hypocrisy

Why The Gun Bill Deserved To Lose, and Why We Should All Be Glad It Did

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments
A bad day for Machiavelli is a good day for America.

A bad day for Machiavelli is a good day for America.

Consequentialism rules supreme in Washington, D.C.; that is the tragedy of our political system. If unethical conduct is perceived as having a positive outcome, few in D.C. will continue to condemn the means whereby those beneficial and lauded were achieved. Worse, the results will be seen as validating the tactics, moving them from the category of ethically objectionable into standard practice, and for both political parties

Thus we should all reluctantly cheer the likely demise of the Senate’s gun control bill yesterday. The compromise background check provision that failed wasn’t perfect, but it would have been an improvement over the current system. Nevertheless, the post-Sandy Hook tactics of gun control advocates, including the President and most of the media, have been so misleading, cynical, manipulative and offensive that their tactics needed to be discouraged by the only thing that has real influence in the nation’s Capital: embarrassing failure.

The tainted enterprise begins with the fact that it should not have been a priority at this time at all. Newtown did not signal a crisis; it was one event, and that particular bloody horse had left the barn. The supposedly urgent need to “prevent more Sandy Hooks” was imaginary, but it apparently served the President’s purpose of distracting attention from more genuinely pressing matters, notably the stalled employment situation and the need to find common ground with Republican on deficit and debt reduction. Meanwhile, the conditions in Syria have been deteriorating and North Korea is threatening nuclear war: why, at this time, was the President of the United states acting as if gun control was at the top of his agenda? It was irresponsible, placing political grandstanding above governing. In this context, Obama’s angry words yesterday about the bill’s defeat being caused by “politics” were stunningly hypocritical. The whole effort by his party was about nothing other than politics. Continue reading →

Integrity Check For Homeland Security: Profiling At The Boston Marathon Bombing

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments
...unless the government feels like it, in which case it's just fine. Got that?

…unless the government feels like it, in which case it’s just fine. Got that?

Shortly after the bombs went off in Boston, we were told that a “person of interest” was in custody and undergoing questioning. As detailed in a New Yorker piece, the young man who was apprehended and interrogated for five hours became a person of interest for one reason and one reason only: he “looked like a terrorist.” He was a Saudi national with a foreign name, and despite the fact that he was wounded in the blasts and acted no differently from any of the other horrified victims in the crowd, he was detained and his apartment was searched. Ultimately it was determined that he was innocent of wrongdoing, and he was released.

Oops! Never mind! Have a nice day!

Except I was under the impression that this practice, which is racial profiling beyond any question, was something this administration and the Dept. of Homeland Security rejected philosophically and practically. It is wrong, and it doesn’t work—or so those of us who are sick of going through invasive and time-consuming screenings at airports are told when we dare to suggest that there may be a better way than feeling up six-year-old girls and senile old men in wheelchairs. The conduct of agents and law enforcement officials in apprehending the young man for his garb, name and the color of his skin shows either that our government doesn’t really believe what it is telling us about profiling, or that it is willing to discard its human rights principles when the pressure is on. Which is it? I see no third explanation Continue reading →

Q: What Do You Get When You Cross The Cheerleading Prosecutor With President Obama? A: An Unethical Quote of the Week!

/ Jack Marshall / 148 Comments

“You have to be careful to, first of all, say she is brilliant and she is dedicated and she is tough, and she is exactly what you’d want in anybody who is administering the law, and making sure that everybody is getting a fair shake. She also happens to be, by far, the best looking attorney general in the country.”

—- President Obama, introducing California’s attorney general (and a possible future gubernatorial candidate) Kamala Harris, at a party fundraiser in Atherton, a wealthy suburb of San Francisco

Hey, she IS hot! I'd love to see HER shake her pom-poms! What is it she does again?

Hey, she IS hot! I’d love to see HER shake her pom-poms! What is it she does again?

You see, all you nay-sayers, another reason why it is inappropriate and unethical for a prosecutor to prominently display herself in the role of unadulterated male eye candy is that it reinforces this kind of subtle (well, not so subtle, really), insidious marginalization of female professionals that occurs daily in offices and places of business all over America. I have taught this in sexual harassment seminars for decades: when a male boss, manager, or superior references a woman’s attractiveness, beauty, or allure in a public settling, it relegates her and all women in that organization to second-class status, and reinforces the glass ceiling. Women who are the target of this sexist, if often innocently intended, practice are usually lulled by the flattery into dismissing such incidents. That has to change. They must register their objections to the speaker for their own sake and that of generations of women to come. Continue reading →

Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck Update: President Obama and the Rhetoric of Hate

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments
Juror 10 (Ed Begley), apparently Obama's inspiration

Juror 10 (Ed Begley), apparently Obama’s inspiration

Reginald Rose, together with Rod Serling and Paddy Chayefsky, formed the liberal writing troika that created some of the most memorable and important dramatic works of the live television era. None were better than Rose’s “Twelve Angry Men,” a unique, brilliant, real-time portrayal of ordinary men trying to wend their ways through their own limitations and biases to achieve justice under the law. Among its memorable characters is the bigot in the room, a nasty, hate-filled man who ultimately explodes in a rant against the defendant in a murder case, a member of some minority group—Rose never tells us which, because it doesn’t make any difference which. The bigot, Juror 10, says in part…

“…If somebody gets killed, so somebody killed. They don’t care…oh, sure, there are good things about them. Look, I’d be the first one to say that. I’ve known some who were okay, but that’s the exception.”

