double standards

On The Washington Post, Its Readers, Its “Fact Checker,” And Spinning For Joe Biden

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

“If you can’t hide it, decorate it!” the maxim goes. Thus it is that someone in the ethics-free “resistance”/ Democrat/mainstream media alliance (“The Axis of Unethical Conduct” we call it in in these parts) decided that President Biden’s problem with the truth—he ignores, distorts, and denies it regularly—must be dealt with, since part of the strategy to defeat Donald Trump is to emphasize his “falsehoods” and “lies.” So a directive went out to the Washington Post’s “Factchecker,” Glenn Kessler: “Hey, Glenn, do one of your cool columns, the ones with the Pinnochio-head ratings system, about Joe’s fabulism, but make sure you’re careful which whoppers you mention, and make sure you don’t call them ‘lies.’ Trump lies. Joe…well, you know, he just does what he does, but it’s no big deal, in fact it’s kind of endearing.” And whoever it was—heck, it might have been Dr. Jill, Chuck Schumer or Merrick Garland!—added, “And besides, it will be good for you, too! It will prove that you’re objective, fair and non-partisan!”

The Post dutifully agreed, because it is not objective, fair, or non-partisan. Neither is Kessler, whom I have tried mightily over the years to regard as a man who tries to do his job ethically, but because bis biases make him stupid, can’t quite manage it. Ethics Alarms officially recants that sympathetic assessment. Yesterday’s Post feature by Kessler headlined “Biden loves to retell certain stories. Some aren’t credible” clinches it. Kessler is a disgusting hack with no shame or integrity, and the Washington Post is a full-time agent of the Democratic Party and an enemy of democracy.

As for its readers…well, I’ll get to them.

“President Biden, like many politicians, likes to tell stories — stories that attempt to connect his life story with his audiences and make up an essential part of his persona,” Kessler begins. He uses a “everybody does it” approach right away, mitigating Biden’s serial lies and sliding over the fact that lies from the president of the United States are not in the same category as lies by “everyone.” “The Fact Checker” also defines Biden’s lies out of existence by labeling them “stories.” Stories are entertaining! Stories are fun! Stories aren’t lies. See, when Donald Trump said that he saw Muslims in the U.S. celebrating after the 9-11 bombings—it was on TV someplace—that wasn’t a story, that was a lie. When he described how he vehemently opposed the Iraq invasion from the very beginning (in fact, he initially said he agreed with it), that was a lie too. But when Joe says that he never, ever, ever discussed his slime-ball son Hunter’s business dealings with him that’s just a story. When Joe says that U.S. citizens weren’t allowed to own cannons in the 18th Century (which he does almost every time he talks about gun control), that’s just a story too, a charming, completely made-up story, like George Washington and the cherry tree. Stating that he attended a “historically black college” while addressing an African American audience? A harmless story! Saying that Beau was killed in Iraq? A comforting story from a grieving father. Understand?

Yeah, I understand, all too well.

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“What’s Going On Here?” Glad You Asked, Miles….

/ Jack Marshall / 69 Comments

The full tweet:

“What happened to Lahaina is a tragedy. Thousands still missing, including children. Everything that could’ve gone wrong went wrong. Sirens didn’t go off, water that could’ve been used to put out the flames was restricted, and power lines kept operating despite the danger posed by hurricane winds. The governor of Hawaii can’t even maintain proper eye contact with the camera as he talks about the systemic failures that led to this avoidable catastrophe. Will anyone be held accountable? Given the relative media blackout, it looks like they’re trying to sweep the situation under the carpet like so much ash. When Hurricane Katrina happened, it’s all the media would talk about. What’s going on here?”

