Principled, thoughtful, erudite, serious and informed conservative pundit George Will has announced that he has officially left the Republican Party, changing his status in Maryland, where he resides, to unaffiliated. He urged conservatives not to support presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump even if it leads to a Democratic victory in the 2016 presidential election.
“Make sure he loses. Grit their teeth for four years and win the White House,” Will said during an interview after his a Federalist Society speech in which he said, “This is not my party.”
I have read Will for as long as he has written, and heard him speak twice. This has to be hard for him, but it also is the only decision for someone who cares about and understands language, law, values, leadership, history, U.S. culture and the duties of citizenship. He is modelling integrity, as clearly as Paul Ryan, for example, is not.
This is what integrity looks like. Though Will does not profess to have any hope that the GOP will have the courage or determination to reject Trump at this point, his announcement still increases the pressure on the party to do so.
It is sad and yet somehow comforting to watch the members of the crypto-totalitarian left writhe like Vlad the Impaler’s staked victims (above) as they try to deny, accuse, spin and otherwise humiliate themselves arguing against the factual assertion that the anti-gun “no-fly list” = no gun rights ploy is blatantly unconstitutional, a breach of due process, and “pre-crime” legislation. It is sad, because it shows how far liberal ideology has fallen from its traditional aspirations, and how hypocritical it has become, embracing the “by any means necessary” approach to political power rather than actually respecting the civil rights it claims to worship. It is comforting, because it is signature significance. I thought much of the progressive movement had become this corrupt and intellectually dishonest; now I know I wasn’t being unfair. This single episode proves it.
There is an ethical response to be adopted by someone previously cheering on the foolish Senator Murphy, or the smugly ignorant Ashleigh Banfield, once they are forced to think a bit about what these secret list tactics really mean in Constitutional terms. They don’t have to attack the messenger, often me, or make non sequitur statements about the Second Amendment is about muskets and militias. That ethical response is, “Oh. You know, I was so upset, I never thought about it that way, but you’re right. Wow. Thank-you.”
Most of them just can’t do it. It may be a lack of character, it may be a case of emotion killing brain cells, it may just be that an individual isn’t very bright, or that he just doesn’t want to be educated. That is, however, the ethical response.
If my floundering, foundering progressive friends want some inspiration to get them over the hump, I may have it for them, ironically from, of all places, Mother Jones, whose due process -mocking headline I recently dissected. That far left publications’ most prominent journalist is Kevin Drum, a progressive to his core. He is, however, also well-informed, intelligent, and true to his principles, and thus, while reporting on the various anti-gun measures being proposed as part of the cynical Democratic “DO SOMETHING!” initiative regarding guns, Kevin Drum wrote,Continue reading →
In 2013, I wrote about what appeared to be a retreat by the Marines in the face of pressure to admit more women into the Corps. At the time, it looked like the Marines would be joining a shabby parade.
For example, some fire departments have allowed political correctness, feminist threats, irrational diversity ideology and fear of “disparate impact” lawsuits to lead to their lowering of fitness standards to allow more women to be firefighters, if weak and dangerously unqualified ones.
The USMC is having none of that, apparently, despite itys tactical delay in 2013. Accepting the new policy that now allows women to qualify for combat duty, the Marine Corps has established new fitness requirements that have weeded out six of seven female recruits as well as forty out of about 1,500 male recruits who failed to pass the new regimen of pull-ups, ammunition-can lifts, a 3-mile run and combat maneuvers required to be certified combat-ready.
That’s fine. It would be fine if 6 out of 7 male recruits failed. There should be no affirmative action when diversity for diversity’s sake results in a less effective work force regardless of the tasks involved, but especially when putting thumbs, fists and feet on the scales will get people killed.
In fact, in a decade or so, when gene splicing, changing cultural norms, elective breeding and the unconditional surrender of the male gender in the War Against Women results in the average American woman being 6’2 and looking like this…Continue reading →
I don’t watch the NBA any more. The reason is that the games are so obviously subject to manipulation by bias that it is, well, not quite as dubious for legitimate sport as professional wrestling, but still too much so to be worth my time…or yours, frankly, but people spend time cheering for pro wrestlers too.
The problem is the referees, who have so much discretion in calling fouls that they can make the game turn out any way they choose. The fact that the NBA has such a huge home court advantage despite the fact that all courts are the same is also suspicious. Baseball, in contrast, with fields that vary materially in size and dimensions, has a very small home team edge. Biases, intentional or subconscious, control pro basketball, accounting for oddly frequent games decided in the last ten minutes, a propensity for allowing superstars to get away with infractions that lesser players do not, and seven game play-off series.
Sorry, I don’t like being a patsy, so I refuse to care.
