campaign ads

Campaign Ad Horrors: Are The Candidates Really So Stupid or Do They Think The Public Is So Stupid or Is The Public Really As Stupid As The Candidates Think They Are?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

One side benefit of having to watch all the Red Sox games as Boston closes in on a serious run for the 2026 World Series is getting a chance to see the various campaign ads for Congressional candidates in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and the other New England states served by the New England Sports Network (NESN) that broadcasts the games to “Red Sox Nation.” Let me rephrase that: getting the chance to see how idiotic the ads are.

The one you see above, by Democrat Chris Pappas, is easily the best of the dozens of ads I have seen, and it’s idiotic—infuriatingly vague, misleading, and using broad innuendos that don’t make any sense.

What restaurant has “VIP sections”? The analogy between a restaurant and Congress is so strained it makes my brain hurt. What does “play by their own rules” mean?

I view any Democrat as ethically estopped from complaining about members of Congress engaging in stock trading. The most powerful Democrat in Congress for decades, Nancy Pelosi, was also the most flagrant beneficiary of Congressional inside trading. The Trump Administration has done a great deal to lower prescription drug prices, but nothing except nationalized health care or government guaranteed income can prevent citizens from having to make choices regarding how to spend their money.

But, again, this is by far the best ad I’ve seen. Several boast that they should be elected to Congress to “stand up to Trump.” What does that mean? The Democrats will vote against anything Trump supports even if its rainbows and lollipops. “Standing up to Trump” means what, making mean faces at him? Insulting him, like members of The Squad or Jasmine Crockett? How does that help constituents? Many also say they will “stand up to” or “oppose” I.C.E. Does that mean they support open borders? Do they not want to get the dangerous illegals out of their constituency? Or are these just meaningless, focus group-tested buzz words? Almost all of them say that if elected they will “bring costs down.” Do they not know that costs as a whole never “come down,” do they think people are so stupid they don’t know that, or are people so stupid they really think that?

Maybe it’s my imagination, but I don’t think so: I remember campaign ads once containing occasional genuine, practical, achievable policy positions. Now its all virtue signaling: Elect me because I hate Trump. Elect me because I don’t like I.C.E. Elect me because I’d really like to do all of these things I won’t have the power to do but at least I have good intentions.

Who are the morons here? Everyone?

Ethics Dunce: Dan Koh (& Head-Exploding Campaign Video Of The Year So Far)

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Wow.

Dan Koh is delusional. The frightening thing is that the there are a lot of brain-washed progressives in Massachusetts who are so far gone that they won’t realize how crazy and hypocritical that ad is.

First of all, to lead with dead-eyed Joe Biden saying Koh’s name because two syllables is probably all they could get him to utter after 34 takes and maybe some AI dubbing, isn’t what I would call a boffo opening. Then to follow with Kamala Harris—why would anyone vote for someone Harris endorses? She picked Knucklehead Tim Walz as her running mate! Next Koh boasts about being a senior White House advisor who was either so dim that he didn’t realize the President was a rutabaga, or so corrupt that he was part of the cover-up of Biden’s dementia. There is no third option. Biden’s term was the most disastrous in American Presidential history: what did Biden fix, with Koh’s expert counsel?

Then he ends by saying “Democrats you trust” endorse him, and there are Biden and Kamala again. I can’t think of many Democrats less trustworthy than those two. Oh, maybe Adam Schiff, Jamaal Bowman, Rep. Omar and a few other scumbags, but it’s close. Harris endorsed Black Lives Matter, and said she wanted redirect public resources away from the police but didn’t support defunding the police, a typical muddled Harris policy position. As a Presidential candidate Harris said she wouldn’t change anything Joe Biden did…you know, like opening the borders and appointing a DEI Cabinet of incompetents, lackeys and dolts. Kamal;a also swore she worked at a mysterious McDonalds that apparently appears for day and then vanishes into the mist, like Brigadoon.

Joe let his addict son use him as an influence peddling prop. He promised to be a moderate and to bring the nation together, then allowed the far Left to run his crippled Presidency. He insisted that he was sharp as a tack while refusing to have his cognition tested after his brain had retired to Boca Raton. True, he “beat Medicare.”

That ad is like something out of an alternate universe.

(And Dan Koh looks like Adam Sandler.)

How Much More Dishonest Can A Campaign Ad Be Than This Abortion of a Pro-Abortion Ad “Approved” By Democrat Tim Kaine in Virginia?

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Oh, I know there are some just as bad; indeed, the pro-abortion ads being run in Maryland against Republican Larry Hogan in the U.S. Senate race are at this despicable level. The Kaine spot, however, reminds me of Mary McCarthy epic take-down playwright Lillian Hellman: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.”

