conservatives

Political Fundraising Frauds And Scams, PART II: The Conservatives

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

(Except nobody was alerted…)

An intrinsic problem with members of a party that extols Capitalism is that so many  have a fondness for making money that often overwhelms their ethics alarms, assuming they have any….and many don’t.

In a brave and responsible article posted to day, National Review writer Jim Geraghty , lays out a devastating indictment. He writes in part,

“Why is the conservative movement not as effective as its supporters want it to be? Because day after day, year after year, little old ladies get called on the phone or emailed or receive letters in the mail telling them that the future of the country is at stake and that if they don’t make a donation to groups that might as well be named Make Telemarketers Wealthy Again right now, the country will go to hell in a handbasket. Those little old ladies get out their checkbooks and give what they can spare, convinced that they’re making a difference and helping make the world a better place. What they’re doing is ensuring that the guys running these PACs can enjoy a more luxurious lifestyle. Meanwhile, conservative candidates lose, kicking the dirt after primary day or the general election, convinced that if they had just had another $100,000 for get-out-the-vote operations, they might have come out on top.”

Continue reading →

On Biden And Sexual Harassment, The Left, As Always, Is Hypocritical, But The Right, As Usual, Is Stupid

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Ah, the good old days, when men were men and in charge, and women knew they were there to hug…

The question of the ages is, which is worse?

It’s a close call, but I vote for the conservative side.

It is true, transparent and pretty embarrassing (I hope) that so many progressives, the Walking Woke, and even feminists are tying their own brains and ours into knots by trying to defend Obama’s long-time happy-go-lucky serial toucher/ hugger/ kisser/ sniffer, nuzzler and groper. We’ve seen this integrity vacuum from them before, as when Gloria Steinem, after successfully selling the undeniable concept that when a man has superior power over a woman, that woman cannot meaningfully consent to being mauled (with love, of course) in the workplace or even boinked after-hours, changed her position so Bill Clinton could escape the consequences of his own sleazy and illegal behavior.

The hypocrisy,is especially egregious now, as I already discussed, because sexual harassment law has been around for over 30 years, because we are two decades past Monica Madness, because Al Franken is watching old Saturday Night Live videos somewhere in Minnesota, and because #MeToo was supposed to have made sure that America “got it.” How is the world can Biden pretend that this doesn’t apply to him? In a 2017 appearance at George Mason University, he defended the Obama “guilty until proven innocent” approach to campus sexual assault allegations, saying: “Guys, a woman who is dead drunk cannot consent — you are raping her! We’ve got to talk about this. Consent requires affirmative consent! . . . If you can’t get her to say ‘yes’ because she wants to, you ain’t much.” And Joe, a woman who is within feel-up distance of a Senator or Vice-President can’t give affirmative consent to touching, hugging, kissing, sniffing, nuzzling and groping, either. This isn’t hard. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 1/17/19: The “Why?” Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

WHY is it a good morning?

1. Why are some people missing their ethics alarms? A family member owned a horse as a pet, and when the horse got old and infirm sold it to a slaughterhouse for dog food. This caused a long-running rift with the Alexandria branch of the Marshall clan, in which my wife will capture spiders and gently release them into the wild while singing “Born Free.” However, the family horse-trader is a saint compared to Fallon Danielle Blackwood, 24, a veterinary student in Alabama, who offered shelter for rescue horses only to profit by secretly selling the animals to Mexican slaughterhouses.   She was arrested on a similar charge last year in North Carolina.

Though the current charges involve just  13 horses, Stolen Horse International, a nonprofit that helps find lost or stolen horses, says Blackwood may be behind the disappearance of dozens more. Her MO was to  reach out to those in need of help caring for their horses and offer the equines  a loving home at her farm near Boaz, Alabama.

Well, I hear veterinary school is expensive…

2. Why do the news media and the public let Democrats get away with the “immoral and ineffective” talking point? I discussed this in detail here. The latest to use the self-contradictory rhetoric was Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), who denounced President Donald Trump’s “quest for a racist and sinful big wall” between the U.S. and Mexico during a speech on the House floor, and followed up with a tweet calling the wall “hateful and ineffective.” Now it’s “sinful” to enforce the borders, is it? How does someone make the argument that border security is “racist” and simultaneously claim that they are in favor of border security? If trying to keep illegal immigrants out is sinful and racist, how can the claim that border security is desirable be anything but hypocrisy?

This argument depends on listeners not paying attention, being complicit in an open borders strategy, or having the IQ of a mollusk.

3. Why do people this inept keep getting elected to Congress? At a Washington reception billed as a “celebration of Asian-American and Pacific Islander (API) members of the 116th Congress,” Hawaii Democratic Rep. Ed Case said that he felt like “an Asian trapped in a white body.” How awful! Trapped in a white body! Yechh! Pooie!

Pandering to racists is a bi-partisan activity, especially in the Aloha State, where hostility to whites is open and palpable. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 1/8/2019: A “Bias Makes You Stupid” Spectacular! [UPDATED!]

/ Jack Marshall / 66 Comments

Good Morning!

The first appearance of Donald, Debbie and Gene in the New Year!

