“birthers”

Unthical Quote of the Week: Donald Trump

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

“Very sadly for the country, for a charity — and for the president himself, President Obama has just missed the deadline and now a charity of his choice will not be receiving $5 million — or as I stated much more than $5 million.”

—- Real state tycoon, self-promoting birther and Romney supporter Donald Trump, blaming President Obama for not accepting his challenge to produce various personal records in exchange for Trump sending $5 million dollars to a charity of the President’s choice.

What a mind-boggling, species-embarrassing ass.

OK, this isn’t really Donald Trump; it’s one of the evil, people-eating monsters from “Killer Klowns From Outer Space,”  one of the cleverest tongue-in cheek horror films. But there’s really not much difference, when you get right down to it. Mitt Romney shouldn’t want the support of either of them. In fact, I’d take the clown over the Donald.

Trump also noted that his money could have been used to swell the relief funds for Superstorm Sandy. That’s right: According to Trump, President Obama is responsible for Donald Trump not being generous, charitable and patriotic by  contributing to help the victims of a disaster.

I know that it is a tight election contest, and no candidate should be expected to toss away any voter or supporter—“Any port in a storm,” and all that. (Remind me to add that one to the ratioanalizations list.) Nevertheless, Mitt Romney would bolster credibility and reputation for integrity if he repudiated this awful man, and pronounced him what he is beyond all argument: a vile, irresponsible, offensive buffoon whose admiration, endorsement friendship or support sullies and diminishes anyone and anything he bestows it upon.

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Facts: The Blaze

Graphic: Release Donkey

Election Publicity Hound Ethics Quiz: Whose “October Surprise” Was Dirtier?

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

That’s Gloria on the left, Donald on the right.

What could be more challenging than trying to choose between Gloria Allred and Donald Trump in the field of inappropriate and shameless headline grabbing?

Both Trump and Allred this week decided to distract voters from the solemn and difficult job of deciding which Presidential candidate’s misrepresentations to forgive by trumpeting an upcoming “October Surprise” that would propel their respective champions to victory. In addition, both are shameless using the election to get their names in the papers for pure personal publicity purposes, to attack Obama or Romney using innuendo, and to attempt to skew a close election by using old matters far past their pull date. The tactic worked for both publicity hounds, because an October surprise in 2000, held for months and leaked by a Gore operative, probably cost George W. Bush the popular vote: his covered up DWI arrest of more than a decade earlier.

Your test: whose attempted late hit was more unethical? We will stipulate that both are revolting. The candidates: Continue reading →

Here’s a Proposal: Republicans Stop Saying That Obama’s a Muslim, and Democrats Stop Saying that The Supreme Court “Stole” The Presidency For Bush

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Law professor/blogger Ann Althouse properly chastises The National Review’s Jonathan Cohn for designating “Bush v. Gore” as the most earth-shattering case of the 21st Century, and not just because the case, decided in December of 2000, occurred in the 20th Century.

“Ridiculous! I can’t believe Cohn doesn’t know that if the case had gone the other way Gore would still have lost in the end!”, Althouse writes, reminding her readers of the results of the objective, meticulous and multiple recounts performed by journalists in 2001, which showed—much to the surprise of the counters, who were dying to be able to report that Gore had been robbed—that “George W. Bush would have won a hand count of Florida’s disputed ballots if the standard advocated by Al Gore had been used.”

I can believe Cohn wrote what he wrote, because the claim that Bush’s presidency was “stolen” has been a cornerstone of Democratic political warfare and unscrupulous hard Left activists since the chad-counting stopped. It stoked the base, misled the public, increased partisan anger, divided the country and undermined Bush’s presidency, all good things from a partisan perspective (and the truth be damned), just as Republicans have been happy to allow the unjustified doubts about President Obama’s loyalty and citizenship linger among its most fanatic partisans. Continue reading →

The Donald Trump Follies: An Integrity Check for GOP Presidential Contenders

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Some of the people more qualified to moderate a presidential debate than Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is staging yet another debate among the increasingly depressing field of Republican presidential contenders, with The Donald as the moderator, in Des Moines on December 27. This is extremely useful in assessing the field, and everyone in America owes him a debt of thanks, for anyone who agrees to participate in this offensive farce is unqualified to be President of the United States. Trump has created an excellent integrity test.

