KABOOM!! Dana Milbank’s New Record For Flagrantly Dishonest Punditry

Exploding head

I am through with Dana Milbank, and also with anyone who quotes him, relies on him, believes him or—take note, Washington Post—employs him. There must be some level of insulting, dishonest, toadying, intentionally misleading punditry that qualifies as intolerable, and Milbank’s latest column for the Washington Post—syndicated elsewhere so the maximum number of weak minds can be polluted—defined it. I’m not going to reprint a word of it for fear that it will poison the blog, or cause your head to explode like mine just did—but I can describe its thesis. Get this: Milbank decries a “crisis of the week political culture” in Washington, and blames the news media, Republicans and Congress for the shifting attention. I am suppressing a scream as I write this.

There is a “crisis of the week” political culture because the incredibly inept and incompetent President of the United States has mismanaged every conceivable aspect of the government’s policies, domestic and foreign, while maintaining incompetents and political hacks in key positions and sending the message that there will be no accountability for abject failure, and because, despite pledging unprecedented transparency, the standard operating procedure for this group of ideologically doctrinaire and skill-challenged group has been to posture, obfuscate, stall, mislead and lie until various ugly chickens come home to roost, and then to rely on the news media to accept absurd excuses, explanation and blame-shifting theories, chaos has been percolating beneath the surface in dozens of vital areas—oh yes, more bad news is coming—and the full measure of various disasters are finally becoming known.

There is a crisis of the week mentality because a new catastrophe caused by the epic incompetence of this Administration is being uncovered every week, and sometimes every day.

And Dana Milbank blames the political culture, as if it is making this stuff up.

And he expects readers to agree with him.

And a lot of them will.

Kaboom.

Continue reading

Euphemisms, Manipulation And Deceit On Illegal Immigration

Not that it isn't illegal for you to be here, but come on in anyway...

Not that it isn’t illegal for you to be here, but come on in anyway…

The U.S. needs to fix its illegal immigration policies, and deal with the millions of underground, and not so underground, illegals currently in the country, having children, getting benefits, often being abused and exploited while not integrating into U.S. society. This has been true for decades, and both parties, as well as the U.S. business community, Mexico, and the illegal immigrants themselves, share responsibility for allowing a major problem to metastasize into a crisis.

The proclivity of journalists to isolate blame to one participant in this fiasco to the exclusion of the others compounds the problem, by making a bi-partisan solution impossible and giving individuals a pass on accountability who deserve none. Even worse is the habit of the news media to adopt the misleading and dishonest terminology of open-border advocates and illegal immigrant activists. Attempting to use deceptive language, exaggerations and outright misrepresentations to make ethically dubious policies seem benign to the public has become standard practice among Democrats and progressives in the Obama era (Republicans and conservatives too, but at least at the present, less flamboyantly and with less success.) Abortion is promoted in terms that leave out any mention of the act at the center of the controversy: it’s about “choice.” Life? What life? As for the issue of how a nation maintains its security and rule of law when foreign citizens are entering the country in violation of those laws at will, the news media, like the President and others, works to make the central issue invisible. Continue reading

Five Ethics Observations On House Majority Leader Eric Canter’s Upset Primary Loss

CantorYesterday, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost the GOP primary in Virginia’s 7th District to virtually unknown economics professor Dave Brat, conservative hard-liner who was backed by the Tea Party wing of the Virginia Republican Party, and the some influential voices on local conservative talk radio. You can get political analysis, though precious little of it objective, almost anywhere you look. Here are some ethics observations:

1. The turnout for the primary was less than 15%. Here is what that means: citizens who give a damn get their way. That is as it should be. An eligible voter who can watch the mess in our national government and sit out any opportunity to make his or her voice heard and vote count is a lazy and irresponsible citizen. This means that in the Virgina 7th District, more than 8 out of 10 voters are lazy and irresponsible. To them I say: I don’t care what you think. You have shirked the sacred responsibility of self-government. Go find a king somewhere. You don’t understand or appreciate democracy, and you don’t deserve one. Continue reading

Chinese Food Ethics, Mexican Food Ethics

Chinese Food

In a dilemma reminiscent of my ice cream sundae problem last year, I faced the question of how to ethically respond to yet another food service botch. We ordered a modest dinner from the local Chinese carry-out establishment, and after we got the order home, discovered that it was missing an appetizer. It was raining hard, and when I called the restaurant, they agreed, after putting me through the third degree, that they had screwed up. They said they would deliver it. I was prepared to drive over and pick it up, but at least this allowed us to begin eating the rest of the dinner before it got cold. It took about a half an hour, but my precious pan-fried pork dumplings finally arrived, along with profuse apologizes from the deliverer.

