Dana Milbank

On Apologies: the Sincere, the Forced, the Cynical and the Harmful

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

"Apologize! SINCERELY!"

On February 17th, Washington Post political commentator Dana Milbank wrote a column disparaging what he called “forced apologies.” Although the context of his column and the apology he was refusing to make was too silly to bother with* (yes, there really are things too silly for Ethics Alarms to bother with) something told me I should keep his column handy, and indeed, the perfect time to consider Milbank’s argument has arrived. Forced apologies are flying all over the place.He wrote:

“…one of the most annoying components of our decaying political culture [is] false umbrage. Liberals created this form of identity politics, in which an underrepresented group claims persecution, but conservatives have embraced it. One of its most common expressions is the demand for an apology. It’s phony by definition — an apology can’t be sincere if it’s answering a demand — and the reflexive demand (like a demand for a resignation) serves only as an excuse to keep a news story alive. Sorry, but it’s time to put this tired gimmick to rest.”

Milbank’s essay included an impressive catalogue of recent demands for apologies, and since it was published there have been many more, the most recent example, of course, being Rush Limbaugh’s mea culpa for his outburst against Sandra Fluke. His central thesis, however, is wrong.

Here is the hierarchy of apologies, their function and their motivation, 1-10, from most admirable to despicable: Continue reading →

Fracking Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

The Eric Massa affair quickly revealed itself as the spectacle of a foolish, narcissistic, dishonest man trying to milk every drop of attention out of the well-deserved implosion of a political career that never should have begun in the first place. Fortunately, there was a side benefit: its reporting by the media exposed the dishonesty of the practice of fake civility. Genuine civility is one of the foundations of ethical conduct, though admittedly a shaky one right now. Fake civility, however, is cynical, dishonest, disrespectful and, on top of all that, silly and ineffective.

One of the inappropriate supervisory moments that punched Massa’s ticket out of Congress was that he told a male staffer, in the presence of others, that “I should be fucking you.” Someone at the Mainstream Media High command issued a memo that the gentile and classy way of reporting this statement was “I should be fracking you.” Not that there was any pretense about what the word signified. On the Headline News morning show with giggly news-bimbo Robin Meade (an in-your-face insult to every serious female broadcast journalist in America), Meade listened to the “fracking” account and said—every one of the times the story was repeated during the program— some version of “Gee, I never heard that word before (giggle)!” Whereupon the newsreader replied with some form of “I know (snicker) neither have I!” They were far from the only ones. Dana Milbank used the same code in his account of Massa’s messes in the Washington Post.  “Fracking” is the euphemism of the week. Continue reading →