Several candidates have already flunked.  Newt Gingrich has agreed to participate—granted, there weren’t many questions about his integrity, so this is no surprise. So has Rick Santorum. I am somewhat surprised at this: Santorum holds some truly objectionable views, but integrity has never been one of his ethical  weaknesses. Well, the Trump Debate is a judgment test too—if you agree to go, yours is none too good. Now that I think about it, Santorum’s decision was predictable too. Continue reading →

The Rick Perry-Birther Flap: An Addendum

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I’ll make this uncharacteristically brief.

I wrote, and believe, that media reports that Rick Perry had expressed Birther sentiments were unfair and misrepresented his words. That was correct. In interviews since that post was composed, Perry has suggested that it is fun to tease the President about the dispute over his place of birth and citizenship, and “keep it alive.”

No, it isn’t. It is unfair, disrespectful and wrong. There is no teasing that is appropriate when the subtext is a challenge to a President’s legitimacy. Perry needs to cut it out, though it is too late in one respect: his words indelibly mark him as a jerk.

Let me also say that I am not especially sympathetic to Democratic indignation regarding teasing over a president’s legitimacy. This is exactly what the entire party did for every second of President Bush’s tenure, suggesting that the 2000 election was “stolen,’ thus rendering his tenure illegitimate. This exploited the vast majority of the public’s ignorance about the Electoral College, and also involved impugning the integrity of the U.S. Supreme Court, doing far more damage to the nation than the idiot Birthers on their best day.

That does not excuse Perry, of course. Every additional word he says to keep the Birther issue in the public eye is another reason—and there are already plenty—to keep him in Texas.

The Media’s Birther Smear On Rick Perry

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

The race for the Republican nomination for president has a long way to go, but the winner of the title of Republican Contender Most Unfairly Abused By The Media has probably been wrapped up. It’s Texas Governor Rick Perry, in a romp.

I’m not sure why, exactly. I suppose the combination of a southern, gun-carrying, capital punishment-supporting, openly religious, conservative Republican just has too many characteristics that the typically Democratic, liberal atheist, gun-hating journalists who overwhelmingly populate the newsrooms instinctively want to destroy. They still have an obligation to do it fairly and honestly, however. Where Perry is concerned, fair and honest seem to be forgotten.

Last week I heard David Letterman say that Perry “is starting to look like someone who crawled out from under a painted rock.” This was a reference to the Washington Post’s unconscionable front page “expose” about a hunting lodge where Perry either did or did not hunt before the name “Niggerhead” had been painted over on a rock that bore the longtime name of the area. Most fair commentators have pronounced that story weak and badly conceived, but as the Post no doubt knew it would, the story has attached itself to Perry, creating fodder for cheap-shot artists like Letterman and Bill Maher, and scarring his reputation.

The enmity toward Perry has not abated. Checking the web over the weekend, I found links to stories proclaiming that Perry had come out as a “Birther,” challenging the validity of President Obama’s citizenship. Continue reading →

Jerk of the Year: Donald Trump

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Where Donald Trump is King

I know it’s only May, and I know that Rev. Jones is still out there somewhere, planning on burning a picture of Mohammad or making confetti out of the Quran or some other offensive stunt designed to attract the attention of Fox News and sell some tee shirts. I know Allan Grayson can surface at any time, and that Michael Moore is joining forces with Keith Olbermann, which is a good bet to make both of them more obnoxious. And I know Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Michele Bachman and some other GOP candidates for president can be counted on to say or tweet outrageous things in the coming weeks and months. Yes, and Harry Reid is still running amuck, and there are plenty of athletes, singers and actors who will be embarrassing themselves, their profession and their species before the year is out.

Never mind all that. I’m ready to declare Donald Trump the Jerk of the Year.

