John Kerry

A “Ripley” For MSNBC: It Actually Practiced Journalism!

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Wow. Will wonders never cease…

Yesterday, the continually ridiculous John Kerry must have thought he was in safe territory when he appeared with MSNBC’s Chris Jansing at the Vatican before Pope Francis’s funeral. But Jansing stunned the fake Irishman, pathetic Democratic Presidential nominee and inept Secretary of State under Obama by asking, “You were Secretary of State when Russia annexed Crimea, and I want to ask you…”

“But when they stated they were…” Kerry interrupted.

Oh, right. The Obama position was that Russia really didn’t take over Crimea, it just said it did, because doing so violated “international law,” so occupying the region and refusing to leave doesn’t count. By that logic, Hitler never invaded France.

“When they, when they stated, yeah,” Jansing said, then Kerry insisted, lying as he so frequently does, badly: “We did not allow them to annex it.”

Suuure, John. You hold on to that fantasy. President Obama was asleep at the metaphorical switch, Russia took the region, and Barack’s response consisted of a few weak sanctions. Jansing, endorsed Kerry’s “it isn’t what it is” spin—this is MSNBC, after all—but still pressed Kerry, saying, “Right. But they said that it was theirs.” And Kerry ludicrously replied, “And we stood up against it and called it against international law. Yeah, they said it, but that doesn’t…Under international law, that does not make it theirs.”

See, because Kerry’s State Department and Obama refused to “recognize” Russia’s annexation of Crimea, it wasn’t annexed. Standing up to Russia in Obama-Kerry Land is: Russia: “We’ve got Crimea!” The U.S.: No you don’t!” Russia: “Yes, we really do.” The U.S.: “Uh-uh, not until we say so!” Russia: “How the hell did we lose the Cold War to these bozos?”

The current Ukraine-Russia war is a direct consequence of the weakness projected by Presidents Obama and Biden, and it has cost our treasury billions while destabilizing the region. Kerry, winner of an Ethics Alarms Lifetime Weasel Award, has been an expert at ducking accountability (“I was against the war before I was for it!”) just like the inept (but historic!) President who appointed him Secretary of State despite a lifetime of failure.

MSNBC, amazingly, reminded us. Bravo.

John Kerry Enters the “Incredibly Stupid Statement” Competition!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I heard about this, initially thought it was some right-wing pundit’s exaggeration, and then thought, “Wait, it’s John Kerry. He might really have said something this skin-peelingly stupid.” And indeed he did.

Kerry is a ridiculous human being, always lacking self-awareness, always personifying the worst of arrogant, corrupt and incompetent Washington. With a straight face, and without suddenly slapping himself silly as soon as the words tumbled out of his mouth, this life-time pious, virtue-signaling phony actually opined that people would feel better about Russia as it wages war against Ukraine if it would do it with more concern for threat of climate change.

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Unethical Quote Of The Month: Biden Climate Envoy John Kerry

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“Without facts or economics on their side, they [“climate deniers”] flatly deny what is happening to our planet and what we must do to save it. They incite a movement against what they falsely label ‘climate change fanaticism,’ as they conveniently forget that the dictionary definition of a cult is the dismissal of facts in devotion to a lie.”

—-Biden Administration “climate envoy” John Kerry, speaking in Scotland after arriving on his private jet that emitted more carbon into the atmosphere than any of the automobiles I have driven or will drive in my lifetime.

Wow. Imagine, people actually voted for this boob to be President. And what a wonderful example of projection: has there ever been any movement that smacked of cultism more than the climate change freak-out? Kerry, whose entire public career has been a sustained war against facts (most people still think he’s Irish, for example), embodies the discredited theory that saying something is true when it isn’t constitutes a fact. Here’s a fact: crippling the U.S. economy to reach climate change policy goals will achieve nothing except hardship and disaster unless a magic formula is developed to force China, India, Russia and developing nations to do the same, and there is no such formula. What is it, then, that we “must do” to save the planet, John? Accept a Democratic Party dictatorship? Put the U.N. in charge of everything and everybody? Put YOU in charge?

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Ethics Alarms Is Proud To Award A Lifetime Weasel Award To John Kerry

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

To be fair, this recognition of John Kerry’s remarkable career as a human representative of the genus Mustelidae is probably years too late. As you can see here and here, Kerry’s weasel credentials as proven by his Ethics Alarms dossier are outstanding. Most recently, Kerry mouthed some boilerplate climate change blather as the Biden administration’s “special envoy.” Before that, Kerry caught my attention by warning an audience that if Donald Trump was re-elected, there would be a “revolution” (speaking of ‘fear speech’!) and implying that the 2004 Presidential election was stolen from him by nefarious means.These, however, were standard fare for a career mediocrity and lifetime weasel; Kerry had established his bona fides long ago.

