J.D. Vance

Thanksgiving Trump Derangement, A Clinical Study

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

A good friend and widely- (and justly) admired lawyer who has been displaying his Trump Derangement symptoms on his Facebook page all year just provided an excellent example of the malady with his Thanksgiving post.

He re-posted the following Occupy Democrats “X” entry attacking J.D. Vance for his speech to the troops this week, as if anything issued by that extreme partisan propaganda outfit is reliable, fair, or trustworthy:

Then my friend, a lawyer, someone who knows as well as anyone that hearsay is unreliable and that biased sources will make you look foolish, wrote:

“If this is accurate it is one of the most bizarre rants by an American politician that I have ever read or heard about. What other American vice president has ever taken on and dumped all over in such crass language the most sacred symbol of one of our most important national holidays? I guess it’s remotely conceivable that Vance was trying to be funny, but if so it seems he needs major schooling on how to amuse an audience of soldiers desperately sick for home at Thanksgiving. MAGAS? Any thoughts on this? Are you proud of this man?”

Never mind that Occupy Democrats is infamous for its distortions of reality to demonize Republicans. Never mind that the video of Vance’s remarks are easily accessible on YouTube. Never mind that a good lawyer like my friend would never dive in with an opinion after writing “If this is accurate” when he had every opportunity to determine on his own whether it was accurate or not. He wanted the biased assessment of Vance’s speech to be true, because he wants to believe the worst about President Trump and anyone who supports him, and he knows that nobody on Facebook, save, perhaps, me, and I have a sock drawer to organize, will call him out on his unethical post.

I did watch the speech, which is posted above. The bit about turkeys was a small segment of the speech as whole. It was not a “rant.” His point was that Americans celebrate Thanksgiving with a roasted turkey out of tradition rather than because it is the yummiest main course imaginable. Of course he was trying to be funny, and because we can’t hear the audience reaction, it is impossible to tell if his routine worked (I could give him a few tips on his delivery) but so what? That was a minor section of the speech. Nor was he using “crass language.” Vance ad libbed “You’re full of shit!” to the soldiers raising their hands as part of the gag, and anyone who believes using the common if vulgar phrase in front of military personnel will be regarded as crass doesn’t know that audience.

But this is Trump Derangement! Neither Trump nor anyone connected to his Presidency gets or is owed good will or the benefit of the doubt. Everything that is said or done or suggested by the President or his supporters is presumed to be terrible, and the Trump Deranged don’t want to be bothered by context, facts or perspective. Their minds are made up. I am watching previously fair, wise and rational people debase themselves without even realizing it, because, you see, the President is “deeply evil.”

Addendum to “Ethics Dunce : President Trump. Again.”: Ethics Dunce: V.P. J.D. Vance

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Ugh. Then conservative pundit at Townhall writes, “JD Vance Absolutely Wrecked an Anti-Trump Commentator Over This Trump White House Post.“

No, Matt, that is not a witty, persuasive or devastating reply to poor, useless Bill Kristol’s tweet. Vance’s retort is the equivalent of “Oh, yeah? Well, your mother is fat!” or You suck!” or “Your favorite President, Bush, would make an even worse Pope!” Or George Costanza’s immortal, “Oh, yeah? Well, I had sex with your wife!”

True, there are some mitigating elements here. Vance, as Veep, is obligated to defend the President even when Trump’s words or conduct are indefensible. It is also true that Bill Kristol, who became so Trump-Deranged that he has turned against principles his entire career was dedicated to advocating and defending, is such an embarrassment that the response he deserves would be, “Bill, nobody cares what you think about anything any more, including me. Go away.”

But Vance resorting to flagrant deflection and “whataboutism” further corrupts civic discourse by endorsing logical fallacies and rationalizations. And for Vespa to cheer such lazy argumentation on compounds the sin.

Ethics Dunce: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (and Further Observations on the Oval Office Fiasco) [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 80 Comments

I worked for many years for a fascinating man, a brilliant negotiation specialist and consultant, Richard Halpern. My first thought yesterday after watching the astounding argument that broke out among the President, Vice-President Vance and Ukrainian president Zelenskyy was, “Boy, I wish Rich was still here to analyze what went wrong.” Rich died in 2009, but I learned enough about the art of negotiation from working with and observing him to be confident in how he would have reacted to what occurred on live television yesterday. My thoughts also reached back across the decades to the seminar I took on negotiation in law school with Adrian Fisher, then Dean of Georgetown Law Center after a career as a top arms control negotiator for the United States.

Both Richard Halpern and Adrian Fisher would have agreed that Zelenskyy was incompetent. I would add that he behaved like a deluded fool who had come to believe his fawning press notices.

First, Zelenskyy did not sufficiently research his negotiation partners, their preferences, their character, and their “hot buttons” that should never be pressed without sound reasons. Second, he did not properly prepare to insulate his own hot buttons from making him behave against his country’s best interests. Third, he did not comprehend why he was in the Oval office and what was expected of him.

Finally, he did not understand that as a supplicant nation seeking critical aid from the United States, he was not on a level playing field, particularly since he was in the U.S., on the President’s home turf. His job was to be respectful, compliant and non-confrontational no matter what occurred or was said.

The previous press conference with a foreign leader that President Trump had completed just the day before should have served as a guide. Keir Starmer was content to stay in the background and barely speak while the President rambled on in his inimitable fashion, and Great Britain has accumulated far more credits and greater good will with the U.S. than Ukraine. One commenter said that yesterday Zelenskyy failed to “read the room.” It was far worse than that: he failed to read the room, whom he was talking to, why he was there, and what he had to accomplish.