There’s going to be a huge Game 7 of the NBA Finals on ABC Sunday, because the underdog Cleveland Cavaliers beat the Golden State Warriors and denied them the NBA Championship for the second straight game last Thursday night. Game Six’s exciting finish was greatly affected by the fact that Warriors uber-star Steph Curry got ejected in the closing minutes of play after receiving a technical foul. Ayesha Curry, his wife, alleged a different kind of foul, tweeting…
Lots of other fans came to the same conclusion, though Ayesha was quickly informed by the league that they knew where her mother lived, or something, and she deleted the tweet. Warriors’ head coach Steve Kerr wrote after the loss, “He gets six fouls on him; three were absolutely ridiculous.” Kerr knows that referees will usually move heaven and earth not to let a superstar foul out in regulation of a play-off game…unless, perhaps, there’s a good reason to let it happen. Continue reading →
“It is true: I am a weenie, and the U.N. can be rolled…”
The United Nations’ 2015 “Children and Armed Conflict” report originally listed the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen under “parties that kill or maim children” and “parties that engage in attacks on schools and/or hospitals.” Based on the work of U.N. researchers in Yemen, the report attributed 60 percent of the 785 children killed and 1,168 injured to the bombing coalition.
But Saudi Arabia threatened to stop its funding of other U.N. projects, so, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon admitted, the U.N. was revising the report to “review jointly the cases and numbers cited in the text,” in order to “reflect the highest standards of accuracy possible” ….and to “temporarily” remove the Saudi-led coalition countries from the report’s annex in the interest of protecting these programs.
Ban said he made a the difficult decision based on the need “to consider the very real prospect that millions of other children would suffer grievously if, as was suggested to me, countries would de-fund many U.N. programs.”
“It is unacceptable for member states to exert undue pressure,” Ban said, absurdly. If it is unacceptable, why does the U.N. accept it?
The UN published a factual report, and has now announced that the report will be inaccurate because it yielded to extortion in involving the lives of children.
Corruption. What justification is there to trust an organization that allows a member to do this?
The news media should stop quoting United Nations reports on health, climate change, hunger, or anything else. It has admitted that it can be bullied, pressured and bought. It has no credibility, and should not be treated as if it does.
Calling balls and strikes in major league baseball has to be mechanized. This is obvious and beyond argument, and the only question is what will finally make the bitter-enders abandon their rationalizations and capitulate to reality.
I last wrote about this in 2012 in a post titled “Umpire Accountability, As the Day Of The Robot Approaches,” following a 1-0 game in which a batter in a position to tie the game was called out on strikes by an umpire named Larry Vanover, who rang him up with three balls out of the strike zone for the final 9th inning out. This particular contest was between two teams that had finished the previous season with one of them edging out the other for the play-offs by a single game, on the last day of the schedule. The pitches called strikes in this particular at bat weren’t even close to being over the plate. You could see that all three were wide with the naked eye as they arrived in the catcher’s mitt; you could see it in the computer graphic on the screen, and after the game, the pitches’ locations were charted to show that they were, in fact, balls. I wrote…
Baseball fans invest too much time and emotion into following the games and their teams to just shrug off results warped by obvious incompetence. The kind of atrocious umpiring demonstrated by Vanover…poses a direct challenge to baseball’s integrity. What will baseball’s leaders do about it?
They have only three choices:
1.They can, for the first time, take public and punitive action against umpires whose poor performance exceeds a missed call or a human mistake, and demonstrates inexcusable incompetence or a lack of professionalism. First time: a stiff fine. Second time: a suspension without pay. Third time: dismissal.I know that the umpires union in Major League Baseball protects its incompetents as zealously as the teachers unions, but baseball has its product to protect.
2. Baseball’s leaders can make a commitment to automated strike and out calling, and cut back on crews to one field umpire to keep order and one booth umpire to read the printouts, watch the TV screen, and study the replays.
3. Baseball can reject integrity and credibility, and continue to let the Vanovers on the field wreck the games and alienate fans.
So far, disgracefully, the sport has chosen #3, but the clock is ticking. Continue reading →
It is a day late, but I finally have my Memorial Day post.
Thank-you, Burke Waldron, for your service, for making me feel young, and for having the integrity not to embarrass yourself, your contemporaries, and everyone else by making pathetic attempt at throwing a baseball.
I’m not sure which elements of Ethics Hero 92-year-old WW II veteran Burke Waldron displayed yesterday, as he threw out the ceremonial first pitch at the Seattle Mariners game on Memorial Day. Call him a holistic hero. He’s a hero, like all of the fallen soldiers—including my dad—of past wars, because he risked the horrors of combat to defend our nation and the values it stands for…well, at least until Donald Trump is President.
He’s a hero because he represented his generation yesterday with style, verve and energy, running to the pitcher’s mound—in his uniform!—as thousands cheered. Most of all, to me, he’s a hero because he took his assignment seriously, and didn’t emulate the pathetic rockers, politicians and even retired athletes who defile their first pitch honors by throwing the ball like a 7-year-old T-ball player, because they couldn’t be bothered to practice. Petty Officer, 2nd Class Waldron threw a strike to his catcher…
…just like another war hero, Ted Williams, did in his last appearance on a baseball field, at the 1999 All-Star Game in Boston. Continue reading →
I know, I have exceeded my Donald Trump quota for the week, but I can’t let this pass.
