democracy

It’s Official: “Gore and the Masseuse” Is An Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Ethics train wrecks, and readers of Ethics Alarms and the Ethics Scoreboard know, are controversies of escalating publicity and complexity in which so many participants engage in bad decisions and unethical conduct that it is difficult to extract any lessons or conclusions from the chaos and rubble.

“The Tale of Al Gore and the Masseuse” began last week as an inexplicably late revelation of a 2006 accusation of alleged sexual assault by Gore on a woman in his Portland hotel room. Initially, it was only unfair and unsubstantiated fodder for Gore’s enemies in the media to ridicule him and assail his character with innuendo. With the revelation, however, that the Portland police decided to re-open an investigation of the matter and the department’s admission of why that the masseuse’s complaint did not warrant a charge when it was finally made in January 2009, the incident can be officially upgraded (downgraded?) to the Ethics Train Wreck status. Continue reading →

Sharron Angle, Responsible Leadership, and the Unforgivable

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

It all comes down to trust.

There are some things candidates for office do or say that render them permanently untrustworthy, and no apologies, however well-crafted and sincere, can change it. That is because there are some ethical boundaries a trustworthy individual literally will never cross. For example, Richard Blumenthal’s repeated claims that he was a Vietnam combat veteran fall below the minimum level of integrity, respect and honesty required for trustworthiness. Former Senator John Edwards has lied so often in public and private that no reasonable person should trust him to hold a leadership position.

Sharron Angle, the Tea Party darling who will be opposing Sen. Harry Reid for the Nevada Senate seat in November, also falls beneath that minimum level. This is not because of her hard, hard right positions advocating the abolishment of government-run Social Security, Medicare and the Department of Education. Those are legitimate topics for debate. But a recent interview with conservative radio talk show host Lars Larson has come to light in which Angle, then the longest of shots to win the Nevada Republican primary, said this: Continue reading →

The Ethically Obtuse Bauer Memo

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

According to both the Washington Post and the New York Times, the memo from White House Counsel Robert F. Bauer shows that the Sestak/Clinton/White House scandal is nothing to waste time over. Or, as the Times puts it today’s Ethics Dunce-worthy editorial,* “nothing terribly unethical” happened.

I see. Our standards for the ethical conduct of our President and his staff isn’t that they should behave ethically, but that they shouldn’t be terribly unethical.  Certainly that is the attitude conveyed by the Bauer memo, which is unconvincing legally and appears to be written by someone who never heard of the concept “ethical.” Continue reading →

The Ethics of Silencing Hate

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Good and just people are not just bothered by the bad things people do, but also by the bad things they may be thinking while they do it.  This is reasonable, on its face, because a lot of  the time (though far from always), misconduct arises from ideas, emotions, motives and intentions that are not very admirable and sometimes despicable. The indisputable connection between what we think and what we do increasingly is fueling the idea that we can and should try to control people’s thoughts—not by encouraging good ones through education, culture, philosophy, role models and positive reinforcement, but by preventing bad thoughts through punishment, enforced conformity, censorship, and linguistic controls.

The civil rights movement, once dedicated to wiping out discrimination, which is a kind of conduct, now focuses on eliminating bigotry and bias, a form of thought. Hate crime legislation extends penalties for criminal acts beyond the act itself to what the criminal was thinking while he committed it.  The term “hate speech” is frequently used to describe any intense negative opinion as a way of both suppressing and de-legitimizing political opinion. The label effectively argues that an opinion, even a reasonable opinion by itself, should be shunned and even suppressed based on the “illegitimacy” of the thought process used to arrive at it.

As many predicted, this device or tendency (which you call it depends in part on how cynical you are) has intensified with the election of our first African American president, allowing the kind of intense opposition rhetoric, satire, condemnation, hyperbole and ridicule that has been directed at virtually every president before him to now be characterized as hate speech, or proof of racial prejudice. People, of course, have a right to engage in this tactic, but it is wrong.

Over on Facebook, over a million people have joined a fan page called “DEAR LORD, THIS YEAR YOU TOOK MY FAVORITE ACTOR, PATRICK SWAYZIE. YOU TOOK MY FAVORITE ACTRESS, FARAH FAWCETT. YOU TOOK MY FAVORITE SINGER, MICHAEL JACKSON. I JUST WANTED TO LET YOU KNOW, MY FAVORITE PRESIDENT IS BARACK OBAMA. AMEN”, inspired by a joke that is a lot older than Barack Obama, and probably older than Millard Fillmore. Continue reading →

Why Lawyers Should Work “For Good”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Pro bono legal work (short for pro bono publico, or “for the public good”) is when lawyers take on cases free of charge. Some lawyers—and you know who you are!—would say that the primary reason to take on pro bono cases is that membership in the Bar requires it. That’s compliance, however, driven by non-ethical considerations, not ethics. There are excellent reasons to work pro bono that have nothing to do with being able to check off mandatory hours, and everything to do with the crucial roles lawyers have a duty to fulfill in a free society.