Let’s see…

  • The Supreme Court didn’t “rob” any women of anything. It sent the issue of abortion regulation to the states, where it always belonged.
  • The issue isn’t a “right to choose.” The issue is how far anyone’s right to kill another human being can or should be acknowledged. There is no right to “choose” to kill those who inconvenience us. Using deceptive phrases that deliberately disguise the rights, parties and stakeholders in a political dispute is deceit, a lie.
  • Abortion is legal in every Southern state. That it is not is an outright, indefensible lie.
  • More deceit: “If Republicans take control in Washington and pass a national abortion ban” is like saying, “If Republicans take control in Washington and legalize slavery.” A national abortion ban is not going to happen, can’t happen, and would almost certainly be ruled unconstitutional if by some miracle it did. Legal scholar and ethicist William Hodes made that case powerfully in his article published on the Federalist Society website, pointing out that any such federal legislation would be unconstitutional, as it would exceed the scope of congressional power.
  • Of course women would have “options.” Finding solutions to the result of their own actions, or the actions of others, that doesn’t involve killing nascent lives is an excellent, ethical option.
  • “The Republicans won’t stop there” because they’re evil! EVIL! This is shameless demonizing and fear-mongering. They’ll legalize cannibalism! They’ll make everyone wear their underwear on the outside! How can the women in that video look at themselves in the mirror?
  • Contraception is protected under the Constitution. IVF involves complex biological and ethical issues, but there is no indication that there would be sufficient support in the Republican Party to ban the procedure. Yet this ad states as fact that the GOP would do it.

That’s pretty impressive hysteria and dishonesty for a 30 second ad. And this was the guy Hillary Clinton picked to be her Vice-President.

I don’t see how anyone who has any standards for honesty in our elected officials can vote for some who puts out deliberate falsehood like these and “approves” them. I know, I know, it’s “the ends justifies the means,” the unethical fallacy that has swallowed the whole Democratic Party.

Anything to be able to kill unborn human beings at will.

Final Pre-Election Ethics Notes I

/ Jack Marshall / 59 Comments

Election 2020

[I may have more of these as the day goes on, before the riots start.]

1. I just heard a notable radio ad “approved” by Joe Biden. An African-American male voice [Aside: I was once told that identifying a voice as African-America was racist. Can you guess my response to this?] talked about voter suppression—poll taxes, literacy tests, terrorism and intimidation. “They” are up to the same “old tricks,” we are told. Then came a montage of sound clips, one of which was from an unidentified news source stating that “President Trump continues to oppose mail-in voting.” Then the voice says, “Be sure to vote. Not because I want you to, but because HE wants you not to.”

Biden approving this despicable message would have been enough, all by itself, to convince me that he is a liar and a cheat. Every American can go to a polling place and vote if they care enough. Requiring them to prove they are citizens and voting on their own behalf is not “suppression,” and opposing mail-in ballots that are an obvious invitation to voter fraud.

The ad is hate-mongering and a disgusting use of Big Lie #4: “Trump Is A Racist/White Supremacist. ”

This does seem to be the latest strategy to send the Deranged, the Marxists, the antifa, the anarchists and the Black Lives Matter mob into the streets if the President wins.  Playing his part, the House Majority Whip, Rep. James Cliburn (D-S.C.) told Fox News over the weekend that the only way Democrat Joe Biden could lose the election would be “for voter suppression to be successful.”

Nice.

Clyburn also evoked Big Lie #4, and said that he would “pray” for blacks who voted for Trump. I give him credit for originality: when asked why such a vote was apparently worthy of damnation, Clyburn did not immediately jump to Trump’s birther period, which is usually the best anyone challenged to show the President’s alleges racism can come up with. No, he cited…Omarosa!

“I’m the father of three black women. I am the son of a black woman. If any black man can go in a polling place and cast a vote for a man who referred to a black woman as a dog on national television, I’m going to have to pray for them. I will have to pray for them. I don’t know of any man [who] can abide that kind of disrespect and insult,” the habitually race-baiting Representative said. Huh? I had to look it up. Yes, the President called his former “Apprentice” villain a “dog” after she turned on him—as he should have known she would do—and published a tell-all book after being fired from a White House position that he was a fool to appoint her to  in the first place. Of course, Trump has called others he was displeased with “a dog,” and uses the insult on all races and genders. It’s not Presidential and it’s not civil; it’s also not evidence of racism, but if that’s the best Clyburn had to flog the narrative, I guess he was stuck with it.

