to see, and destroyed many thousands of them that she didn’t want to be seen, just in time to stop them from being subpoenaed.)

As State explained  in excruciating  detail, the process will take a long time because (other than the fact that the current leadership of the State Department doesn’t especially want those e-mails released either) “the Department received the 55,000 pages in paper form. The documents were provided in twelve bankers’ boxes (approximately 24” x 15” x 10 ¼” in size) with labels placed on the outside of the boxes that corresponded approximately to the time frame of the documents within a given box.”

Tech Dirt, which is not a political site and certainly not an ideological one, is falling all over itself guffawing about this and Clinton’s response to it:

“You know what would have expedited the release? First, using the State Department’s own email system while you were Secretary of State, so this wouldn’t have even been an issue. And, second, when all of this became an issue handing over the emails in electronic form, rather than in printed form in a bunch of boxes. [T] he way that Clinton has handled this whole thing is really ridiculous. Who the hell thinks it’s a good idea to print out 55,000 pages of records that were original electronic unless you’re trying to hide stuff and make life difficult for those going through it?…”

Continue reading →

The Latest Clinton Financial Disclosures: Never Mind The Appearance of Impropriety, This, Folks, Has The Appearance of Bribery

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

bribesDuring Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State, Corning lobbied State on various trade issues, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The company also donated between $100,000 and $250,000 to her family’s foundation. I know, I know—as Clinton Foundation contributor and trained Clinton spinner George Stephanopoulos—he’s an objective journalist too, you know!—will indignantly remind you, that’s no smoking gun. Then,last July, knowing Clinton would run for President  in 2016, Corning paid an obscene $225,500 honorarium for Clinton to speak to them. Notes Vox, reliable Democratic cheer-leader Ezra Klein’s liberal commentary website,

“The $225,500 speaking fee didn’t go to help disease-stricken kids in an impoverished village on some long-forgotten patch of the planet. Nor did it go to a campaign account. It went to Hillary Clinton. Personally.”

Got that? This isn’t a well-laundered foundation donation that benefits the Clintons but is plausibly deniable since it is given to their slush fund/charity. This, says Vox correctly, “involves the clear, direct personal enrichment of Hillary Clinton, presidential candidate, by people who have a lot of money at stake in the outcome of government decisions.” Continue reading →