Georgia attorney Dawn Levine compiled this list of  “The Top Eight Reasons to Take Pro Bono Cases;” I recommend the whole article. Her list, however, should be posted on the walls of every attorney’s office. It represents the best aspirations of an unfairly maligned profession. Here it is… Continue reading →

Crash the Tea Party Today, Teach America’s Youth Tomorrow?

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Jason Levin is a media lab technology teacher at the Conestoga Middle School in Beaverton, Oregon, and for all I know, a good one. Jason Levin is also a passionate political activist whose sense of fair politics is a little bit skewed: he has gained notoriety through his plan, detailed on his website http://www.crashtheteaparty.org, to discredit and undermine the political movement through a series of unethical tactics, such as infiltrating rallies and shouting racist and homophobic slogans, seeking out reporters and making wild claims posing as Tea Party advocates, holding mis-spelled signs, and dressing in Nazi uniforms.

Needless to say (I hope), Levin’s idea of political warfare is unethical in every way. Misleading the public and media about a party or group rather than contesting its positions on the merits is dishonest and a disgrace to the democratic system. Continue reading →

Anger and Accountability in the Obamacare Aftermath

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

“Anger” is the watchword in the media and blogosphere this week. Democrats are using the epithets and “hate speech” from the more uncivil members of the Right to demonize adversaries, try to muzzle the opposition, and raise money. Republicans are trying to harness anger to fuel their drive to triumph in November. Talk radio is trying to fan the flames, because it’s good for ratings. But anger is neither healthy nor conducive to clear thought. Antidotes vary according to the type and cause of the anger, but in this massive breakout, what is needed is the ethical value of Accountability. Neither the objects of the anger nor the angry themselves are blameless, and it would measure the anger level considerably if everyone would accept their fair share of  accountability for the rage: Continue reading →

Premature Ethics Alarm on Obama’s Judicial Appointment, Day 2

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Amazingly, even liberal journalists are now presuming that Obama’s appointment of attorney Scott Matheson signals that a deal has been struck with his Congressman brother to reverse his previous votes and support the health care bill, whatever its current form may be. And they are saying that this is hardly sinister, as such deals are commonplace in the rough-and-tumble, amoral world of politics.

Deals like this one, if that’s what it is, are not commonplace. Not when the object is a major systemic overhaul costing billions, not when so much of the public is dubious about it, not when the legislation is so complex that almost nobody completely understands it and definitely not after previous efforts to buy votes–as in the “Louisiana Purchase” and Ben Nelson’s extortion—caused so much public revulsion that they swept a Republican into a U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts. Nobody knows what unsavory back-room tactics L.B.J. used to get the civil rights legislation passed, but that’s the point: you don’t mind the little piece of rat in your sausage if you’re not certain it’s there. Continue reading →

Martha Coakley, Bloody Socks and Democracy

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

If Republican Scott Brown, the former Cosmo fold-out,  defeats Martha Coakley, the designated 60th Senate vote for Obamacare,  in the special election in Massachusetts to fill Ted Kennedy’s long-time seat, there will undoubtedly be a flurry of columns about how she was beaten, in the end, by irrelevant, trivial gaffes that only prove how silly and provincial Massachusetts voters can be. In particular, the state’s voters will be ridiculed for rejecting Coakley after she airily dismissed Boston Red Sox legend Curt Schilling as “a Yankee fan.” O.K., so she doesn’t follow the Red Sox. Big deal. You want to choose a senator on stuff like that? Continue reading →

Courting Confusion: Unethical Candidates for Unethical Voters

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

In Chicago, Rep. Jesse L. Jackson will be running for re-election against…Jesse L. Jackson, a political novice. Why is he–that is, Jesse #2—running? Obviously, he hopes to confuse enough voters to steal an election, and I do mean steal. When a candidate intentionally seeks to capitalize on voter apathy and ignorance, that is dishonest, unfair and cynical. The Chicago Congressional election is a blatant example, but not the only one, or even the most egregious. For in Massachusetts, the critical special election for the U.S. Senate seat left vacant by the death of Ted Kennedy may well be decided by a block of civic slackers and fools who think that Independent candidate Joseph Kennedy is from the same family that gave us Jack, Bobby, Ted, Abraham, Martin and John…wait a minute, I got carried away there. Just the first three. Continue reading →