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“God Save The Queen, Man!”: An IIPTDXTTNMIAFB And An Integrity Test

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Remember Plan E? That was the designation on the Ethics Alarms list of resistance, Democrat and news media impeachment or removal plots for the 25th Amendment theory, which was that President Trump was mentally disabled and thus should be declared incompetent. The catalysts for this intellectually dishonest effort were Trump-hating hack author Michael Wolf and now-fired Yale psychology instructor Bandy Lee, but many in the “Get Trump!” mob quickly embraced their nonsense, as Ethics Alarms discussed here. I wrote, “Ethics Dunce is too mild a name here. We have the mainstream news media proclaiming to the world that the President of the United States is mentally deficient based on tweets, gossip, leaks, unethical diagnoses by discredited professionals, an author who has admitted making things up and lying to the White House to get access, and Steve Bannon.” Prominent among the 25th Amendment-pushing journalists, if you can call him that, was CNN’s fake media ethics watchdog, Brian Stelter. Of course, my Trump-Deranged Facebook friends were also convinced that Trump had dementia.

Last week, as he ended his remarks at a “gun safety summit” in Connecticut, President Biden said, for no apparent reason, “God save the Queen, man!” The video was instantly all over social media.

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Today’s IIPTDXTTNMIAFB…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

That’s “Imagine if President Trump did X that the news media is accepting from Biden.”

I hate quoting the GOP hit machine, but sometimes attention mus be paid.

All I ask is for the same standards of decorum, taste and civility to be applied equally, fairly and objectively. Is that so unreasonable?

I’m assuming that the “boy” Biden was addressing was not black. However, if Trump had dared to use a similarly condescending term, it would have been cited as further evidence of his autocratic instincts.

From Wisconsin, A Double Standards Classic

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I don’t understand how this could happen at all.

In Wausau, Wisconsin, an investigation by the school board after a student complaint found that East High School’s band teacher, Robert Perkins, used “racist and sexist” language in the course of his teaching directed at Asian-American students in his class.

But it was okay, because he didn’t mean anything by it!

“While a preponderance of the evidence shows that Mr. Perkins did not engage in harassing or discriminatory behavior, he did engage in insensitive and unprofessional conduct,” the district superintendent wrote in a letter this week. “Witnesses indicate that he did use language that could be insensitive to students of different protected classes, including race and sex, but that language does not rise to the level of discrimination or harassment.” The letter argued that Perkins often uses humor to “engage students and create a ‘fun’ environment,'” and creates a “safe space” for all students, but that Perkins’ “humor” sometimes caused “unease” among students when “his comments are racial or sexist in nature.” However, the letter assures parents, Perkins “does not mean to harm anyone.”

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Ethics Quiz (“The Password Is ‘Civility'”): Fired For A Foul-Mouthed Faux Pas

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

ESPN fired national baseball reporter Marly Rivera, an ESPN Radio MLB analyst who has also appeared on baseball telecasts, after an incident at Yankee Stadium in which she called a female reporter from another outlet a “fucking cunt” during an altercation. The incident was caught on someone’s cell phone video (of course), and posted on social media. When the clash and the vulgarity got back to Rivera’s employer, ESPN canned her.

Rivera had been with ESPN for 13 years, working for ESPN’s English language platforms as a writer and on-air personality, and for ESPN Deportes. Reportedly she attempted to apologize to the object of her epithet, but was rebuffed.

Your Ethics Alarms Civility Quiz of the Day is…

Was it fair and responsible to fire Rivera for her outburst?

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More “Good Racism” OK’ed By Network News

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I want to read or hear a reasonable, intelligent defense of this phenomenon, which is occurring fairly regularly, especially since the George Floyd Freakout, DEI Madness and the Great Stupid descended over the land like the Seven Plagues of Egypt.

Above you see approximately the moment when CNN’s dumb, sexist, racist, biased—but cute!—morning anchor Don Lemon said to Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, because he couldn’t think of a real argument,

“When you are in black skin, and you live in this country, then you can disagree with me.”

