incivility

Now THIS Is Hypocrisy: Rep. Michael Capuano (D-Mass.)

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Rep. Capuano says it's time...

Ethics Alarms has expanded its tutorial subject matter. We began by helping the satire and metaphor-challenged understand what does and didn’t constitute incivility ( putting Sarah Palin in a Victorian satirical song, no; calling Republicans Nazis, yes) and now will add the elusive concept of “hypocrisy” to the course list, for those, like Rush Limbaugh, who are confused about that as well.

Today’s lesson: Democratic Representative Michael Capuano of Somerville, Mass. When Arizona loon Jared Loughner killed a little girl, a judge, some other Arizonans, and grievously wounded Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Capuano was one of the Democrats who joined with some shameless voices in the media to suggest that the madman’s rampage was provoked by hot partisan rhetoric….specifically conservative rhetoric, since the victim was a Democrat. Continue reading →

The Maine Incivility Project

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Thank goodness for the Maine Incivility Project.

With all the talk about incivility sparked by the media’s determination to blame a madman’s shooting rampage on Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and the Tea Party, it rapidly became evident that civility is a somewhat elusive concept. For example, while shouting “You lie!” at the President while he is speaking is definitely uncivil, arguing that the President was really foreign born isn’t—it’s stupid, but not uncivil. Calling Rush Limbaugh “a Big, Fat, Idiot” in the title of your book, as Sen. Al Franken did, is uncivil, as is calling Nancy Pelosi “the Wicked Witch of the West,” as Rush Limbaugh did. Using cross-hairs to designate Democratic House seats that Republicans are “gunning for'”, “targeting” or “taking aim at”, on the other hand, is not uncivil…just unsettling if one is metaphor-challenged or hoplophobic (having a pathological fear of guns.)

Never fear, however. Before the echoes  of President Obama’s call for Americans to come together had barely faded, the public got a handy lesson from the Governor of Maine about what incivility sounds like, as his term launches the new Maine Incivility Project. Continue reading →

Blood Libel Ethics and the U.S. News Media’s Integrity Dead End

/ Jack Marshall / 75 Comments

First you make a baseless, inflammatory accusation–the Big Lie. Then you attack your victim for how she responds to it.

The news media’s self-destructive obsession with discrediting Sarah Palin has reached its ethical nadir, and with it any reasonable hope that U.S. journalism, as currently practiced, will be returning to credibility and respectability within the foreseeable future. Continue reading →

Now THIS, On The Other Hand, Promotes Political Violence:

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The good news, I suppose, is that the Palmetto State Armory decided to take down its webpage advertising the “You lie!” etched rifle component, in belated recognition of the fact that promoting such a product after the Tucson shootings would be irresponsible and in terrible taste. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.)

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I know that Ethics Alarms has been a bit relentless regarding the accusations and the innuendos against Sarah Palin and others in the wake of the Arizona shooting, but it is an unusually widespread out-break of unfair conduct, and the Ethics Dunces are coming in waves, and from all sides and sectors.

We have a sheriff on the scene, Clarence Dupnik, who seems determined to create the assassin’s defense for him, by claiming, in the face of much evidence to the contrary, that he was driven to violence by inflammatory political rhetoric. Watch Loughner’s crack criminal defense team run with that. We have the nation’s supposedly premiere news source, the New York Times, running a revolting editorial describing Loughner’s attack as political, when this is clearly not true. (An excellent condemnation of the Times piece by James Taranto can and should be read here). Not to be outdone, Rep. James Clyburn (S.C.), the third-ranking House Democrat, took the same low road. Referencing defeated G.O.P. Senate candidate Sharron Angle’s justly criticized “Second Amendment solution” statement from the campaign (it probably, and justly, lost her the election), Clyburn tied it to Jared Loughner’s attack. Continue reading →

Ethics Final For Barack Obama

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Is President Obama the fair, ethical, unifying, anti-partisan president of all the people that he promised to be in 2008, or is he a Machiavellian, undercover Chicago pol, willing and ready to use divisiveness and deceit to enhance his power, silence critics and advance his agenda? During the past two years, there has been ample evidence supporting both descriptions, but his address in Arizona Wednesday could settle the issue. If the President emulates his Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton, using the massacre in Arizona as a political wedge the way Clinton used the Oklahoma City bombing—if he adopts the philosophy of former Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emmanuel that one should never waste a crisis—then we will know the dispiriting truth about Barack Obama. Continue reading →

On the Post-Shooting Finger-Pointing Apology Watch

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

It may be that the first apology for the partisan rush to lay twenty shootings and five deaths at the doorstep of the Tea Party, Sarah Palin, and conservatives came from Arizona Daily Star’s cartoonist, Dave Fitzsimmons, and the paper itself in an editorial today. It began with a statement from the cartoonist, and continued: Continue reading →

Partisan Opportunism: The Media and the Arizona Massacre:

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

The shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, a Federal judge, and 18 others yesterday has exposed media bias and unfairness at its despicable worst. That so many reporters, commentators and bloggers learned of  Arizona parking lot carnage and immediately thought, “Wow, what a chance this is to pin everything on Sarah Palin and the Tea Party!” speaks volumes about the ethics and integrity of America’s journalists. The Daily Beast, for example, began a column this way:

“No motives have emerged from today’s senseless shooting in Tucson, but Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords has a long history of being targeted by the Tea Party—sometimes in violent terms.”

Is there a shred, an inkling, a hint or a clue anywhere that the man who did the shooting had anything whatsoever to do with the Tea Party? No. Is there anything at all linking Tea Party rhetoric to his motives for the shooting? No. So how can this paragraph be explained? Easy. The Daily Beast doesn’t like the Tea Party movement, and saw this horrific shooting as an opportunity to discredit it. Continue reading →

Chris Matthews and Politically Correct Racism On the Left

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

“Chris Christie is moon over New Jersey, he should not wear white shirts, I tell you that. I saw him the other day and I was amazed by it, he must be 300 plus, and that’s something he’s just gotta deal with because you’re not going to say, ‘I’m going to cut the budget,’ well, how about starting with supper?”

That was Chris Matthews during an appearance in Washington, D.C., mocking New Jersey Governor Chris Cristie, not for his positions, not for his performance in his job, but because of his looks, specifically his weight. Later in the same session, Matthews criticized Mississippi Governor Hailey Barbour for his waist size. It isn’t only Matthews; media liberals have been using Rush Limbaugh’s weight as a punchline for years. Ted Kennedy, Gerald Nadler, Madeleine Albright and Charlie Rangel, however, were immune: being fat is only a justification for insults if one is conservative and fat. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

“I know how the “tea party” people feel, the anger, venom and bile that many of them showed during the recent House vote on health-care reform. I know because I want to spit on them, take one of their “Obama Plan White Slavery” signs and knock every racist and homophobic tooth out of their Cro-Magnon heads.”

——Washington Post columnist Courtland Malloy

That’s it, Courtland, just the ticket for helping to cool the inflammatory rhetoric, encourage mutual respect and restore civil discourse. As long as it makes you feel better, go ahead and use your space in the Washington Post to be just as hateful as those whose conduct you deplore. Next step: call anyone a Cro-Magnon racist who takes you to task for it.

Any journalist or columnist who stoops to this kind of irresponsible and emotional name-calling needs to be taken off the job and given a nice, long paid vacation in the Bahamas to get his perspective back. There is too much primal screaming in print already, and it only raises tensions and entrenches both bad feelings and bad conduct. Malloy has been simmering for a long time, so his outburst comes as little surprise. A responsible newspaper, however is foolish to print such a column.