conservative talk radio

The Unethical Ethics Attacks on Arizona

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

The anger, ridicule and threats being heaped on Arizona for its illegal immigration enforcement law defies fairness and rationality, and has been characterized so far by tactics designed to avoid productive debate rather than foster it. Now, with the help and encouragement of professional bullies like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, Arizona is facing an economic boycott, which, like all boycotts, carries the message “we’re going to force you to do what we want, whether we’re right or not.” Meanwhile, all of the over-heated rhetoric diverts the focus to side issues rather than the major problem that prompted the Arizona law in the first place: out of control illegal immigration, and its very obvious—and very serious—negative consequences to the entire nation.

Whether they know it or not, opponents of Arizona’s law are using a common ethics misconception to its advantage. Illegal immigration enforcement is an ethical conflict, which occurs when two or more ethical principles dictate different results, and thus have to be weighed against each other. The attacks on Arizona, however, have framed the argument as an ethics dilemma, defined as a problem in which the ethical course is clear, but powerful non-ethical considerations make rejecting it seem attractive. This allows the opponents of Arizona’s law to inaccurately place themselves in the moral high ground, sniping at Arizona as it supposedly wallows in a pit of greed, meanness, nativism and bigotry….non-ethical considerations all. Much of the media, to their discredit (but the media has so much discredit now that they don’t seem to care any more), is accepting this spin.

The spin, however, is nonsense. Continue reading →

Rush vs. Clinton: Who’s Right?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Former President Bill Clinton has sounded an alarm he has sounded before, warning that the intensity of the rhetoric on conservative radio emboldens fringe radicals to violence. As he did in 1995, when he was in the White House, Clinton lays the Oklahoma City bombing at the feet of big-government critics, a strategy that then managed to halt the momentum of Republicans in their assault on Democratic policies. Also as in 1995, King of the Radio Right Rush Limbaugh has countered that Clinton is using revisionist history to avoid his administration’s own responsibility for Timothy McVeigh’s attack, which wasn’t timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Branch Davidian massacre by accident. Limbaugh’s argument that the conduct of Federal agents in Waco (as well as Ruby Ridge) had a lot more to do with McVeigh’s anger than anything he heard on talk radio is persuasive on the merits.

Nevertheless, Clinton’s general point that talk radio is playing with fire is a legitimate one. Continue reading →

Ethics Test for Republicans and Conservatives

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

President Obama’s unexpected announcement that he will reverse the long-time ban on off-shore drilling for oil and natural gas resources should help us answer an important question: Has the GOP’s intractable opposition to President Obama’s policies been based on principle, or the purely political motive of obstructing his presidency in order to win votes and power from a disillusioned and impatient electorate? Obama’s conservative critics on talk radio will be presented with the same test. Rush Limbaugh famously said that he wants Obama to fail: will that extend to a new Obama policy that Limbaugh has advocated in the recent  past?

Opening up off-shore drilling to exploit unused U.S. energy resources was a key plank in Republican John McCain’s campaign when he opposed Mr. Obama, and is anathema to many Obama supporters. If the Republican Party and its conservative media allies have a requisite amount of fairness and integrity, they will both praise the President and support him.

We shall see.

Cool It

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

To listen to the conservative talk radio circuit and read the Right’s wing of the blogosphere, one would think that the United States is in the midst of a coup right out of “Seven Days in May,” or a foreign take-over like the one portrayed in “Red Dawn,” or even an alien infestation by disguised lizards, as in the sci-fi mini-series “V.” Hysteria is everywhere. Dark threats of revolution are not being whispered, but shouted. “I really think civil war is inevitable,” one blogger wrote yesterday.

Holy Gamoly! Continue reading →

The Sestak Affair, the White House, and the Corruption of America

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

The Rep. Joe Sestak affair, still playing out, is a depressing reminder of how the process of corruption works, and more depressingly, how corruption spreads like a virulent flu, leaping from individuals  to organizations to institutions and finally to our culture itself.

Back in September, the Denver Post ran a well-sourced article stating that in order to protect Democratic Sen. Michael Bennett from the threatened primary challenge of popular former state Colorado House Speaker Andrew Romanoff, the White House, in the person of Jim Messina, President Barack Obama’s deputy chief of staff, told Romanoff  that a plum position in the administration would be his if he avoided the primary. The Post’s sources said that Messina offered specific suggestions, including a job at USAID, the foreign aid agency.  Romanoff, who apparently turned down the deal and is currently opposing Bennett in Colorado, refused to answer any questions.

