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

Secretary Of State John Kerry, Pants On Fire

Kerry SaluteWashington Post Fact-checker Glenn Kessler finally couldn’t stand it anymore regarding Secretary of State John Kerry’s favorite lie, only trailing me by about nine years.  As he was participating as a stooge in President Obama’s improvised vaudeville act regarding his “red line” and Syrian chemical weapons (but then, as Americans, so are we all), Kerry said this in an interview on MSNBC, where he knows any transparent and self-serving lie by a Democrat will be accepted as revealed truth:

“You know, Senator Chuck Hagel, when he was senator, Senator Chuck Hagel, now secretary of defense, and when I was a senator, we opposed the president’s decision to go into Iraq, but we know full well how that evidence was used to persuade all of us that authority ought to be given.”

Now I, for one, am thankful when Kerry, who is not Irish (his heritage is  primarily Jewish) * and was elected Senator in Massachusetts using campaign posters with green shamrocks on them, reminds us all why he never became President. This was yet another re-phrasing of the deception he kept hammering during his 2004 campaign—you remember, the one with John Edwards as his running mate, because Kerry is also a magnificent judge of character?—he didn’t support President Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

Of course, he did, and emphatically too. Kessler, who is inclined to go easy on Democrats for the same kinds of deceptions he slams Republicans for (I measure the discrepancy at just short of two “Pinocchios”) decided to give Kerry a full blast with both barrels: Continue reading

Ethics Dunce: Gina Chon

“The question I continue to have is when will the conversation return to issues?  Because when they do, I know Brett will become the next ambassador to Iraq.”

Just JKF’s type. Also a Communist spy, but hey, nobody’s perfect!

Thus did loyal wife Gina Chon rationalize away Republican objections to the appointment of her husband, Brett McGurk, to be Ambassador to Iraq. Her point, apparently, is that the fact that he carried on an illicit and secret affair with a reporterher—while on a previous State Department assignment to Iraq and exchanged e-mails “joking” (?) about exchanging intelligence for sex should be an issue in his conformation.

Let’s see, now. One of the gazillion women President Kennedy may have had an affair with while he was in the White House was Ellen Rometsch, an East German spy. (JFK consistently ranks #1 in polls of which Presidents Americans think were the best. Discuss) Imagine that this came to light, that somehow JFK avoided impeachment for it (he would not have), and avoided Oswald’s magic bullet in Dallas. How would Jackie have sounded, if she argued to the press that since Jack didn’t blab state secrets during his pillow talk, his indiscretion jeopardizing U.S. national security was a non-issue?

Like a loyal wife, like a loyal Democrat, and like an idiot.

Like Chon. Continue reading

The Reporter and the Diplomat: Anatomy of an Ethics Train Wreck

Gina Chon, who handled the Iraq beat for the Wall Street Journal, “quit under pressure,” a.k.a. “was fired”, yesterday after it had been discovered that she had carried on  a romantic affair with Brett McGurk, a high-placed American official, while both lived in Baghdad in 2008. McGurk was on the National Security Council staff during the Bush administration and has been nominated by President Obama to be ambassador to Iraq.  Chon was covering McGurk’s activities while she was also romantically engaged with him, a cardinal ethics sin for a journalist. She also shared “certain unpublished news articles” with him, also a violation of Journal policy and journalism ethics. The relationship had been hidden by Chon, and only came to light when racy e-mails between the two were revealed. Of course, the fact that they had recently divorced their respective spouses and married each other probably should have been a clue.

This is a full-fledged ethics train wreck, and it is not over yet.  Let us review the participants so far:

Typical of ETW’s, the coverage itself was ethically flawed. The Washington Post story about the Chon-McGurk affair appeared in the Post’s Style section, which covers media, entertainment, and gossip. McGurk is the current Obama administration nominee to be Ambassador to Iraq, a key post. This was the last line in the Style story:

“The disclosure has intensified doubts about McGurk’s nomination for ambassador among some Republican members of the Senate, but the Obama administration has stood by him.” Continue reading

Integrity, Politics, and Medal of Honor Ethics

The Medal of Honor

Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, a Marine veteran who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, is leading an effort to loosen the standards being applied to the awarding of the Medal of Honor for combat in Afghanistan and Iraq.  In an Oct. 4 letter to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Hunter argued that Medals of Honor are being denied in cases where they appear to be well-deserved and that the process of approving awards takes too long. He asked the Defense Department to conduct a review of hundreds of such cases. “Properly recognizing these actions through the awards process is not just important to the individuals involved, but it is also essential to upholding the tradition of the armed forces and inspiring others to step forward,” Hunter wrote.