After all, he rose to political prominence by calling his former brothers in arms still fighting in the jungles of Vietnam war criminals. When he first ran for the Senate in Massachusetts, his campaign literature was festooned with shamrocks to appeal to the large Irish contingent in the state. Kerry isn’t Irish. Memorably, when called on the fact that he was running against President George Bush as a critic of the Iraq War despite having voted for it in the Senate, Kerry said, “I was against the war before I was for it.”

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John Kerry’s Comments At The World Economic Forum Show How Irresponsible And Incompetent US Climate Change Policy Is

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

To be clear, the fact that John Kerry, a proven dim bulb, is allowed to address any group at all as the representative of the U.S. government (he’s the U.S. special presidential “envoy for climate”) also shows how irresponsible and incompetent the Biden administration is. Kerry, a college grad of even less distinction than Al Gore and with no science training, is as qualified to speak about the complex details of climate change as Greta Thunberg. Nonetheless, his fatuous presentation this week in Davos, Switzerland is revealing for anyone not blinded by climate change propaganda, talking points and doomsday scenarios.

Here are some of the fake Irish politician’s astute observations:

  • “I’m convinced we will get to a low-carbon, no-carbon economy — we’re going to get there because we have to.

We can do it because we have to. Now there’s persuasive logic, at least to someone like Kerry. This would be talking down to an audience and patronizing them, if Kerry himself wasn’t likely to believe such rubbish. We’ll reduce the National Debt—because we have to! We’ll eliminate gun violence—because we have to!  We’ll end war and racism—because we have to!

  • “I am not convinced we’re going to get there in time to do what the scientists said, which is avoid the worst consequences of the crisis.”

According to the past predictions of those same scientists, we should have already seen coastal cities under water, snow a  distant memory, and the polar bears keeping company with passenger pigeons….not that John Kerry being “convinced” of anything related to science should carry any weight whatsoever. He’s just mouthing what cherry-picked “experts” say in highly simplified, politically slanted summaries.

  • “And those worst consequences are going to affect millions of people all around the world, [in] Africa and other places. Of the 20 most affected countries in the world from [the] climate crisis, 17 are in Africa.”

Ironically, it is exactly those same developing countries that most need to employ fossil fuels to advance economically—you know, like the United States did.

  • “So, how do we get there? Well, the lesson I’ve learned in the last years and I learned it as secretary [of State] and I’ve learned it since, reinforced in spades, is: money, money, money, money, money, money, money.”

That’s the Democratic way, all right: throw money at any problem whether you know what you’re doing or not. And if there’s one thing the United States has, with its National Debt of 31 trillion dollars, it’s money. The federal government  borrowed $4 billion a day in 2022.

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3/17/21 Ethics Wind-Down, 3/18/21 Wind-Up…Featuring “The Song Of The Year”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Wind-Up

There’s nothing quite like a flaming tooth-ache to spark an early-morning post…

1. Corporate incompetence, Indian-style: The Cleveland Indians knee-jerked themselves out of their history, traditions and name by somehow concluding that the Black Lives Matter rioting obligated them to abandon “Indians” just because the NFL Washington Redskins had capitulated to political correctness thuggery. Like all of baseball and most of professional sports, the team decided that signaling progressive virtue was more important than their fans. And like the Redskins, the team prepared to to go through the 2021 season without a new name…just nothing, as in “Cleveland Baseball Club,” or something similarly generic. Because of the unseemly, unnecessary and unplanned rush, the Cleveland Whatsis-es also made it difficult to come up with a new name. Changing a team name is a large and expensive mess, because the name and logo are on everything from the team’s merchandise to websites, sponsorship deals, and the ballpark. Trademarks are needed to protect them. “Advice for anyone doing any product: Before you make it public, file,” Andrew Skale, a San Diego-based trademark attorney told the New York Times.

“The U.S. trademark office offers this kind of unique ability to file when you haven’t started using it, so take advantage of that,” Skale said. “Because I’ve seen when people that have issued news releases about new products and haven’t filed yet, and then they have problems later because some idiots decided to squat on them.” Or maybe not such idiots. Because of the Ex-Indians moral panic, many of the names the team could have chosen based on its history and culture will be now be expensive.Trademarks were filed by squatters after Cleveland’s first announcement for “Cleveland Baseball Team” (from someone in Georgia), “Cleveland Baseball Club” (from a company in Ohio), “Cleveland Guardians” (from someone in New York), Cleveland Rockers (from someone in California), Cleveland Natives and Cleveland Warriors (though even the Ex-Indian aren’t so stupid as to wade back into Native American controversies again), and most of all, the Cleveland Spiders, which has been an early favorite. That was the name of the team. That was the name of the team for ten years, 1889-1899, when baseball players looked like this…

Spiders

The No-names are fighting some of these filings, because the Trademark Office tends to disfavor squatters. It all could have been avoided, though, if the team hadn’t wushed to be woke, thus joining The Great Stupid.