Rose, who was a Jew, knew that kind of rhetoric well, the condescending, sneering faint praise of the hate-monger. I wonder what Mr. Rose, whom I once had the pleasure of speaking to, would have said about a U.S. President who had pledged to reject the “politics of divisiveness and hate,” and went on to say this to a partisan audience, as Barack Obama did yesterday:

“And I do believe that there are well-meaning Republicans out there who care about their kids just as passionately as we do.” Continue reading →

Jay Leno, Age Discrimination, And Our Cultural Hypocrisy

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments
Jay Leno, when he was talented.

Jay Leno, when he was talented.

One of the purposes of laws is to point the culture toward more ethical awareness and eventually, conduct. In the case of age discrimination, however, this isn’t working very well, and the recent foofaraw surrounding Jay Leno’s forced exit from the “Tonight Show” gives us some hints of why this is so.

NBC and the TV reporters covering the situation (in case you have a life: Leno has been forced to give up his 30 year reign at NBC’s flagship late night show in favor of his current follow-up on the NBC schedule, the lighter-than-air Jimmy Fallon) do not disguise the reason for Leno’s ouster: he is old, or at least considerably older than Fallon. Never mind that Jay still leads in the ratings over the despicable David Letterman, the Hell-spawn Jimmy Kimmel, and Jay’s former victim, poor, betrayed Conan O’Brien at TBS. Leno is 62, so he and his gray hair are being jettisoned by NBC in its fear that Kimmel, recently installed as competition by ABC, will siphon off more and more of the younger demographic that sponsors crave. I would think it would be much easier to tell Leno to start encouraging parents to torture their children too, but hey, what do I know?

What is telling is that nobody seems to see anything wrong with this. Old guys are a drag, we all know that, I guess. How many MSNBC hosts and Democratic Party flacks have loudly proclaimed that the Republican Party’s problem is that it is run by old guys? Old guys are trouble, sooner or later, so it certainly makes sense that anyone running a business or an organization figures out ways to dump them in favor of new blood, unless that pesky law stuff gets in the way. Then, of course, age discrimination is bad, bad, bad. Continue reading →

A Party Of Portmans, Of Cynics, Of Losers, Or No Party At All

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

GOP-ButtonThe just released GOP post mortem on the 2012 election is either wishy-washy, cynical, ambiguous or confused, depending on your level of charity. Personally, I would call it useless, as any internal assessment is likely to be when an organization knows that it will be dissected by unfriendly critics and used against them by outright enemies. It is also depressing.

In its essence, the report is about “messaging,” a.k.a marketing, a.k.a. “making people like what you’re peddling by not really letting them know the truth about it.” Undeniably, the Democrats have been better at this in recent years, as passing Obamacare without ever explaining what was in it either to the public or the legislators voting for it, running in 2008 as the tonic for all of George W. Bush’s supposed assaults on human and Constitutional rights and then pretty much adopting all of them and a couple more, like drone strikes, and perhaps most of all, making “transparency” a centerpiece of the 2008 campaign and then delivering a governing style that is anything but. “Messaging” to political parties means “lying” to the so-called “low information voter,” and no doubt about it, the Democrats were better at lying—not necessarily more prolific at it, now, but better—than Republicans in 2012

They must be so proud.

Thus the post mortem lurches between vague appeals to messaging and disturbing assertions that principle and integrity are just too darn risky in 2013 America. For example, the report notes that Republicans were tarred as the party of the rich–hardly a new label, based on those 1920’s political cartoons I have on file, but apparently more Americans don’t like rich people, and would rather be poor people who take the rich people’s money, or something…the report isn’t quite clear on why being rich in America is now somehow a bad thing. The report, therefore, seems to suggest a range of alternatives: Continue reading →

No Hero He: Sen. Portman Demonstrates How To Make Doing The Right Thing Look Terrible

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments
PortmanQuayleTracy

Guess Who’s A Hypocrite?

Sen. Rob Portman’s sudden reversal of his long-held and vocally expressed revulsion toward everything gay—including marriage—is being hailed by some as a virtuous, generous, open-minded and courageous act. It is nothing of the sort.

Portman’s change was precipitated by the fact that his own son….that is, a real person he  cares about…revealed that he was gay, requiring Portman to choose between following through, in ways that would, for the first time, have unpleasant personal consequences, on his supposedly deeply held, faith-based opposition to gay rights in America, or to abandon those core moral beliefs in the time it takes to throw out an ill-fitting pair of pants. What Portman has gone through is a classic “foxhole conversion,” in the manner of the atheist who suddenly finds God when death is near and it seems wise to hedge his bets.