From the Washington Post’s Rebecca Sinderbrand, who follows the campaign’s twists and turns in an on-line column, comes a useful report on The Donald’s statements about teleprompters and his use of them between April 27 and May 27:
—April 27: Uses a teleprompter while delivering a foreign policy speech.
—May 2: “I don’t have any teleprompters…I’m up here all by myself.”
—May 20: “I’ve started to use [teleprompters] a little bit. They’re not bad. You never get yourself in trouble when you use a teleprompter.”
—May 22: Attacks Clinton because she “reads off a teleprompter, you notice. She’s reading off a teleprompter, she always does.”
—May 24: “We should have a law that when you run for president, you shouldn’t be allowed to use a teleprompter.”
—May 26: Uses a teleprompter while delivering an energy policy speech in North Dakota.
—May 27: “Isn’t it great when you don’t use teleprompters? …we oughta have a law that if you’re running for president, you can’t use teleprompters.”
“While political opponents of Hillary Clinton are sure to misrepresent this report for their own partisan purposes, in reality, the Inspector General documents just how consistent her email practices were with those of other Secretaries and senior officials at the State Department who also used personal email. The report shows that problems with the State Department’s electronic record keeping systems were longstanding and that there was no precedent of someone in her position having a State Department email account until after the arrival of her successor. Contrary to the false theories advanced for some time now, the report notes that her use of personal email was known to officials within the Department during her tenure, and that there is no evidence of any successful breach of the Secretary’s server. We agree that steps ought to be taken to ensure the government can better maintain official records, and if she were still at the State Department, Secretary Clinton would embrace and implement any recommendations, including those in this report, to help do that. But as this report makes clear, Hillary Clinton’s use of personal email was not unique, and she took steps that went much further than others to appropriately preserve and release her records.”
—-Hillary Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon, spinning the IG report with revelations which prompted that right-wing rag the Washington Post this morning to call his boss’s conduct, in an editorial, “inexcusable, willful disregard for the rules.”
Wow.
Whatever Hillary Clinton’s campaign is paying Brian Fallon to lie for her, it’s not nearly enough.
Imagine: the State Department IG issues a devastating condemnation of Clinton’s conduct, one that proves (as stated here since March, 2015, because it was obvious that early) Clinton has been lying about her conduct, her motives and the consequences of her actions regarding her personal e-mail server installed precisely to avoid the legal reach of the Freedom of Information Act at the risk of compromising national security, and the Clinton camp response is to say, “See? She was telling the truth all along!”
This response is..
Cynical.
Audacious.
Insulting.
Also designed for use by the completely corrupt, like Nancy Pelosi, typical of Clinton responses to all scandals, and ridiculouslyeasy to expose.
And before I start exposing, let me address the comments of the liberal end of Woodward and Bernstein (that would be Carl), who while agreeing on CNN this morning that the IG’s report is “devastating” in its near complete demonstration of how much Clinton has misrepresented the facts and her conduct to the news media and the American people, summed it all up be saying that Hillary has had “an uncomfortable relationship with the truth.”
To evoke the late Fred Rogers: Can you say “habitual liar”? Sure you can! A woman who has had “an uncomfortable relationship with the truth,” Carl, is a liar. Don’t sugar-coat it and obfuscate. That’s what the Clintons do. You sound like a Clinton! She’s lying. She lied about the server. She lies all the time. You’re a journalist. Just say it, loud and clear. That’s your damn job.
But I digress.
Let’s just go over how poor Brian Fallon’s statement of desperate mega-spin is dishonest, misleading, and, to be blunt, a pack of lies: Continue reading →
I’m not sure what to write about this, except that it has to be reported because the Clinton e-mail scandal has been so extensively discussed here since early in 2015. If it’s surprising to anyone, I pity them. If they try to keep denying it, I have contempt for them. If they don’t understand why this issue matters (Bernie…!), I pity them and have contempt for them.
Today the State Department’s inspector general’s report on the Clinton’s e-mail practices was released to the media. The report makes it clear that Clinton intentionally set up the private server to avoid scrutiny of her personal e-mails, and the various Stygian activities revealed there. In order to do that, she willfully and knowingly violated State Department policies, and placed national security at potential risk.
The report concluded that Clinton failed to seek legal approval for her use of a private email server and that department staff would not have allowed it had she requested approval, because of the “security risks in doing so.” Clinton’s use of private email for public business was “not an appropriate method” of preserving documents, the inspector general concluded, and her practices failed to comply with department policies meant to ensure that federal record laws are followed. Clinton should have printed and saved her emails during her four years in office or surrendered her work-related correspondence immediately upon stepping down in February 2013. She did not, choosing instead to provide those records in December 2014, nearly two years after leaving office.
So she was not following policy. What she did was not approved. She did knowingly take risks with sensitive national security information. It wasn’t because she didn’t make “the best choice” that all of this occurred. Clinton was making the best choice for her…her career, her ambitions, her schemes. The nation’s interests were secondary. If that. Continue reading →
Ethics Alarms 