CNN

Stay Classy, Anderson Cooper!

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Ah, yes, journalistic professionalism! Those were the days! Walter Cronkite may have been a Democratic party mouthpiece when he wasn’t slamming the Vietnam war, but he never called Spiro Agnew a “dick,” at least in public. Neither did Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Howard K. Smith or Barbara Walters. But that cute Anderson Cooper on CNN, he’s the face of broadcast journalism today and one of the cool kids, so he can talk like this while he was arguing about DOGE attacks on FEMA on a news show that airs coast-to-coast (this happens right before the two minute mark in the video above)…

COOPER: Some of the details, like millions for hotels, it’s actually not…

CHRIS SUNUNU: You mean the FEMA money for migrants? That’s OK now?

COOPER: I’m not saying it’s OK, don’t put words in my mouth. Don’t be a dick!

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The 2024 Election Ethics Train Wreck Births the “Puerto Rico Is An Island of Garbage” Caboose

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

So it’s come to this.

The 2024 election is its own, massive ethics train wreck, as the tag will show you. It officially began with Democrats (and the news media, but I repeat myself) spending too long lying to the public about Joe Biden’s deteriorating mental state and deciding to select a Presidential nominee Soviet-style bypassing all democratic norms and processes. The party broke all previous campaign records for hypocrisy by taking this course while already making the dangerous claim that Republicans are the threats to democracy, and that Donald Trump as President would never allow another free election again. Amazingly, the campaign has gone downhill ethically since that point.

Just as tornadoes sometimes spin off little baby cyclones that still are deadly enough to kill people, the big Ethics Train Wrecks (or ETWs) as designated by Ethics Alarms, like the 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck, the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman Ethics Train Wreck and the Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck (which spawned the Biden Presidency Ethics Train Wreck), often generate related ethics train wrecks that cause a lot of their own damage.

But I did not foresee that a Don Rickles-style “roast comic’s” jab at an ongoing news story would or could, even in the Age of the Great Stupid, turn into a controversy dominating headlines when the election is so near and serious matters should be the public’s focus.

I’ll summarize the events as efficiently as possible to get to the main point:

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“Perfect!” Axis Election Desperation and “Win By Any Means Necessary” Update

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I doubt that Ethics Alarms will be able to keep up with the predicted (and coming to pass) pre-election hysteria and ends justify the means overload that the Axis of Unethical Conduct (“the resistance,” Democrats and the mainstream media) are inflicting on the nation as they fear their fake DEI candidate for President will lose, as she so richly deserves to. It is almost entire fueled by Big Lies, fake news, ad hominem attacks, and anything that might distract from Harris’s increasingly obvious incompetence and dishonesty.

I am serious when I say that I only drop by Fox News, CNN and MSNBC for about five minutes each day, and it’s a amazing the garbage I see anyway. I just heard Kamala Harris tell Anderson Cooper, in last night’s CNN “town hall” (Who believes Harris didn’t have the questions in advance?) that she believes that the border must be secure and that there should be “serious consequences” for illegal immigration…this in the same campaign where she has said that she supports amnesty for illegals as well as citizenship! See, if the “consequences” of illegal immigration are exactly what illegals want, that’s called an “incentive.” Naturally, Cooper didn’t call Harris on this self-evident—stupid, really— contradiction.

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Ethics Villain: CNN

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The announcement that the shamelessly biased and wildly incompetent “media expert” Brian Stelter is returning to CNN and that the network is resurrecting “Reliable Sources,” the once legitimate media watchdog show that Howard Kurtz ably and fairly hosted until it was corrupted by Stelter, proves one thing. CNN, after a brief (and only partial) attack of conscience, is fully committed to being a metaphorical whore for the Left again. After all, it has to help save democracy! Here’s Stelter’s announcement:

This revolting development means that Stelter, Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon, CNN’s most flaming propagandists and untrustworthy talking heads who were fired for disgracing even what is now laughingly called broadcast journalism, have found gainful employment, not at Hardee’s where they belong, but again in the field that they sullied by their presence. Continue reading →

Note To CNN’s Race-Baiters: There Are So, So Many Reasons Not To Respect Kamala Harris…Stop Attributing It To Her Race

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

A conclave of fools, knaves and ethics dunces on a CNN panel illustrated how Democrats and the news media are going to try to elect Kamala Harris: keep the conversation entirely on vilifying her opposition and concentrating on irrelevant trivia…like how to pronounce her name.