Great: now we have an advocate for heroism inflation. Continue reading

Unethical Quote of the Week: U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

Hillary said something unethical? I'm shocked! Shocked!

“But the bottom line is, whose side are you on? Are you on Qadhafi’s side or are you on the side of the aspirations of the Libyan people and the international coalition that has been created to support them? For the Obama Administration, the answer to that question is very easy.”

—–Obama Administration Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, responding in a press conference to Congressional objections that the U.S. continued participation in attacks on Libya violates the War Powers Resolution—which it undoubtedly does.

Most of the objections to Sec. Clinton’s comments focus on her apparent hypocrisy; after all, this is the same woman who as a U.S. Senator in 2003 objected to “are you with us or against us” rhetoric from the Bush Administration regarding the Iraq war by saying,  “I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration somehow you’re not patriotic. We should stand up and say we are Americans and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration.” But this isn’t necessarily hypocrisy: Hillary has a right to change her mind. What is unethical about her statement on Libya is that it is manipulative, unfair and dishonest. Continue reading

No Time for Brackets

Thank God THAT's taken care of...

I don’t need to go into great detail on this; either it bothers you, or it doesn’t.

I strongly suspect there are many of President Obama’s supporters who are bothered, but will never admit it: hence the silence from the mainstream media. I am certain that there are many on the Right who are bothered, but since they are bothered by everything the President does, their annoyance is easy to dismiss. Many, I know, won’t see it, can’t see it, don’t care, and will just turn their attention other matters with a shrug, if that. For my part, I am bothered because I believe that leaders have to be competent and to engender trust by showing good judgment, and I believe the President of the United States has an added obligation to maintain the weight, credibility, and honor of the office, and therefore its strength.

President Obama’s special invitation to ESPN to come to the White House and announce his bracket picks for the NCAA basketball tournament was as frightening a demonstration of tone-deaf leadership malpractice as I have seen, or read about, from any of the 12 U.S. Presidents of my lifetime. Continue reading

United Nations Ethics

 

After the U.N., Plan B

Ah, the United Nations—can’t live with it, can’t live without it!

 

But I think it may be time for the U.S., having tried to live with a corrupt, hypocritical, impotent monument to how disastrous a one-world government would be—while supplying the lion’s share of its funding— to try living without it.

The U.N. Human Rights Council has issued a 23-page report praising the Gaddafi regime’s human-rights record. Continue reading

Summer Rerun: “Ending the Bi-Partisan Effort to Destroy Trust in America”

[TV is full of reruns these days, and sometimes I am grateful for them, for it gives me a chance to see episodes of favorite shows I had missed for some reason or another. Back in early March, I posted the following essay about the origins of America’s current crisis of trust in our government, and how it might be cured by our elected leaders. Since then, the crisis has deepened, and as I was doing some routine site maintenance, I reread the post. It is still very timely (unfortunately), and since far fewer people were visiting Ethics Alarms in March, I decided to re-post it today, with just a few minor edits. I promise not to make this a habit. Still, trust is the reason why ethics is so important in America: if there is a single post of the more than 700 I have written here since October 2009  that I would like people to read, this is it.] Continue reading

Some Ethics Catch-Up Due on Climate Change

It is clear that the Obama Administration, if only to bolster the fading support of its most Left-ward constituency, is going to try a full-court press to get some form of carbon tax or “cap and trade” bill. These were once referred to as “climate change” measures, but since polls are showing that the American public’s belief in Al Gore’s jeremiad is waning fast, now these are “prevent more oil spills like the one going on now” bills. Obama, much to the global warming zealots’ dismay, only snuck in one little “climate” in his Oval Office speech, and that was without “change.”

This is all just politics, but the fact is that the American public has some straight talk coming, and it doesn’t seem to be anywhere on the horizon, or even the Deep Horizon. In the past year, the Climate Change Express has pretty much jumped the rails, with the collapse of international summit; the East Anglia “Climategate” revelations that supposedly objective scientists were blocking dissenting conclusions and hiding inconsistencies,  the uncovering of evidence of unprofessional  practices at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),  and some embarrassing pronouncements and predictions that appeared to be off by hundreds of years or so, or wrong entirely.

Despite all this, the U.S. media has been caught in a time warp, with no major news organizations altering their previous official conviction that the fact of catastrophic climate change and the main cause of it–human activity—are “settled science,” even though this is just plain false. Continue reading