honesty

Rahm Emanuel, History and Hyperbole Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

There are times when obvious exaggeration is nothing worse than politeness, nothing more than an expression of admiration and affection. “You’re the best boss anyone ever had,” is in this category, especially when the boss is retiring or dying. But when one is speaking in public about controversial and historical matters involving well-known public figures, the margin between excusable hyperbole and unethical dishonesty or worse is much smaller. Al Gore learned this when he played loyal Vice-President on the day his President was impeached by vote of the House of Representatives. Gore’s statement that Bill Clinton was “a man I believe will be regarded in the history books as one of our greatest Presidents” was intended as supportive, but interpreted as a toadying endorsement of Clinton’s unsavory and dishonest conduct, impeachable or not. It probably cost Gore the Presidency.

Worse yet was Trent Lott’s clumsy effort to praise the ancient, infirm and mentally failing Sen. Strom Thurmond at his 100th birthday party. Lott said, “I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have all these problems over all these years, either.” Thurmond, running on the Dixiecrat ticket, had opposed segregation, and Lott’s comment, less fact than flattery, made him sound like he longed for the days of Jim Crow and “white only”rest rooms. The lessons of these hyperbolic gaffes are similar: if the well-intentioned compliment concerns a public figure in historical context, historical exaggerations either appear to be unjust to history or its important figures, seem to make inappropriate value judgments, or come off as a blatant effort to mislead the public.

Rahm Emanuel hit the Trifecta with his fawning farewell to President Obama, as he left the White House to run for Mayor of Chicago. Obama, he said, is “the toughest leader any country could ask for, in the toughest times any president has ever faced.”

Wow. Continue reading →

Chris Plante and the Cupcakes: Why You Can’t Trust Talk Show Hosts

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

A new Gallup poll shows that the public’s trust in news media has plunged to discouraging new (but completely deserved) levels. One of the side effects of this, the inevitable and correct result of  the incompetence, arrogance and bias of journalists and editors every single day, is that the public has begun to trust even less trustworthy sources. For example, a large proportion of twenty-somethings get their primary news information from the Daily Show, which is today’s equivalent of using Bob Hope’s monologues as a current events resource. This is foolish beyond words, because Jon Stewart’s professional obligation is to be entertaining, provocative and funny, not fair, accurate, or responsible. Indeed, if he has an opportunity to make a hilarious joke and doesn’t do it because it would require distorting the truth, he’s breaching a professional duty. He’s accountable to no one; he has no ethical standards to meet. It is unfair to rely on Jon Stewart for the news. He doesn’t want your trust: don’t trust him.

Others…older, but no wiser…go to public issue talk shows as their primary news sources. These people are not journalists either. They may be lawyers, former military men, spooks, authors, agitators, stealth political candidates,  or pundits; they may also be comedians, satirists, blowhards, ignoramuses, idiots, misanthropes, radicals, cynics, phonies or bigots. Among their ranks are too many agendas to count, in addition to those they all share: they want you to listen to them and adopt their views of the world. Those agendas are not conducive to truth either.

Some of the talk show hosts are less trustworthy than others. Take Chris Plante, for example—a B-list conservative talk show host whose primary tools are smugness and mockery. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: “Dancing With The Stars” Judge Bruno Tonioli

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Bruno Tonioli, one of the judges on “Dancing With The Stars,” gave celebrity dance contestant Michael Bolton a lousy score for his lousy quickstep to the tune of “Hound Dog”with partner Chelsie Hightower, and reportedly Bolton’s  fellow dancing celebrities were “enraged”—especially since Tonioli said the performance was the “worst” dance he’s seen in 11 seasons. That may have been a little harsh, but not by much. His dancing was arguably not worse than, say, Tucker Carlson of a few seasons back, who never got out of a chair. Still, among past dance-challenged contestants who actually got on their feet, Bolton was about as bad as it gets. He made Kate Gosselin look like Cyd Charisse by comparison. Continue reading →

Three Strikes—Wait—Four? Five? on Christine O’Donnell

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

At some point, the Tea Party stalwarts are going to have to accept the fact that Christine O’Donnell is an untrustworthy, credential fabricating dud, much like Mark Kirk, the G.O.P. Senate candidate in Illinois who has been caught embellishing his resume with fantasy and exaggeration. Continue reading →