Then we have this, from the Attorney General of Pennsylvania:

Continue reading →

Ethics Update: The Frontrunners

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

the-three-stooges6

There was ample evidence over the past week that all three of the candidates currently leading their respective party’s races for the presidential nomination are unqualified for the office by virtue of their deficiencies of competence, character, and principles. Hillary Clinton had the most spectacularly revealing week, but first, the other two….

Donald Trump: Hubris, incompetence, disrespect and unfairness

1. “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” Trump boasted at a campaign rally yesterday. I know, it’s a joke. It’s also an astoundingly stupid thing to say, even in jest, and reveals massive hubris, the quality that brought down many a Greek king and the worst and most dangerous of all Trump flaws. This is what will get him, sooner or later. 3000 years of history and literature teach us that. The comment also reveals utter contempt for his supporters; he is essentially calling them blind morons. The crowd in Iowa laughed….because they are.

2.“Our great veterans are being treated terribly,” Trump says in a new campaign video. “The corruption in the Veteran’s administration, the incompetence is beyond. We will stop that.” Then critics pointed out that the clips used showed Russian veterans, not Americans, and he pulled the ad.

This is the man whose only claim to legitimacy is his management wizardry. Such an error, however, is proof of sloppy oversight and incompetent delegation. Moreover, this is the second time a Trump campaign ad  included mislabeled material: his illegal immigration ad earlier this month used footage of people crossing the Moroccan border to represent the U.S.-Mexico border. Conclusion: he’s faking it, “it” meaning everything. This is all posturing and bluffing, like a student taking an exam for a course he never studied for. Continue reading →

Pre-Election Ethics Quiz: The Campaign Fortune Cookie

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

I have not authored the usual number of unethical campaign tactics indictments this time around. One reason is that their desperation while facing an almost certain GOP wipe-out has led Democratic Party candidates into far more questionable devices than the confident Republicans as the Blues have increasingly defaulted to race-baiting, Koch brothers attacks, scare-mongering on everything from guns to contraception, and the “war on women” chorus. Combine that with the popular integrity breach of  Democratic incumbants virtually pretending that they never heard of the Democratic President in the White House, and I was faced with giving more ammunition to those who accuse me of partisan bias. Looking at the poll projections, it appears that the worst offenders—Wendy Davis, Allison Grimes, Mark Udall, and Mary Landrieu among them—will get their just desserts from voters without additional alarms from me.

Speaking of desserts: this campaign tactic is worthy of note. A loyal Rhode Island reader inquires if I have any ethical problems with the campaign of Allen Fung, the Chinese-American GOP candidate in the closely contested Rhode Island governor’s race, delivering thousands of fortune cookies to Rhode Island Chinese restaurants that look like this when you open them

fortune-cookie-fung

So your Ethics Alarms Pre-Election Ethics Quiz is the question asked of me:

Is there anything unethical about this?

Continue reading →

Happy Halloween! Scary Unethical Quote Of The Week: MSNBC Host Alex Wagner

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“In Georgia, state Democrats printed a flyer warning that the way to prevent “another Ferguson” is to vote. Arkansas residents meanwhile, received a mailer showing a man in a hands-up, don’t shoot position made infamous in the wake of Michael Brown’s killing. The mailer reads: “If we want to end senseless killings like Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, we need to vote . . . It’s important to say that it shouldn’t have to be the threat of undermining civil rights that gets people to vote, but if it does, so much stronger the party is for it.”

—MSNBC talking head Alex Wagner, acknowledging the desperate, last-ditch effort by the Democratic Party to energize its African-American base by racial fear-mongering, and endorsing it in epic “the ends justify the means” fashion.

Wagner: 'Race-baiting makes us strong.' Wow.

Wagner: ‘Race-baiting makes us strong.’
Wow.

I remember my father announcing during the Nixon re-election campaign that the cynical GOP “Southern strategy” is which it catered to old-line Southern Democratic voters with direct appeals to racist myths and fears that he was changing his registered party affiliation from Republican to Independent, because he refused to belong to a party that would engage in such divisive and despicable tactics just to win elections. It is hard to imagine any conservative-leaning broadcaster, commenting on these scare-tactics at the time, both acknowledging them and pronouncing them regrettable but, all in all, good for the party. Yet this is exactly what Wagner did.

It exposes many things: the ethical deficit at MSNBC, progressive approval of the strategy of exacerbating racial discord and division in America, and the open, seven year-long strategy of Democrats resorting to race-baiting as the solution of last resort whenever the party’s performance and policies are subjected to fair criticism. The statement also exposes partisans like Wagner as ethics corruptors of all who hear them and are gullible enough to believe they speak the truth. Winning by lies and undermining racial comity in America makes nothing and nobody stronger. Even if such a tactic is successful in the short-term, it is devastating to democracy and the culture. No party that stoops to such gutter tactics is worthy of support by anyone who believes in basic ethical values.

