IRS

The Peculiar Delusion of Dan Pfeiffer, a.k.a. “The White House”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments
Captain Smith, of the "Titanic." Of course, there's no proof that he did anything wrong.

Captain Smith, of the “Titanic.” Of course, there’s no proof that he did anything wrong.

What does it tell us about the White House (and its primary occupant) that its “insider” and designated spokesperson, Senior Advisor Dan Pfeiffer, could utter a statement like this, in public, no less? On Fox News Sunday, one of four Sunday Morning Talk shows he appeared on yesterday to deliver the current White House position on multiple scandals, referring to Sarah Hall Ingram, who led the agency’s tax-exempt division when it targeted conservative groups and has been promoted to chief of the health care reform office, Pfeiffer said,

“No one has suggested that she did anything wrong yet. Before everyone in this town convicts this person in the court of public opinion with no evidence, let’s actually get the facts and make decisions after that. There’s nothing that suggests she did anything wrong.”

Such manifest nonsense would be depressing coming from a recent college grad, and grounds for demotion from a corporate manager or CEO, but it is nothing short of frightening coming from the heart of a nation’s leadership.

Continue reading →

Twelve Ethics Observations On “The Scandal Trifecta”

/ Jack Marshall / 42 Comments

Obama

1. “The Scandal Trifecta” may be gaining traction in D.C. and in the news media as the hot term to handily describe the Obama Administration’s three instances of serious and significant misconduct: the Benghazi deceptions, the I.R.S. harassment of conservatives and conservative groups, and the Justice Department’s surveillance of Associate Press reporters. It should be rejected. I know conservatives and Republicans are especially smug and gleeful right now to have their suspicions and warnings confirmed, but this is a national crisis, at a time of dire challenges to the nation, and tragic in many ways. It is not a game, and should not be likened to one. Nor should the three situations be lumped together, though they have, to some extent, common seeds. They are each important in and of themselves, and packaging them like stop-light peppers risks allowing all or some of them receive less than the individual attention they must have. This is the first and last time I’m using the term, and I urge everyone, in the media or out of it, to similarly drop it. Labels matter, in this is a bad one.

2. Here’s someone Democrats and the rest of us can blame, in part: the left-biased news media. You see, knowing that the news media is looking to expose them when they make mistakes, blunder, show corruption and otherwise do a bad job when entrusted with the welfare of the greatest nation on earth makes our leaders better, more responsible, more objective, and more competent, out of fear, if nothing else. The media does nobody any favors when it lets its biases take over and lies down on the job—not the public, not Republicans, certainly; not the nation, not their profession, but also not even those they are desperately trying to help succeed. Continue reading →

Jon Stewart’s Lesson On Trust

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I am teaching this morning, so a more substantial post will be appearing later. In the interim, those who haven’t seen Jon Stewart’s meltdown over the scandal avalanche exposing the ineptitude and ethics blindness in the Obama Administration should go here. I suspect much of the mainstream media that has been abdicating its role of objective reporter for the pat four years is reacting in much the same way; in fact, I know it is, based on the sudden confluence of op-eds, columns, and on-screen rants about the President’s disinterest in management, oversight, and, you know, governing, as if this was a new phenomenon.

Stewart expresses his horror that after the revelations of the last couple of weeks, the burden of proof will now be on the government to show it is worthy of being trusted to impose ourselves on our lives, and the concerns of those who distrust the expansion of government power can no longer be dismissed as paranoia and conspiracy theories. In truth, nothing has changed, for this always has been the case. That is why our nation’s founding documents are both written from the perspective of those who are wary of the inherent corruption and abuse that government power always risks, based on the tragic lessons of history.

The remarkable thing isn’t that these most recent examples occurred, but that otherwise intelligent people like Jon Stewart seem to be genuinely surprised by it.