Attack Ad Ethics: Rep. Alan Grayson, Sinking to Expectations

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Rep. Alan Grayson (D) of Florida has his defenders, which means you can pretty much forget about fair play when you are dealing with any of them, too. The Florida Congressman is infamous for saying and repeating outrageous things about opponents and refusing to acknowledge that he was wrong or inappropriate. As I have written here often, some unethical conduct is so egregious that it precludes the possibility of it being an aberration or a mistake, and Grayson could be the poster boy for that principle. He has little regard for fairness, civility and truth, if defying any of these serves his purposes. Thus it is both unsurprising and comforting that the most unethical attack ad in this early campaign season come from him—comforting, because it proves the point. For Alan Grayson, unfair and dishonest attacks aren’t mistakes. They are a habit.

In a TV spot called “Draft Dodger, Grayson accuses his opponent of evading the Vietnam War draft, because “he doesn’t love this country.” Continue reading →

President Obama’s Perfect Lie

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

What is a perfect lie in politics? It is a lie that gives strength to one’s defenders, cast’s blame on one’s enemies, and yet the victims of the lie would rather let people believe it is true than correct it, because the truth will hurt even worse. These lies are rare, but when you have one, it is a wonderful thing to behold. There is only one problem with perfect lies.

They are still lies.

As Reason’s Matt Welch points out in devastating fashion, President Obama has found such a lie, and repeats it often, though it has no basis in fact whatsoever, and Obama has to know it has no basis in fact whatsoever. Here is the latest version, from a speech this week: Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: Christine O’Donnell Voters

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

It’s not a smear or a lie, and it certainly isn’t trivial. The upset winner of Delaware’s Republican Senate primary, Tea Party darling Christine O’Donnell, has a well-established pattern of irresponsible financial conduct, including living off of her campaign funds, a violation of Federal election law. She has not made a bona fide effort to support herself other than running for office, and she has a record of misleading and dishonest statements that show a reckless disrespect for candor and the truth.

In short, she is not trustworthy, and the fact that O’Donnell has her Tea Party rhetoric down pat doesn’t change the fact that it is just plain stupid to trust someone who is dishonest in her public statements and fiscally irresponsible in her private life to bring honor, integrity and fiscal restraint to Congress. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: White House Economic Adviser Austan Goolsbee

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

“The vice president was talking about the summer of recovery in reference to the Recovery Act, that you would see the creation of a series of infrastructure and other projects ramping up over the summer. And you did see that.”

—White House Economic Advisor Austan Goolsby, when asked on “Fox New Sunday” about Vice President Biden’s proclamation in June that this would be “the summer of recovery”—a predication that has fallen embarrassingly flat, and that sounded rash and even silly at the time.

Of course, nobody but nobody really believes that Biden wasn’t talking about jobs when called this the “summer of recovery.” Continue reading →

“Let the Buyer Beware”? How about “Let the Seller Be Fair” and “Let the Pitchman Beware”?

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

A recent perusal of some developments in the ghastly realm of false advertising suggests several conclusions:

1. Too many merchants and vendors traffic in deceit, misrepresentation, and out right lies in order to separate trusting customers from their money.

2. The law is a pretty blunt instrument when it comes to controlling this. Too many tricks and tricksters, seldom enough evidence.

3. The ancient common law rule of “Let the buyer beware!” is less a warning to gullible purchasers than it is a green light for unethical business practices.

4. For every instance of dishonest advertising that is stopped, there are probably hundreds that slip by.

5. Anti-government types looking for legitimate uses of taxpayer funds for critical government regulation of private enterprise should start here.

For example: Continue reading →

Vanity Size Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Esquire has revealed the result of its investigation, and it is this: many manufacturers of men’s pants routinely mislabel their products’ waist measurements, representing waist sizes as less, and sometimes considerably less, than they really are. Old Navy, by far the most outrageous of the size-liars, sells pairs of trousers with a 41 inch waist band as a 36. Other companies, like Hagar and The Gap, play the same game, though not as egregiously.

The practice is intentional, apparently, and even has a name in the industry—“vanity sizing.” The theory is that pants with smaller waist measurements make men feel better about their pot-bellied bodies, and thus have a competitive advantage over truthfully labeled pants. All other things being equal, a man is more likely to buy a comfortable pair of jeans that have a 36″ label on the waist than ones with a 38″ label. Continue reading →