1. “A Nation of Assholes” update: Conservatives being ugly. The comments and even the posts around the conservative blogosphere regarding Ruth Bader Ginsberg are repulsive, and  reveal a deep mean streak, a lack of compassion and basic respect. Ginsberg, it was announced yesterday, will miss oral arguments–that means she won’t be able to vote on the cases she doesn’t hear—for the first time in her long career. It also may well mean that she isn’t long for this world, or the Court. The gleeful tone of the jokes, sarcasm and mockery being aimed her way by those salivating at the prospect that she will soon be replaced by a right-leaning justice is palpable. (Yes, some of the mean jokes are funny. The blog referring to her illness as a “belated Christmas present” isn’t.)

2. A classic bad argument for illegal immigration in response to an emotional one against it. The advocate? Geraldo Rivera. On a Hannity segment with conservative Dan Bongino [Correction notice: I mistakenly identified Bongino as African American in the original post. He is apparently Italian-American.]  Rivera tried to defend illegal immigration while condemning the use of individual episodes of violent crimes by illegals to justify stronger border enforcement. As Bongino and Hannity shouted around and over him, Rivera objected to Hannity’s featuring the grieving parents of 22-year-old Pierce Kennedy Corcoran who was killed in a head-on car crash with illegal immigrant Franco Cambrany Francisco-Eduardo. Francisco-Eduardo was charged with criminally negligent homicide and driving without a license or insurance,  was turned over to ICE. (Good!). Hannity lit the fuse when he began his panel by saying,

“Their son is dead. Or the people that also aid and abet these people with their sanctuary cities and sanctuary states, criminal aliens in our custody that are not handed over to ICE. You always say it’s about both parties, it’s not,” Hannity stated. “It’s about one party now that refuses to protect the American people…”

Said Geraldo at his most Geraldo-ish: Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: William Kristol

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The Weekly Standard went belly-up today. As usual when a publication dies, there isn’t just one reason. There are many reasons, including a changing market, competition, aging principals and bad luck. These factors were at work in this instance as well. However, the Weekly Standard was primarily doomed by the arrogance and selfish pique of the man who one would think would be the individual least inclined to harm the Standard, since it was his legacy. He went ahead and mortally wounded it anyway, for a stupid reason, if a popular one. He hated Donald Trump. That individual, of course, is William Kristol. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce (Again!): The Daily Caller

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

 

Yeah, I know…”She can play on my violin any time she likes…”

Tucker Carlson’s toy, conservative website “The Daily Caller,” headlined the story I mentioned in today’s warm-up about a teacher who sent naked photos of herself to a teen-aged former student, this way:

“Former Miss Kentucky Arrested For Assaulting 15-Year-Old Teen’s Eyes With Her Naked Body.”

I’ve called Carlson’s site on this kind of idiocy before. It’s the brainless, macho, “yeah, I sure wish a teacher had mistreated me like that when I was a kid” jerkism that seeds the next generation of Harvey Weinsteins and Matt Lauers, as well as perpetuating the still flourishing double standard that sees a male teacher who has sex with female high school student  as a rapist, but a male student who is seduced by his female teacher as lucky dog.

This is one of many reasons I don’t watch Carlson’s popular show on Fox.  I really don’t care what assholes with those kinds of warped values have to say about anything. Teachers cannot use their position to prey on students, and it doesn’t matter how attractive the teacher is or how appreciative her victim is.  The fact that so many conservatives gravitate to Carlson’s frat boy attitudes is one reason to be wary of conservatives.

I haven’t checked…let’s see if the comments on this article express the usual Daily Caller reader perspective… Continue reading →

Wait…Condemning A Pope’s Mass Cover-Up Of Sexual Abuse Of Children By Priests Is Partisan Now? [UPDATED*]

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I saw a hint of this when I noticed this week that my 90% leftist Facebook friends scrupulously avoided commenting on my cross-posted article about the current Pope’s likely complicity in the ongoing Roman Catholic Church child sexual abuse cover-up while metaphorically foaming at the mouth because the White House flag wasn’t at half mast. Then the New York Times started spinning. An article by Jason Horowitz titled “Vatican Power Struggle Bursts Into Open as Conservatives Pounce”  argued that conservatives were “weaponizing” the scandal in order to minimize the influence of Pope Francis, who has aroused the Right’s ire by “going soft” on homosexuality and by becoming a shill for climate change. Horowitz wrote,

“Just how angry his political and doctrinal enemies are became clear this weekend, when a caustic letter published by the Vatican’s former top diplomat in the United States blamed a “homosexual current” in the Vatican hierarchy for sexual abuse. It called for Francis’ resignation, accusing him of covering up for a disgraced cardinal, Theodore E. McCarrick.”

What? Heaven forfend that someone suggest that a hypocritical homosexual factor at high levels of the Church might be partially responsible for a policy of allowing male priests to continue to rape little boys! That’s minor, however, compared to the triple “What?” earned by the writer and the Times for implying that Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò’s  a letter accusing Pope Francis of covering up Cardinal McCarrick’s abuses while also taking his counsel on appointing bishops was merely a political ploy. This is one more example of the tactic of using alleged mixed motives to delegitimize an ethical act. So what if Viganò is a Vatican dissident? The evidence is overwhelming that the Catholic Church has facilitated child abuse for at least decades (See: “Spotlight”), that this continued on Pope Francis’s watch (See: the recent grand jury report), that the Pope is accountable, that his statement was a weaselly mess of accountability-skirting platitudes, and that Viganò’s accusations appear to have validity. Continue reading →