The New York Times was finally revolted sufficiently by the conduct of its party of choice that it wrote about the recent spate of race-baiting campaign messages being used in close contests around the nation by the deservedly desperate Democrats: Continue reading →

Ethics Observations On Wendy Davis’s Controversial “Wheelchair Ad” Attacking Greg Abbott

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

1. The campaign of Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis has issued an attack ad directly referencing gubernatorial rival Greg Abbott’s partial paralysis, and includes the image of an empty wheelchair. Davis could claim—and will, if she hasn’t already–that  the implication that his use of a wheelchair argues against his qualifications to be governor is inadvertent or imagined, except that her supporters were caught in a Project Veritas video mocking Abbott for his disability, and Davis has made gaffes relating to his handicap before, as when she said that he hadn’t “walked a day in her shoes.”

2. She is a member of a party with supporters in the media ready to pounce on any Republican who makes a similarly provocative reference to an opposing candidate’s race, religion, ethnicity, gender or “abled status.” The double standard is certainly a campaign boon to Democrats, but they have to take advantage of it a bit more subtly than this.

3. What is primarily wrong with the ad, however, isn’t the wheelchair, or the use of tactics that would called an appeal to bigotry if they were used by Republicans. It is that the arguments the ad seem to be making are stupid, unfair and wrong, and ones that Davis, who is a lawyer, must know are stupid and wrong, or she is stupid and wrong. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Republican Governors Association…And An Integrity Test For Chris Christie

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

This ugly beast keeps raising its head out of the muck, and it is the duty of every citizen, Republican or Democrat, who believes in justice and due process under law to beat it back with heavy clubs.

The Republican Governors Association is defending one of its own, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, with a series of ads attacking state Sen. Vincent Sheheen, an attorney who is her Democratic opposition in the gubernatorial race. The message of the ad, as summarized by  a voice-over, is that “Sheheen defended violent criminals who abused women and went to work setting them free.”

False. Continue reading →

To Hell With Godwin’s Law: As The Cynical “GOP War On Women” Strategy Officially Adopts “Big Lie” Tactics, Who Will Have The Integrity To Call It What It Is?

/ Jack Marshall / 142 Comments

Sometimes recalling Der Fuhrer is necessary to give credit where credit is due.

Sorry. Sometimes recalling Der Fuhrer is necessary to give credit where credit is due.

One thing one can’t deny about the “Big Lie,” it sure works.

An H. F. Elson from Bethesda, Maryland indignantly writes the editor of the Washington Post:

“The April 10 news article “Senate Republicans block wage-equality legislation” reported that Republicans “say that the bill is unnecessary because discrimination based on gender is already illegal.” Pardon my sarcasm, but existing laws have worked really well, haven’t they? Republicans fear the bill would increase civil lawsuits, but the threat of lawsuits is the only way to get these needed changes in compensation made. When are Republicans going to stop antagonizing thinking, intelligent women?”

Let’s see…it’s hard to write such an incompetent and irresponsible letter while simultaneously being snotty about it, but H.F. was up to the challenge:

1. Discrimination based on gender IS already illegal. The law in question was Democratic showboating with a bad bill that would permit lawsuits when no evidence of intentional gender discrimination exists.

2. Yes, H.F., the existing laws have worked very well indeed. The remaining differences in pay by gender are almost entirely due to factors other than discrimination.

3. The only way to get the changes made in compensation would be for women to behave exactly like men, and adopt the same priorities and career paths. Lawsuits, on the other hand, are just a way to increase the costs of doing business, lose jobs, and give more money to trial lawyers—who are overwhelmingly male, by the way.

4. “When are Republicans going to stop antagonizing thinking, intelligent women?”  The real question is when will “thinking, intelligent women” stop accepting on faith outright misrepresentations about gender pay inequities, and do some research before adopting partisan talking points and writing snotty letters to the editor?

There are virtually no serious analysts of this topic that accept the proposition that “women get paid only 77 cents on the dollar compared to men in the same jobs” as an accurate measure of discrimination in the workplace and gender inequity. The misleading nature of that statistic and similar ones has been thoroughly explained and vetted in scholarly documents and the news media for decades, yet whenever Democrats want to activate their “base,” which includes a disproportionate number of women, their candidates and leaders shamelessly use the same dishonest figures. Obama and Biden used this tactic during the 2012 sliming of Mitt Romney, for example, because, after all, the ends justify the means, and besides, mean old Romney kept all those poor women in binders.

I just about fell off of my chair when President Obama sank to this abysmal deceit again in his 2014 State of the Union message, when he intoned, Continue reading →