hypocrisy

So…The Second Gentleman Running For First Gentleman Impregnated His Nanny During His First Marriage and Slapped a Date In the Face: Is That a Problem?

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

By the established standards of the news media and the rest of the Axis of Unethical Conduct, it should be, don’t you think? But apparently not.

Huh.

A throbbing example of wildly varying standards in the media depending on whether they are covering Donald Trump or Kamala Harris just raised its warty head. Did you see that Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris’s husband who was largely invisible until she pushed President Biden off the Democratic ticket, admitted he had an adulterous affair with his nanny and got her pregnant, leading to his divorce? That happened in August, after the slimy Daily Mail broke the scandal and Emhoff came clean to CNN. I missed it entirely, which means that, for example, the New York Times either ignored it or soft-peddled it because, well, you know. But the story burst on the social media scene this week after ex-Obama paid liar Jen Psaki, now a full-time Axis propagandist at MSNBC, interviewed Emhoff and gushed that he had “reshaped the perception of masculinity.” “Has that been an evolution for you and do you think that’s part of the role you might play as first gentleman?” Psaki continued. Yecchh. That was nauseating enough (no Vice-President’s spouse has the power, visibility or status to “reshape” anything), but Emhoff’s answer exploded heads from coast to coast.

Continue reading →

Harris Is Losing the Meme Wars, So Naturally Democrats Want To Censor Memes

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Who would have expected the AI metaphorical tidal wave to have an influence on the Presidential election? Memes are a breeze to make using artificial intelligence, and while I got heartily sick of my Facebook friends bombarding me with political ones, I have to admit that the technology has the silver lining of taking blunt and biased punditry out of the political cartoonist monopoly and letting some very witty people make satirical political statements.

So far, at least, it appears that conservatives have mastered meming before the Left has, and in this race for President, that is having impact, though how much and how significant is impossible to tell. However, it is clear that the Kamala-Harris-as-a-Communist memes are getting under the skin of some Democrats—one of my Trump-Deranged relatives was complaining about those just yesterday—and so now there are calls for “something to be done” about anti-Harris memes. On MSNBC’s “The Sunday Show,” NPR’s Maria Hinojosa was very upset about AI images of Harris presented in Maoist uniforms:

Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: President Joe Biden

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

“Some things are more important than staying in power.”

—-President Biden at the U.N., stumbling through his speech on world affairs even with the assistance of his teleprompter.

Even though our President is demented, deluded, habitually dishonest and without shame, I am still astounded that he would have the gall to say that at the United Nations. I guess he thinks the delegates are as stupid and gullible as his party evidently thinks the U.S. public is.

No, the context of that head-exploding statement doesn’t make it less nauseating:

Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: Hillary Clinton

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“I think it’s important to indict the Russians, just as Muller indicted a lot of Russians who were engaged in direct election interference and boosting Trump back in 2016. But I also think there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda. And whether they should be civilly or even in some cases criminally charged is something that would be a better deterrence, because the Russians are unlikely, except in a very few cases, to ever stand trial in the United States.”

—-Ethics Villain Hillary Clinton, on MSNBC (of course) this week, as Rachel Maddow nodded in agreement.

The irony and hypocrisy in Hillary’s statement are striking. After all, it it was her campaign that funded the infamous Steele dossier and spread false stories of Russian collusion during her failed 2016 Presidential run, culminating in the investigation Democrats used to cripple and delegitimize the Trump Presidency. Meanwhile, Hillary remains an icon to the same party that claims Donald Trump is a threat to American liberty, and much of the insane hate the Axis has been focusing on Trump since 2016 was inspired by his “crime” of stopping Clinton from becoming President.

__________

Pointer: Jonathan Turley

Ethics Quiz: The Onion’s Sick Joke

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

A tweet by the once-dominant satire site “The Onion” has sparked a battle on “Twitter/X” and in the conservative blogosphere:

Your Ethic Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:

Are the objections by conservatives and Trump fans hypocritical in light of the Right’s widespread mockery of  progressive reactions to  insufficiently sensittive or politically incorrect humor?

“The Onion Thinks It’s Funny Corey Comperatore was Murdered at Trump’s Rally,” protests Legal Insurrection. “The tweet has over 80,000 likes, too. What is wrong with people!?” “The Simpsons'” Krusty the Clown might ask, “Too soon?” The black humor attempt is certainly no more insensitive than the jokes about the Japanese tsunami that got the late Gilbert Gottfried fired as the voice of the Aflack duck, and, I blush to say, I found those both horrible and amusing.