I’ll admit my bias up front: I think Trump has been a contender for Jerk of the Year every year for at least two decades. Even I, however, never thought he was a big enough jerk to use the developing 2012 campaign for President of the United States—at a critical juncture in the nation’s history, with literally life-and death crises in the nation’s economy, housing market, and job markets, with the Middle East erupting and America involved in three armed conflicts, with a leadership vacuum at the highest levels of the government and with American trust and hope for the future at a record low—for personal ego gratification and to promote his cheesy, freak-show reality program “The Celebrity Apprentice.” But that’s what he did, soiling the news and  political discourse along the way by giving aid and support to the assortment of paranoids, wackos and racists who had been denying that Obama was a natural born citizen. Continue reading →

Guess Who Invited Donald Trump to the White House Correspondents Association Dinner?

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

OK, who's the wiseguy that brought the skunk to the picnic?

I missed it, but the Washington Post of April 28 revealed who it was that invited Donald Trump, fresh from a month of trying to make the President’s citizenship a campaign issue while denigrating Obama’s integrity, legitimacy, and honesty, to the annual light-hearted White House Correspondents Association dinner, where the President is always a featured “performer.” It was buried in the gossipy Style section, but there was the culprit. Who invited him?

The Washington Post invited him, that who.

Inviting Trump to that event is in approximately the same good taste as inviting blogger Pamela Geller to a Park51 (a.k.a. “the Ground Zero Mosque”) controversy, or allowing a group of “Truthers” to crash a testimonial to Dick Cheney.

What could the Post have been thinking? “He’s a fascinating figure to Washington right now!” the Post’s representative breathlessly explained on the 28th. We are to assume, then, that if the dinner was being held this week and Osama bin Laden hadn’t been dispatched (most respectfully, of course) to Davy Jones’ Locker, the Post might have invited Osama’s bullet-riddled corpse to slump at its table.

The Post was stirring the pot, is what it was doing, and that is not the media’s proper of ethical role. If the intention was to set up Trump, who had been called everything from a joke to a fool to a thug to a racist by various Post writers only days before, to be insulted to his face by host Seth Myers and the President, that is taking sides in the news rather than reporting it. If it the intent was to position volatile elements together in the hopes of sparking a story, that is unethical  journalism too.

The paper got both results that it presumably desired: Trump was a sitting duck at the dinner, and then he embarrassed himself by later complaining about the skewering he so richly deserved. It also, not for the first time, showed how rusty those old ethics alarms are at the offices of Washington, D.C.’s most prestigious newspaper.

[Thanks to sharp-eyed Post reader Robert Sher.]

Trump’s Lament

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Can't you read the sign, Donald?

Was Donald Trump treated rudely and unfairly at the White House Correspondents Dinner, where he was made the target of sharp barbs by both President Obama and MC Seth Myers?

Trump thinks so, telling Fox and Friends, “Well, I really understood what I was getting into — I didn’t know that I’d be virtually the sole focus. I had no idea it would be to that extent, where you know, it was just joke after joke after joke. It was almost like, is there anyone else they could talk about?”

Trump is a poor sport, a whiner, a humorless fool, and deluded to boot. He spent the previous month accusing the President of the United States of being a liar, a fraud, a usurper, a poor student, and an illegal alien, appealing to the worst instincts of the most extreme Obama-haters and political foes. His conduct was most charitably and frequently defined as “a joke,” though it was worse than that. He comes to the Correspondent’s Dinner where the President has his one chance to skewer others the way comedians regularly skewer him, having provided by his own boorishness and hucksterism enough material to supply ten stand-up routines, not only claims to be surprised at the extent of his roasting, but is offended that he has to take his medicine. Continue reading →

Colbert King, Obama Abuse, Bias and Double Standards

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Washington Post columnist Colbert King is an around-the-clock Ethics Hero, a relentless journalist investigator and critic of government corruption in Washington. D.C. He has an impeccable sense of right and wrong, as well as intolerance for public betrayal by elected officials. Yet this undeniably ethical, fair man, who eschews rationalizations at all costs while applying rigorous ethical analysis, cannot see a double standard when it is staring back at him from his own computer screen. His is a frightening tale of the power of bias.

In today’s Post, King expresses fury and pain over last week’s despicable birther drama, feelings that I share. He is revolted at the racist undertones of the “joke” photo e-mailed to friends by an Orange County Republican official as am I. He is horrified by the high percentage of Republicans polled who question Obama’s religion and national origin, as indeed he should be And without any sense of irony, King writes… Continue reading →