I wonder if “Spider McBaseballfaces” has been taken…

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In Revealing Contrast To The Patriots Who Built This Nation 244 Years Ago, Consider John Kerry

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Speaking to the Copenhagen Democracy Summit this week on a panel via cybercast, John Kerry, former U.S Senator and Secretary of State, and unsuccessful candidate for President in 2004,  told his audience that a victory by President Trump could provoke a revolution in the United States, as he claimed that Republicans have a history of denying voting rights to Democratic voters. Kerry implied that  voter suppression contributed to his defeat in 2004 as well as former Vice President Al Gore’s loss in 2000, and he repeated Stacey Abrams’ completely unsupported claim that this was the reason for her defeat in Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial race.

“If people don’t have adequate access to the ballot, I mean that’s the stuff on which revolutions are built,” Kerry said.  “If you begin to deny people the capacity of your democracy to work, even the Founding Fathers wrote in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, we have an inherent right to challenge that. And I’m worried that increasingly, people are disaffected. We’re not meeting the standard that we ought to be meeting, so I’m deeply concerned about protecting the vote.”

Kerry’s remarks, as so many of Kerry’s statements have been throughout his career, were reprehensible. The mystery, as always when Kerry is involved, is whether they were made with evil intent, or just as a bi-product of his severely limited intellect. John Kerry is not an intelligent man. Continue reading →

The Massie-Kerry Exchange: Sadly, Everybody’s Stupid

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

First I encountered several conservative media references to an exchange between former Secretary of State and Presidential candidate John Kerry and Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky.  This occurred at at a House committee hearing Tuesday on “The Need for Leadership to Combat Climate Change and Protect National Security.” The sense of the references was typified by this headline in Townhall: “Watch Incoherent John Kerry Get Destroyed Over His Bogus Climate Change Claims.”

Then, almost immediately later, I found Rolling  Stones account of the same exchange. It’s click-bait headline: “Is This the Dumbest Moment in Congressional History?”

Talk about Roshomon! How could both of these accounts possibly be accurate? Was Kerry reduced to a babbling fool by the Republican Comgressman’s deft cross examination, or did Massie embarrass himself? The truth was that everyone involved on all sides of this mini-foofaraw was, and is, stupid in one way or another, including the biased bloggers and pundits who saw what wasn’t there.

For Kerry to represent himself as any kind of expert on climate change is so silly even Democrats shouldn’t fallfor it. Yet here is Rolling Stone, saying outright, “Kerry is an expert on climate change who helped broker the Paris climate accord.” Kerry, like Al Gore and so many others whose belief in climate change doomsday predictions is based on politics rather than their comprehension or even review of the science, is just mouthing what he has been briefed to say. He has no background in science, no demonstrated aptitude for it, and has a well-established record of saying really dumb things about subjects he should be able to understand. The Paris accord was a diplomatic agreement, not a scientific one, and, of course, was symbolic and meaningless.  Kerry is an expert on symbolic and meaningless.

Massie is an MIT grad and trained as an engineer, so one could fairly expect that he is a little more legitimately conversant in climate science than Kerry, though he hardly proved it this day. He did prove that he’s no lawyer. Setting out to discredit Kerry’s climate change expert status should have been easy: just show a typical climate change model chart, like this one, Continue reading →

Saturday Afternoon Ethics Titillation, 9/15/18: Yes, Virginia, It Was A Smear…

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

A hurricane-free hello!

…at least in Northern Virginia. We had been told by breathless media and local government since early in then week that today and tomorrow would consist of heavy rain and dangerous winds. Naturally, today dawned clear, calm and menacing. The shelves in the supermarkets, however, were picked over as if a nuclear attack were imminent. At what point are urgent warnings no longer prudent but irresponsible and fear-mongering? At what point do they undermine the ability to get the public to take warnings seriously when there is a genuine threat? This area plays Chicken Little so often  and with such speculative provocation that I don’t trust the prognostications at all any more.

And who the heck buys up all the pickles to prepare for flooding?

1. Ethics Dunce: John Kerry. But anyone who didn’t know that by now wouldn’t be convinced by me, so I’ll just include poor, sad, useless and deluded John in a Saturday afternoon potpourri that hardly anyone reads. But what a jerk. We don’t enforce the Logan Act that prohibits private citizens from mucking around in our diplomacy, but under what justification can he argue for his negotiating with Iran? There is literally no good he can accomplish (there was little good he could accomplish when he was authorized to engage in diplomacy), and now his interference does is undermine the elected President and government.