The ethics issue: Should I tip him or not? Continue reading

The Reasonable, Ethical Firing of Maria Conchita Alonso

V_logo_currenteventsOnce again we confront a variation of the “Duck Dynasty” issue of entertainers losing their jobs over their expression of political, religious or other opinions that have nothing to do with their performances.

Actress María Conchita Alonso, who has been an outspoken advocate of conservative  policies on occasion, was recruited by the camp of the Tea Party candidate for governor of California, Tim Donnelly, to appear in a campaign video.  Donnelly is a hardliner on illegal immigration, or as supporters of open borders and stolen U.S. benefits of citizenship like to call it to blur the issues, “undocumented workers.”  Following the ad’s debut, many Hispanic residents of San Francisco protested and threatened to boycott the Brava Theater Center’s production of a Spanish-language version of “The Vagina Monologues,” which was starred the actress.

Not any more. Alonso “resigned”from the cast—actually she was the cast, since “The Vagina Monologues” is a one actress show—which means she was forced to quit or be fired. Continue reading

To Get Your Christmas Ethics Off To The Right Start…

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…the Complete Ethics Alarms “It’s A Wonderful Life” Ethics Guide is here.

Just in case you forgot!

Ethics Dunce: California

Oh, rats. There goes my head again...where's the duct tape?

Oh, rats. There goes my head again…where’s the duct tape?

The reductio ad absurdum of the debate over illegal immigration has reached its apotheosis in California, where Governor Brown actually signed into law a provision allowing illegal immigrants to be awarded licenses to practice law in the state. The law was designed to render moot the case of illegal immigrant Sergio Gomez, who was brought into the country as a child, managed to evade detection and enforcement through law school and the bar exam, and is now fighting to be admitted to the California Bar.

Garcia has said that being able to obtain a law license “is my life’s dream come true. One of two. I’m going for the U.S. citizenship next. I want to be a full part of this country.” Well, why stop at that bizarre sequence? Why not let Mexican citizens first become U.S. lawyers, and then aspire to sneak over the border some day and become U.S. citizens? Continue reading

Unethical Quote of the Month: Washington Post Book Reviewer Patrick Anderson

The_Best_Little_Whorehouse_in_Texas?????????????????????????

“The moral I draw from this richly detailed, terribly sad book is that, since prostitution will never be eliminated, it should be legalized.”

—-Washington Post book reviewer (and former Jimmy Carter speechwriter) Patrick Anderson, in the conclusion of his positive review of “Lost Girls,” a non-fiction about a series of prostitute killings.

Read that quote over and over again, as I have, and if you can tell me how an intelligent human being reaches the point where he (or she) considers such a statement logical, rational, responsible or ethical, please enlighten me.

I know there are people who think like this and applaud such sentiments, though on its face the position is utter nonsense. Substitute murder, or child porn, or incest, or wife-beating…official corruption, bribery, kick-backs…drunk driving, water pollution, cruelty to animals…any persistent blight on society and human interaction, and Anderson’s idiotic formula applies as well to it as it does to prostitution. Continue reading

The Illegal Immigration Bill: A 37 Year Ethics Train Wreck Rumbles On, With No End In Sight

trainwreck6

The details of the “immigration reform bill” moving through Congress like a water buffalo through a snake are less important than the fact that some action is being taken regarding a problem that has been cynically, incompetently, dishonestly and negligently allowed to fester since the last illegal immigrant accommodation law was passed in 1986. This is one of the rare cases in which doing almost anything is more responsible than doing nothing, and that is the beginning and the end of the list of the bill’s virtues. This is an ugly ethics train wreck  in which there are no heroes, only dunces and villains. There may be a worse one, but at the moment, I can’t think of it.

The 11,000,000 or more illegal aliens in this country have to be given some way to attain citizenship and get out of the shadows. That is an unavoidable, pragmatic reality, the best of a stinking pile of unethical options. All the rationalizations for doing this are unethical, except one: they are here, we allowed them to get here and allowed them to stay, and now we are out of choices. It’s our fault, which is to say our incompetent, irresponsible government’s, and now we have to swallow hard and accept the consequences. Continue reading

Of Teenage Tweets, Politics, Fairness, and Acorns

How about scrutinizing the trees, and not the acorns?

How about scrutinizing the trees, and not the acorns?

Two GOP Congressmen are apologizing for the offensive tweets of their teenage sons, as well they should. But to what extent do the homophobic, racist and otherwise vile social network comment of a couple of high school students with famous fathers tell us anything about their legislator parents? Are such communications newsworthy? Should the kids be exposed to “Gotchas!” as if they were the elected officials, not their dads, and are their indiscretions legitimate clubs for political and journalistic foes to beat their fathers with?

I think these are difficult ethics questions, and I don’t much care for any of them.  Let’s examine the ethical conduct of some of the participants in this icky drama: Continue reading