You can read the context of Lemon’s remark, but I don’t believe it matters. There is no context in which that statement is anything but racially biased (not to mention un-American and really, really stupid.) For the record, Lemon was claiming that black Americans don’t have the same rights in the U.S. that whites do, a particularly audacious contention from a guy who 1) hardly rose to his position at CNN from the ghetto or the cotton fields, 2) only has and keeps his multi-million dollar a year job because he is black (though being gay helps) and 3) was debating with another “BIPOC,” but apparently there is a hierarchy in that privileged group in which African American beats Indian American, like rock beats scissors.

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Back To The Justice Thomas Scandal: Do Conservatives Really Not Understand The Appearance of Impropriety Judicial Ethics Prohibition, Or Are They Just Choosing To Ignore It?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Ugh.

From the Daily Caller:

Conservative legal scholars are calling attacks on Clarence Thomas for his alleged ethics violations hypocritical in light of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s financial disclosure as a nominee, which shows she omitted portions of her income on previous filings, including money from her husband’s consulting work.

These “conservative scholars” are partisan hacks.

Their argument is that because Jackson’s SCOTUS nominee disclosure papers filed in March 2022 “inadvertently omitted” income her spouse “periodically receives from consulting on medical malpractice cases” (which was disclosed on prior reports), there is a double standard applied to conservative justices. Utter garbage, and I suspect intentionally misleading. There would be no demands for Thomas’s resignation if all that was at issue was the failure to report some ambiguous gifts on his annual disclosure forms. SCOTUS justices have done this many times in the past: it is grounds for criticism and a necessary “Sorry, I won’t do that again” statement. The reason Thomas’s 20 years of unreported vacations with ultra-conservative billionaire real estate developer Harlan Crow is that it looks bad, to the public, to objective judicial ethicists, and to me.

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New Rule! Only White, Straight Men Need To Be Civil

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Last week, a looming $30 million budget shortfall prompted NPR to eliminate 10% of its staff across all its departments.  It killed several podcasts and so far, 84 employees are gone; more will follow.

One of the podcasts sent into the archives was “Louder Than A Riot,” which explored how hip-hop’s “Black women and queer folk have dealt with the same oppression [hip-hop] was built to escape.” So after getting the bad news, “Louder Than A Riot’s” staff took to Twitter and accused NPR of bias in its layoff decisions:

What support for that did the angry staff have? Oh, none. But NPR is a nest of progressives who don’t believe in ethics, so playing the discrimination card was a reflex, and Facts Don’t Matter. As it turned out, NPR did engage in discrimination, but the “good’ kind:  the layoffs had been  “structured in a way” so they would not disproportionately affect people of color and other marginalized groups. In other words, skin color and sexual proclivities were used to decide who to fire, and being white and non-LGTBQ was held against employees.

That’s unethical.

Also illegal.

Also “Diversity Equity and Inclusion” exemplified. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The Comic Strip’s Hidden Message

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Yikes.

In February, 2019, venerable ( and usually funny) Sunday comics feature “Non Sequitur” included a hidden message tucked into the corner of a strip . Cartoonist Wiley Miller had scrawled, barely legibly, “Go Fuck yourself, Trump.”

This led some newspapers that had run the strip to cancel the comic permanently. Most, however, did nothing: the strip is still running in, for example, the Washington Post.

Dallas Morning News editor Mike Wilson said that Miller was going “around his editors and even his own syndicate to publish something he must have known we wouldn’t accept. We’ll have no trouble finding a better way to spend the $8,000 we would’ve paid for that strip.” For its part, Kansas City-based Andrews McMeel Syndication, which distributes “Non Sequitur,” apologized, saying,

“We are sorry we missed the language in our editing processIf we had discovered it, we would not have distributed the cartoon without it being removed. We apologize to ‘Non Sequitur’s’ clients and readers for our oversight.”

Miller’s explanation was essentially “Oopsie!” He said he had entered the vulgarity in the corner when he was angry with then-President Trump, and forgot to remove it. He wasn’t trying to sneak the insult by anyone.

Okaaay. Do you believe that?

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

What is the fair and responsible punishment for Sunday comics cartoonist who does what Miller did?

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