Continue reading →

Outrageous Hypocrite of the Month: Liz Cheney

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

It continues to amaze to me that there are (once) intelligent and objective people who regard Liz Cheney as anything but a raging, emotion-driven, warped political hack at this point. The Axis and the Trump-Deranged like her for the obvious reasons, but isn’t there some point where even a mouth-foaming Trump-Hater is too silly to take seriously? Cheney crashed through that DETOUR sign when she signed onto Nancy Pelosi’s “Get Trump!” star chamber “investigating” the January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol.

Continue reading →

Stop Making Me Defend Michigan’s Proto-Totalitarian Democrats

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Michigan might have the most sinister and anti-American Democratic Party of all. It’s certainly a tough competition, with New York, Minnesota, Washington, California, D.C. and a few others in the race, but Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer is special (she was a particularly heinous enemy of civil rights during the pandemic) and any party that would allow someone like anti-Semitic Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib to run under its banner has decency and integrity issues.

The state just threw independent presidential candidate Cornel West off its ballot, and many conservatives and Republicans see evidence of a conspiracy to rig the election for KAmala Harris. “Call me paranoid if you wish, but it’s almost as if the Democrats don’t want voters to show up at the polls on November 5 and see the name of anyone from any party or no party at all on their ballots except for Kamala Harris,” writes P.J. Media pundit Jazz Shaw.

Michigan elections director Mark Brewer sent a letter to West’s campaign saying that his affidavit of identity submitted with his ballot application was “not properly notarized.” The affidavit was notarized in Colorado and had to be valid in that state to be valid in Michigan as well. “There were apparently a couple of boxes left blank and the notary public stamp for the affidavit was attached on a separate piece of paper rather than on the document itself,” Shaw reveals. More from Jazz, who concludes in part:

Yes, that was it. That was the entirety of the complaint. In fairness to the Michigan elections director, they did send West’s campaign a letter in late July giving him a couple of weeks to respond and West never responded. This should have all been able to be cleaned up easily, but it wasn’t so the Democrats pounced. The original complaint was filed by former Michigan Democratic Party Chairman Mark Brewer in case you’re wondering why I’m generically blaming “the Democrats” here.

So what’s the real reason behind all of this and why would the Democrats care about Cornel West? He wasn’t going to carry any states or win the White House. …But that doesn’t mean that Cornel West’s presence or absence might not have a significant impact on the final results. This would be particularly true in Michigan where the presidential race is tighter than razor wire…That’s the reality of what is going on behind the scenes….West was identified as a potential threat to Biden and now to Harris. So he had to go. They scraped up Mark Brewer to have someone pore over West’s ballot application documents with a magnifying glass and find some sort of flaw to use as a basis for their complaint….They found a compliant judge to go along with a trivial complaint over what amounted to a technicality and West was unceremoniously kicked to the curb. Welcome to the rough and tumble world of modern Democratic politics as they desperately scramble to maintain their hold on power at any cost.

The Democrats cheat, as we have seen repeatedly this year and before. That party, as it has mutated in the 21st century, indeed will do anything and take actions that once were regarded as unthinkable in the American political culture to continue its slow eradication of Constitutional government. This episode, however, is not an example of that.

Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Chaya Raichik

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Chaya Raichik, the industrious conservative gadfly who infuriates the Left by posting the most ridiculous and self-indicting TikTok videos by unhinged progressives, definitely has a nasty side. Exposing public figures, celebrities, local officials, scholars, professors, teachers, corporate execs, prominent athletes, “influencers,” Hollywood stars and would-be activists is an admirable (and useful) pursuit—after all, they post the stuff that makes them look ridiculous or sinister and know that what they say gets noticed. Such statements also often demonstrate why they should not continue in their chosen professions. Siccing the social media mob on a typical working American who posts something dumb on Facebook is very different. It is cruel.