It serves CNN’s purposes to feature the worst and the dimmest of Republicans whenever possible: this time its choice was Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina. She’s on my list of 25 most embarrassing members of Congress. Mace either set out to troll professional race-baiter Vanderbilt University professor Michael Eric Dyson by intentionally mispronouncing Kamala Harris’s first name or got confused; first she said the name correctly (with the accent on the first syllable), then reversed herself and said it the way that apparently drives the woke crazy, with the accent on the second syllable. (I sometimes forget which is the right way myself—luckily I’m usually typing her name rather than saying it). Democratic strategist Keith Boykin corrected her, and Mace defiantly said, “I will say Kamala’s name any way that I want to.”

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CNN and Brianna Keilar Give a Symposium on How the News Media Tries to Rig Elections

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Incredibly and against all odds, the mainstream media is demonstrating that it is even more biased and determined to swing the 2024 election to the Democrats than they were in 2008, 2012, 2016 and 2020. Not only that, but its propagandists are being more obvious about it.

As a case study, let us examine CNN’s handling of the Tim Walz scandal. Walz has been falsely representing himself to the public as a combat veteran for many years and in many ways. In addition, he abandoned the leadership of the troops he had trained with as soon as they were ordered to deploy in Iraq. This isn’t even a matter of serious dispute, yet the Harris ticket’s promoters in the news media, aka “almost all of it,” have been furiously spinning, obfuscating and ignoring inconvenient facts. Under different circumstances (such as, say, a VP nominee on a Republican ticket), the news media would be all over this story like Jaws on Pippin. It would be a daily feeding frenzy.

In the past few days, more of Walz’s former almost-comrades-in-arms have come forward to condemn Walz’s conduct and character. For example, the chaplain of Walz’s field artillery regiment said there was no excuse for the him to have abandoned his National Guard unit before a critical deployment. “In our world, to drop out after a WARNORD [warning order] is issued is cowardly, especially for a senior enlisted guy,” retired Capt. Corey Bjertness, now a pastor in Horace, North Dakota, told the New York Post. This wasn’t even newsworthy to most news sources: it might take public attention away from the fact that Trump keeps claiming Harris is misrepresenting the sizes of her rally crowds.

CNN’s spin debacle regarding Walz’s “stolen valor” was special, however.

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Ugh. Could Someone PLEASE Explain the First Amendment to Donald Trump? Quickly?

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

This morning, I was simultaneously listening in on CNN (hyping Harris absurdly), MSNBC (well, you know) and Fox News, where the morning trio of hyper-partisan clowns were hosting Trump in a 30 minute phone monologue. First, I got a laugh when a CNN reporter commented on Harris having to navigate the complexities of Israel’s war with Gaza (Hamas). He actually said, first, “This is a major issue for Harris” and five seconds later that “Republicans are trying to make an issue out of this.” Yes, Harris was one of the first Democrats to call for a cease fire in Gaza, essentially making sure Hamas’s adverse consequences for slaughtering and raping Israel civilians on October 7 were minimal, but because she was only a VP at the time, and, after all, Kamala Harris, Idiot, nobody paid much attention to how irresponsible that position was. It is an issue, of course, but CNN will try “Republicans pounce!” even when everyone should pounce.

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Ethics Dunce, Unethical Quote of the Week and Instant Entry Into the “Bias Makes You Stupid” Hall of Fame”: CNN Correspondent Jamie Gangel

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

First the quote…

“I do want to say that when I watched the tape there was one thing I found, because of all the heated rhetoric, and that is that after he was hit, former President Trump got up and said ‘fight, fight, fight, fight.’ I think what we’re hearing from people is that’s not the message that we want to be sending right now. We want to damp it down.”

