gaffes

“You Didn’t Build That” Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

“If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.”

With those words, President Barack Obama handed the Romney campaign a rich and evocative phrase more ripe for political exploitation than even his Republican opponent’s juiciest gaffes, like…

  • “I like being able to fire people “
  • “I’m not concerned about the very poor “
  • “Corporations are people”

Since every one of these quotes were misrepresented by both pundits and Democrats, taken out of context and unfairly characterized, it’s hard to blame Republicans for jumping on President Obama’s provocative rhetoric, and using it for all it’s worth…which, I suspect, if you want to paint the President as a socialist who wants to punish success and give the fruits of  risk-taking and hard work to the slack and unsuccessful, is a lot.

Here’s the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto:

“The president’s remark was a direct attack on the principle of individual responsibility, the foundation of American freedom. If “you didn’t build that,” then you have no moral claim to it, and those with political power are morally justified in taking it away and using it to buy more political power. “I think that when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody,” Obama said in another candid moment, in 2008.”

And here’s Mitt, making the most of it: Continue reading →

Why Journalists Can’t Shoot Straight

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

George probably wasn’t lying, but Bill sure was.

The issue in the Washington Post’s weekly Outlook section concerned the virtues and dangers of honesty in a Presidential campaign, a matter that interests me from the perspective of ethics, presidential history, and citizenship. Two Post reporters were given the assignment of creating sidebars to the main article, one on candidates who told the truth and were punished for it, the other on campaign lies that came back to haunt the Presidents involved.

These are not difficult assignments, by any means. Either would be a legitimate term paper topic for a high school senior’s history class; both would be rejected as a history major’s thesis topic as overly simplistic. Yet both Rachel Weiner and Aaron Blake botched their tasks, and would have earned D’s at best in high school history, and that’s only because of grade inflation. The reasons for their failures exemplify the inadequacy of the mainstream media for the job we need it to do during a Presidential election.

Continue reading →

The Korean President’s Dinner: President Obama, I Owe You This One

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Funny...you don't LOOK Japanese!

Having joined reflexive Obama-bashers by assuming the worst based on an unjustified reading of a leaked diplomatic cable and subsequently criticizing the White House for something it did not do, allow me to continue my contrition and repentance by flagging another example of the same phenomenon, also involving Asian diplomacy and equally unfair, being trumpeted by some of the same sources that led me astray.

The headlines: “ANOTHER WHITE HOUSE STAFF SCREWUP”  (Instapundit) …“Obama Honors South Korean President With Japanese Food” (The National Review)

Where did this come from? USA Today reported the fare for the upcoming  White House dinner honoring South Korean President Lee Myung Bak: Continue reading →

In the Aftermath of Biden’s Human Rights Betrayal, Little Integrity From The Media

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Like Diogenes of Sinope searching for an honest man, Ethics Alarms has been searching for a political progressive, here or anywhere, who will acknowledge the blatant pro-liberal, pro-Obama, anti-conservative, anti-Republican, anti-Tea Party bias of the mainstream media. Obvious examples are routinely explained or rationalized away, even when they are criticized by a media outlet’s own internal ombudsmen and ethicists.

The media’s coverage of the recent toadying remarks of Vice-President Biden to the Chinese, as he gave a pass to China’s  long-time policy of limiting families to one child, has been a particularly vivid and disgraceful case in point. Despite the fact that Biden’s remarks were a shocking diplomatic gaffe and human rights betrayal, they were almost solely criticized by Republicans and conservative pundits, and only fleetingly covered at all by the mainstream media. While the so-called “conservative media” kept Biden’s gaffe in the news, the rest either covered the coverage, as in “Right Wing Critics Attack Biden,” or framed the criticism of Biden as a pro-life vs. pro-choice dust-up, as if anyone but a lunatic could describe a program limiting births by law  as “pro choice.” Continue reading →

More Than a Fool: Bachmann, John Quincy Adams, and Wikipedia

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

John Quincy Adams, Sixth President, slavery foe, and time-traveling Founding Father

I will strive a bit longer to avoid concluding that Michele Bachmann is as irresponsible, dishonest and dangerous as I strongly suspect that she is, though my determination may not last the time it takes to write this post. I won’t wait any longer to conclude that she is a fool.

In one short week since the controversy erupted over Fox News anchor Chris Wallace daring to ask her on the air, “Are you a flake?” and her subsequent botching of both her answer and the question’s fevered aftermath, she has stumbled into two flaky episodes. One—her mixing up Western movie star icon John Wayne with serial child killer John Wayne Gacy—was at least funny. The other, far less forgivable—her claim that the Founding Fathers “worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States”—has signature significance. Continue reading →

“Are You a Flake?” Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

"Are you Michele Bachman?"

With only four well-chosen words, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace accomplished several objectives Sunday, all of them in the best tradition of ethical, objective, responsible journalism.

The words were “Are you a flake?,” posed to Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who is running for President.  The question…

1. Properly forced a conservative darling to address her most striking weakness, belying Fox’s well-deserved reputation for bias toward figures its viewers admire…

2. Was a near-perfect example of the “off-the-wall” question technique, which has exposed more than one pretender to high office (Hello, Mike Dukakis!) as less than desirable.

3. Simultaneously gave Bachmann an opportunity to show how quick she could think on her feet while demonstrating important leadership traits like self-awareness, humor, wit, and grace, or, in the alternative, demonstrate the opposite.

How did she do? Well. Judge for yourself: Continue reading →

Sarah Palin Blows the Whistle On A Classic Media Bias Trick

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

After Sarah Palin, during a televised interview, said North Korea when she meant South Korea (me, I always mix up North and South Carolina)—an obvious slip of the tongue, since she had correctly identified our ally among the Koreas previously in the same interview, multiple media reports decided the gaffe was newsworthy, or at least another opportunity to show the American public that the former Alaska governor is, as they believe, an idiot. Palin, who is nothing if not feisty, took to the New Media with a Facebook post pointing out that equally egregious flubs out of the mouth of President Obama had been ignored, and listed some of them, including the time Obama raised the number of states to 57, momentarily confusing them with ketchup. Continue reading →