Recently Raichik’s Libs of TikTok account has expanded its target range to private Facebook posts that included ugly comments on the near assassination of Donald Trump. (I could point her to some by my Trump-Deranged friends.) “To bad they weren’t a better shooter!!!!!” was the witty if ungrammatical retort Darcy Waldron Pinckney posted on Facebook to her modest number of FB friends. She worked at Home Depot, but not after the influential anti-woke warrior launched her (also misspelled) “quip” into cyberspace hyperdrive. A week ago, Raichik posted a screenshot of Pinckney’s comment with her photo (above) and wrote, “Hi @HomeDepot! Are you aware that you employ people who call for political violence and the ass*ss*nat*on of Presidents? Any comment?”

Continue reading →

An Expert Bemoans How Experts Have Destroyed the Public’s Trust in Them While She Misleads the Public In Her Criticism

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Zeynep Tufekci, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University, seemed to be leveling harsh criticism at the health community. “Under questioning by a congressional subcommittee, top officials from the National Institutes of Health, along with Dr. Anthony Fauci, acknowledged that some key parts of the public health guidance their agencies promoted during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic were not backed up by solid science,” she wrote. “What’s more, inconvenient information was kept from the public — suppressed, denied or disparaged as crackpot nonsense…Officials didn’t just spread these dubious ideas, they also demeaned anyone who dared to question them…Dr. David Morens, a senior N.I.H. figure, was deleting emails that discussed pandemic origins and using his personal account so as to avoid public oversight. “We’re all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails and if we found them we’d delete them,” he wrote to the head of a nonprofit involved in research at the Wuhan lab.”

Her condemnation appeared uncompromising: “I wish I could say these were all just examples of the science evolving in real time, but they actually demonstrate obstinacy, arrogance and cowardice. Instead of circling the wagons, these officials should have been responsibly and transparently informing the public to the best of their knowledge and abilities. Their delays, falsehoods and misrepresentations had terrible real-time effects on the lives of Americans. Failure to acknowledge the basic facts of Covid transmission led the authorities to pointlessly close beaches and parks, leaving city dwellers to huddle in the much more dangerous confines of cramped and poorly ventilated apartments. The same failure also delayed the opening of schools and caused untold millions of dollars to be wasted.”

Continue reading →

This Isn’t a Baseball Ethics Post, It’s a “Money Makes Organizations Forget Their Core Values” Post

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Gee, what a surprise.

Major League Baseball, almost destroyed by a gambling scandal in 1919, with two of its greatest players, Shoeless Joe Jackson and Pete Rose (its all-time hit leader), banned from the game and exiled from the Hall of Fame for participating in baseball gambling (Jackson helped throw a World Series for gamblers; that’s him above. He was no Ray Liotta, was he?), is suddenly awash in new gambling scandals. How could this happen, you may ask? Easy. Once the Supreme Court opened the door to online gambling, all of the professional sports leaped into the money pit. Now online sports gambling outfits like DraftKings are the most ubiquitous sponsors of televised sports. In the middle of televised Red Sox games, the screen will show the odds on bets like “Will Rafael Devers hit a homerun?” David Ortiz, a lifetime Red Sox hero and icon, stars in commercials for DraftKings. The obvious message is that gambling on baseball is fun, virtuous, harmless, and…

For Major League Baseball, with its history, of all sports, to take this U-Turn was wildly irresponsible and perilous. How can the sport maintain the fan’s trust in the legitimacy of games played in an environment where billions are being wagered on them, openly and without any fear of corrupting the players?

Fay Vincent, the last real baseball commissioner (the first one was appointed because of the Black Sox scandal in 1919) told the Times, “The inevitability of corruption is triggered by the enormous amount of money that’s at stake. When you pour all this gambling money into baseball, or all the professional sports — or for that matter, even amateur sports — that amount of money is so staggering that eventually the players and I think, tragically, the umpires, the regulators, everybody is going to be tempted to see if they can get a million dollars.”

Vincent is an ethical man. The current “commissioner” (he’s the owners’ toady, just like Bud Selig, his predecessor), not so much. In a statement reacting to baseball this week banning one Major League Player for life for gambling on his own team and suspending four more for a year, Rob Manfred ludicrously said, “The strict enforcement of Major League Baseball’s rules and policies governing gambling conduct is a critical component of upholding our most important priority: protecting the integrity of our games for the fans. The longstanding prohibition against betting on Major League Baseball games by those in the sport has been a bedrock principle for over a century.”

Funny that after decades of no gambling scandals, baseball is suddenly drowning in them. What a coinkydink!

Continue reading →