—-Longtime CNN reporter/host/hack Jamie Gangel last night, reacting to the assassination attempt

What an idiot.

Gangel and CNN are catching flack for this truly offensive and classic Trump-Deranged reaction, but whatever it is, it’s not enough.

Someone had just tried to murder him, and what the media-vilified candidate aid in the moments after that close brush with death could not reasonably be held against him even if he had said, say, just to pick random nonsense out of the air, “We beat Medicare!” But what he did say, as I just wrote in the previous post abut his raised fist, was unimpeachable, though if Trump were currently President I’m sure Adam Schiff and Maxine Waters would try to impeach him for it.

Ann Althouse gets it: she wrote this morning, after quoting Trump’s Truth Social message that concluded, “In this moment, it is more important than ever that we stand United, and show our True Character as Americans, remaining Strong and Determined, and not allowing Evil to Win,” that “No one can forget his fist pumping and repetition of “Fight! Fight! Fight!” less than 2 minutes after he “felt the bullet ripping through the skin.” But as his antagonists call for shared love — and an abandonment of fighting — he brings the love into his fight message, merging love and fighting. Notice that he isn’t calling us to fight against any human being — indeed, he calls all Americans to fight on his side.  The enemy is ‘Wickedness’ and ‘Evil’.”

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Father’s Day Morning Nausea, 2024 Election Ethics Train Wreck Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Waking up this Father’s Day [Thanks, Dad, for 1) being such a terrific, selfless father 2) for continuing to be an inspiration, a role model and a guide during my highs and lows (like now), and everything in-between 3) for loving my wonderful mom and showing it so brilliantly to everyone, especially her, without interruption for almost sixty years; 4) for somehow saving so much money on a modest salary to hand over to my sister, me, and the three grandchildren through sacrifice and smart investing, because without it I would be living in a cardboard box right now, and 5) for surviving the Battle of the Bulge] to the near certainty that my son (who informed me last week that he would like me to refer to him/her/they as my daughter, Samantha. OK! ), is almost certain to ignore this rather contrived holiday (which is fine with me), a mystery in my yard in which someone or something keeps pulling the 15-foot-long heavy plastic, 7″ diameter tubing, installed to send runoff from the gutters into the garden rather than into my home’s foundation, off the down spout and dragging it into my neighbor’s yard, and another fight with a customer service rep, who, I swear, spoke exactly like Andy Kaufmann’s character on “Taxi” but faster than an auctioneer—yes, this IS a long sentence!—I sat down with Spuds to talk myself out of seppuku, drink a cup of coffee, and check what nonsense the various news networks were spouting.

Big mistake.

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SCOTUS’s 9-0 Smackdown of Democratic State Lawfare to Stop Trump Exposes the Unethical Left for All to See

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

All to see, that is, except those whose eyes have been so jaundiced by hate, indoctrination and lies that they are blind.

A 9-0 decision by an ideologically fractured U.S. Supreme Court, rejecting a cherished partisan fantasy devised to hold on to power that one party has empathically shown that it is unfit to possess, should logically result in frank admissions of error, bias, foolishness and confusion by those who insisted that the tactic thus condemned was correct, legal and wise. But today’s progressives are not logical, nor are they self-aware or particularly smart. The reactions from pundits, left-warped lawyers and others (what are the creatures on “The View”?) really should be viewed as a gift. They are telling us what they are, admitting what they are. It’s ironic: the first post of the day was titled, “Will the Disastrous Results of The Great Stupid Result in Learning, So Behavior Changes, or Will the Fools Responsible Keep Trying To Govern On Dreams Rather Than Reality?,” but it wasn’t about the Trump-Deranged learning from their absurd and intellectually indefensible embrace of the 14 Amendment Trump disqualification plot. The SCOTUS decision hadn’t come down yet. Nevertheless, the headline is apt in the aftermath of the decision and the Axis’s embarrassing tantrums. They won’t learn because they can’t learn, even though refusing to admit their mistakes makes them ridiculous, untrustworthy and unpersuasive.

Here are the kinds of people who have been running our government, journalism, entertainment, law schools and universities:

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