There is nothing courageous or admirable about this at all. To the contrary, it proves that Portman’s earlier position condemning people like his son was based on political expediency, ignorance, recklessness, cold disregard for anyone not like him, or dishonesty, and I really don’t care which.

We have seen such conduct from the Right before, memorably in Dan Quayle’s admission that despite his absolute conviction, or so he had said, that abortion was morally wrong and ought to be illegal even in cases of rape or incest, he would, hypothetically, support his teen-aged daughter’s decision to have an abortion because he loved her. We have seen it from the Left, too, as in the situation memorably dramatized in the film “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner?” Individuals who advocate political, economic, moral and policy positions that they would oppose in the jerk of a knee if they had real, personal consequences are undercover hypocrites. They have not applied the Golden Rule;  how they would feel if the were in the position of those whose lives they so cavalierly would affect has never entered their consciousness. What this flip-flop tells us about Sen. Rob Portman is that nobody should respect or take notice of what he thinks or says he thinks, and that having such a man casting one of a hundred votes in the U.S. Senate means that the body is, at best, only 99% responsible, competent or trustworthy. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week, Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck Division: WSJ Blogger James Taranto

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

“It’s like a proponent of laws against hate speech standing on a street corner shouting racial slurs in order to “demonstrate how easy it is” to say offensive things under the First Amendment. Of course it’s ‘easy’ to do something that is perfectly legal and protected by the Constitution. That doesn’t mean you ought to do it, especially if you claim to believe it is wrong.”

—–Wall Street Journal blogger, pundit and wit James Taranto, describing the “stupid stunt”perpetrated  by Mark Kelly, the husband of  former Rep. Gaby Giffords, in which he purchased the kind of weapon he and his wife have been lobbying Congress to ban, a so-called “assault weapon,” in order to “demonstrate how easy it is to obtain” one.

At least Kelly didn’t break the law, like David Gregory, to show how easy it was to get an illegal magazine in Washington, D.C.

 

If this is the best argument you have...be quiet.

If this is the best argument you have…be quiet.

Is this hypocrisy? No, it’s not hypocrisy. Kelly’s act is reminiscent, though not as certifiably cretinous, of stunt pulled by the foolish Ronald Miller, who walked into his child’s school and announced that he was going to start shooting people, just to show that he could. Kelly proved nothing. To someone who believes that a law-abiding citizen who believes he needs an assault weapon to protect his family against home invaders, Rodney King-style riots or the breakdown of civilization (never mind what Joe Biden or Andrew Cuomo think he needs), Kelly’s purchase proved only that the system works: a law-abiding citizen can buy a legal gun. The Horror. To anti-gun crusaders, Kelly proved that a gun they think should be made illegal is legal—but presumably they already knew that. Kelly was trying to demonstrate that legal conduct should be made illegal because people can currently do it?

Okaaaaay… Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: The Hugo Chavez Fan Club (Michael Moore, Sean Penn, Rep. Jose Serrano (D-NY), Oliver Stone and Joe Kennedy III

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments
"We love you Hugo, we really do-oo! There isn't anyone, we love like you-oo! When you're not with us, we're blue! Oh, Hugo, we love you!"---From the new musical, "Bye-Bye Chavez," written by Oliver Stone, starring Sean Penn!

“We love you Hugo, we really do-oo! There isn’t anyone, we love like you-oo! When you’re not with us, we’re blue! Oh, Hugo, we love you!”—From the new musical, “Bye-Bye Chavez,” written by Oliver Stone, starring Sean Penn!

What do we learn from those who mourn the passing of Venezuelan autocrat Hugo Chavez and praise his leadership? Chavez leaves his nation with a corrupted judiciary, an intimidated and manipulated press, a soaring violent crime rate, massive debt, crumbling infrastructure, galloping inflation, government-sanctioned anti-Semitism, and the prospect of political instability for the foreseeable future. When we hear an American praise Chavez, we learn that he or she neither trusts or values the institutions of democracy, like a free press and independent judiciary. We learn that such an individual believes that indeed the ends justify the means; that lies, repression, manipulation of news and public opinion, cultism, divisiveness and class warfare are all forgivable and even laudable in pursuit of “social justice,” roughly defined in the manner of Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Castro, murderers all. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week: The Washington Post Editors

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

“To govern is to choose. By missing Friday’s deadline for averting $85 billion worth of across-the-board spending cuts to defense and domestic programs, Congress and President Obama have chosen not to govern. Instead, each side has concluded that its interest lies in letting the “sequester” proceed as scheduled — and then trying to win the political blame game….”

—-The Washington Post, in its lead editorial today, as the sequester deadline passed.

gordian-knot1While so many other Obama supporting media organizations continue to absolve the President for any responsibility in this disgraceful episode, his hometown newspaper, blue as blue can be, has been uniquely  fair and objective on this issue. The Post’s blueness manifests itself in overly-gentle terms to describe conduct that deserves far harsher terms, much as Bob Woodward’s using the term “mistake” to describe President Obama’s claim that he didn’t propose the sequester in the first place, when the accurate term is certainly “lie.”  For example, the Post editors, later in their piece, say this: Continue reading →