This was treated as a local story, and the national media ignored it. Then, last month, a similar story surfaced, this time from a Congressman. Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak, gearing to to run against party-switching  U.S. Senator Arlen Specter in the Pennsylvania primaries, told a Philadelphia TV news anchor that “someone” at the White House tried to discourage him from running, and also offered him a job (rumored to be Secretary of the Navy)  if he would back off. Like Romanoff, Sestak refused.

Again, hardly anyone paid attention, because all the national media wanted to do is talk about health care reform, the economy, and really important stuff like how Ellen was going to do on American Idol. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Mark Levin

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Despite his on-air persona as a real-life version of the old SNL John Belushi bit on “Weekend Update” in which his rant on some issue always ended with him convulsing and hurling himself to the floor, Mark Levin is an attorney of some note, a scholar, and theoretically a couple of evolutionary steps above the typical right-wing radio screamer. Yet tonight he began yelling about how hypocritical it was for the Obamas to be preaching healthy life-styles “when his own doctor told him to stop drinking so much!” Now, that is simply untrue, as Ethics Alarms and others have thoroughly documented. Obama’s medical report did not recommend that he “moderate his drinking” as the Drudge Report erroneously reported, but rather recommended “moderation in alcohol intake,” which is boilerplate language for “a drink now and then is OK.” Even though the Drudge smear, accidental of not, made the rounds of the virulent Right media, there had been plenty of time to get the facts right, especially for someone like Levin, who is always mercilessly slamming Democrats for sloppy research and dishonest facts. Continue reading →

Essay: Ending the Bi-Partisan Effort to Destroy Trust in America

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Both the Pentagon shooter and the Texas I.R.S. attacker were motivated by a virulent distrust of the U.S. government, the distrust mutating into desperation and violence with the assistance of personal problems and emotional instability. We would be foolish, however, to dismiss the two as mere “wingnuts,” the current term of choice to describe political extremists who have gone around the bend. They are a vivid warning of America’s future, for the media, partisan commentators, the two political parties and our elected officials are doing their worst to convert all of us into wingnuts, and the results could be even more disastrous than the fanciful horrors the Left and the Right tell us that the other has planned for us. Continue reading →

Drudge Gets Careless, and the Right Bites

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The conservative blogosphere and Rightish talk radio hosts were all in a lather this morning: according to Matt Drudge’s “Drudge Report,” President Obama’s physicians “recommended” “moderation of alcohol intake”! What could that mean, they asked breathlessly, then with a snicker or two, except that “Mr. Perfect” has been hitting the sauce, raiding the liquor cabinet, and having one-too-many snorts of the ol’ hooch? After all, the doctors were telling the President to “moderate” his drinking habits, like you tell a hot-head to moderate his temper. Scoop! The President drinks too much! Continue reading →

The Racist Slur on Tea Parties, and an Ethicist’s Lament

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I thought long and hard about whether to write this post, and I resent the fact that I had to think about it at all. But it involves piggy-backing on a theme that has been finding voice on conservative talk radio, and concerns an unfair and dishonest theme being pushed by liberal talk television and certain media pundits. That means that whatever I write will immediately be taken, by those who view the world in narrow ideological terms, as a declaration of alliance when it has nothing to do with politics at all. It has to do with unethical journalism, sloppy reasoning, and dirty politics. I resent the fact that Right Wing radio is so frequently uncivil and unfair  that it sullies every legitimate observation and position that it takes. I resent the fact that so much of the public decides what they believe, not by the quality of the ideas in question, but by the identity of who advocates them. Communication is hard enough without bias serving as a perpetual hurdle to comprehension.

Oh, well….

The effort by certain commentators, TV hosts (notably MSNBC’s troika of Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann), liberal columnists and Democratic Party flacks to stereotype the Tea Party movement as a thinly-veiled racist protest is despicable, unsupportable, dishonest and unfair.  It is also insulting to Americans generally. And yes, I resent that too. Continue reading →

“Everybody’s Stupid”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Please. Make them stop.

It seemed that every conservative talk show host today was getting yuks from the irony of the Obama  Commerce Department announcing the launch of a new government climate change service in the middle of unprecedented snowfall in Washington, D.C. Underlying the hilarity was the persistent implication, and sometimes outright assertion, that the snowfall itself actually undermined the prevailing scientific findings of climate change research. If Hannity, Limbaugh and others who did this (and have done it before) really believe that one snowstorm, or twenty, can have any probative value at all in determining the accuracy of climate change science, then they are too ignorant to participate in policy debates about the issue.  If, on the other hand, the talk show pundits are deliberately pandering to the many science-illiterates among their listeners—and I think that is exactly what they are doing—then they are being dishonest and unfair. Continue reading →