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Doxxing, “Big Balls,” J.D. Vance and “The Racist Tweeter Principle”: A Tragi-Comedy With a Twist

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Like my old law school roomie who left “Gone With the Wind” at the intermission thinking it was over, I almost posted on this ethics mess too early. There were three acts, and there might be a fourth. I thought the ethics show was over after Act II.

Act I. The news media’s tantrum: Upon finding that Elon Musk and DOGE were serious about uncovering government waste, that he was employing some of his young computer nerds from SpaceX to do it, and that they had brought down USAID, a foreign aid, woke slush fund icon by exposing just how profligate and irresponsible it was, Katherine Long, a progressive reporter on the Wall Street Journal, targeted the young geniuses who may all be on the autistic spectrum (like Musk). One of them, a 19-year-old, she embarrassed by revealing that his social media handle when he was in high school was “Big Balls.” She also doxxed Marko Elez, writing that he was a “25-year-old who is part of a cadre of Elon Musk lieutenants deployed by the Department of Government Efficiency to scrutinize federal spending” and had published troubling social media posts like, “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.” “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” he wrote on “Twitter/X” in September. Long revealed that his account declared, “Normalize Indian hate,” in the same month, expressing his disapproval of the large numbers of tech workers from India in Silicon Valley.

Ethics takeaway: Doxxing is unethical; so is using old social media posts to make a newly prominent figure a victim of the “cancel culture.”

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4 Ethics Takeaways From USA Today’s 5 Takeaways From Joe Rogan’s Interview With JD Vance

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The target is this USA Today story.

1. The quote everyone seems to be repeating is “It’s just strange that everyone’s accepting that this person who is the least popular vice president ever is now the solution to the problem and that the media machine in just a few days did this 180 and just sold her as the solution. And as long as they keep her from having these conversations where she’s allowed to talk, they’re able to pull this off. And the, the fact that it’s happening with no primary should be really concerning to people… because that’s never happened before…. they could have had a primary….”

It should tell voters everything they need to know to vote against Harris that even with the race so close, she refused to do an interview with Rogan for his massive audience of mostly young men unless he did it under her staff’s control and limited the interview to an hour rather than his usual three. This shows that she’s hiding her real nature, unsure of her abilities, a coward, a weenie, and a prop candidate. Why would anyone vote for someone like that to be President? There are no ethical reasons: the reasons that exist are all linked to unethical conduct and characteristics or non-ethical considerations like fear and hate.

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CNN and Brianna Keilar Give a Symposium on How the News Media Tries to Rig Elections

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Incredibly and against all odds, the mainstream media is demonstrating that it is even more biased and determined to swing the 2024 election to the Democrats than they were in 2008, 2012, 2016 and 2020. Not only that, but its propagandists are being more obvious about it.

As a case study, let us examine CNN’s handling of the Tim Walz scandal. Walz has been falsely representing himself to the public as a combat veteran for many years and in many ways. In addition, he abandoned the leadership of the troops he had trained with as soon as they were ordered to deploy in Iraq. This isn’t even a matter of serious dispute, yet the Harris ticket’s promoters in the news media, aka “almost all of it,” have been furiously spinning, obfuscating and ignoring inconvenient facts. Under different circumstances (such as, say, a VP nominee on a Republican ticket), the news media would be all over this story like Jaws on Pippin. It would be a daily feeding frenzy.

In the past few days, more of Walz’s former almost-comrades-in-arms have come forward to condemn Walz’s conduct and character. For example, the chaplain of Walz’s field artillery regiment said there was no excuse for the him to have abandoned his National Guard unit before a critical deployment. “In our world, to drop out after a WARNORD [warning order] is issued is cowardly, especially for a senior enlisted guy,” retired Capt. Corey Bjertness, now a pastor in Horace, North Dakota, told the New York Post. This wasn’t even newsworthy to most news sources: it might take public attention away from the fact that Trump keeps claiming Harris is misrepresenting the sizes of her rally crowds.

CNN’s spin debacle regarding Walz’s “stolen valor” was special, however.

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J.D. Vance Demonstrates the Ethical Remedy For Partisan Media Bias

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

J. D. Vance made the rounds of the Sunday morning TV shows, and neatly demonstrated why he will be an asset to the Republican ticket in the exchange above with CNN’s biased dim bulb Dana Bash.

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Ethics Villain: Ex-J.D. Vance Friend Sofia Nelson

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“Villain” is the best I can muster right now. I really can’t find the right word for someone who would do what Sofia Nelson did, or who would be able to look at themselves in the mirror after she did it.

Nelson, a close friend of J.D. Vance’s in law school and for many years thereafter, sent about 90 of the emails and text messages they exchanged from 2014 through 2017 to The New York Times. Nelson is gay or a trans-male or a trans-female, or something, I couldn’t possibly care less. Nor will I read the Times’ article about what its partisan “Slime Trump and Vance!” posse found in the emails thus far. All that matters from an ethics perspective is the throbbing betrayal of trust represented by anyone the sharing past private communications with a media outlet without obtaining consent and permission from the other party to the exchanges. It’s revolting that the Times would accept such stuff: this is a National Enquirer level story. Trump’s running mate once wrote “Love you” to a guy who is now a chick! Ew! Does that mean Vance is gay, not that there’s anything wrong with that?

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Ethics Observations on J.D. Vance’s “Childless Cat Ladies” Controversy

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The Axis of Unethical Conduct “pounced” on newly nominated Trump running mate J.D. Vance this week over a “re-surfaced” video in which Vance said that the country is being run “by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” The comment was made in an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson when Vance was beginning his ultimately successful campaign for the Senate.

Observations:

1. Gee, just the GOP needs—TWO candidates who lack functioning filters between their brains and their mouths.

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