Trump’s tweet…

John Kerry had illegal meetings with the very hostile Iranian Regime, which can only serve to undercut our great work to the detriment of the American people. He told them to wait out the Trump Administration! Was he registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act? BAD!

…was predictably juvenile and superfluous, but, incredibly, Kerry’s return tweet was worse, and might as well have consisted of “Nyah nyah nyah!”

Mr. President, you should be more worried about Paul Manafort meeting with Robert Mueller than me meeting with Iran’s FM. But if you want to learn something about the nuclear agreement that made the world safer, buy my new book, Every Day Is Extra:

Wow. Begin by passing along the “resistance” myth that there just has to be some smoking gun proving the President rigged the election, follow it up with the batty theory that giving the #1 purveyor of world terrorism billions of dollars to play with “makes the world safer,” and then hint that the real reason he’s openly interfering with U.S. diplomacy is to sell his book.

Yechhh.

2. A plug for a really smart friend who debunked a Democrat smear: Senator Feinstein’s despicable desperation sliming of Brett Kavanaugh, a real “Have you no decency at all?”-worthy moment, prompted a nasty conspiracy theory yesterday.  The fact that the GOP could rapidly release a letter with 65 female acquaintances from the nominee’s high school years certifying that his anonymous accuser has described conduct wildly out of character being cited as proof that the alleged episode was already known by the administration, and thus has some basis in fact.

Virginia Hume, known to some as the politically active daughter of veteran broadcast journalist Britt Hume and known to me as a smart, clever, astute woman who worked for me 30 years ago, authored a piece for the Weekly Standard explaining how the letter came together so quickly. She knows, because she signed it.

She writes in part…

“The letter was conceived and drafted by friends of Brett’s, and it was drafted after allegations came out on Thursday. I learned about the letter from a friend and fellow signatory. Others learned about it the same way. Those surprised at the speed with which it came together should see it as yet another testament to Brett’s excellent reputation”

Elsewhere in the article are examples of Virginia’s characteristic wit. I can vouch without reservation for her honesty and integrity. I would trust her with my life. More than that, I would trust her with my dog. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 5/5/2018: “Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

Good Morning!

(I’m happy to report that my Clarence Darrow ethics program for a lawyer group yesterday in Annapolis was received wonderfully, in no small part due to actor Paul Morella’s moving and powerful recreations of Darrow’s courtroom oratory. As is often the case, attendees said that they didn’t realize a legal ethics presentation could be so interesting. If fact, there is no excuse for any kind of ethics NOT being interesting…)

1. I call this “cultural defacing.” At 10:30 last night, I watched the end of “The Princess Bride,” and was thrilled to arrive just as the final showdown between Ingo Montoya (Mandy Patinkin) and Count Rugen (Christopher Guest). Here is the scene, a classic one, which begins with the Count apparently fatally wounding Inigo with a dagger:

Inigo Montoya: Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.

[Inigo advances on Rugen, but stumbles into the table with sudden pain. Rugen attacks, but Inigo parries and rises to his feet again]

Inigo Montoya: Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.

[Rugen attacks again, Inigo parries more fiercely, gaining strength]

Inigo Montoya: Hello! My name is Inigo Montoya! You killed my father! Prepare to die!

Count Rugen: Stop saying that!

[Rugen attacks, twice. Inigo avoids and wounds Rugen in both shoulders. Inigo attacks, bellowing:]

Inigo Montoya: HELLO! MY NAME IS INIGO MONTOYA! YOU KILLED MY FATHER! PREPARE TO DIE!

[Inigo corners Count Rugen, knocks his sword aside, and slashes his cheek, giving him a scar just like Inigo’s]

Inigo Montoya: Offer me money.

Count Rugen: Yes!

Inigo Montoya: Power, too, promise me that.

[He slashes his other cheek]

Count Rugen: All that I have and more. Please…

Inigo Montoya: Offer me anything I ask for.

Count Rugen: Anything you want…

[Rugen knocks Inigo’s sword aside and lunges. But Inigo traps his arm and aims his sword at Rugen’s stomach]

Inigo Montoya: I want my father back, you son of a bitch!

[He runs Count Rugen through and shoves him back against the table. Rugen falls to the floor, dead]

Except “you son of a bitch” was cut!

We settled this when the TV showing of “Gone With The Wind” let Clark Gable’s iconic exit line, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn” remain uncensored, and later,when John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn uttered the words, “Fill your hand, you son of a bitch!” before charging Ned Pepper and his gang. It is unfair and disrespectful to wreck the best work of writers and actors for the few remaining people on earth who take to their fainting couches when rude language meets their ears. You don’t edit Rhett, or Rooster, or Inigo, or even John McLane when he says, “Yippee ki yay, mother fucker!” Show the movie, or don’t show the movie, but don’t ruin the movie for the most easily offended in the audience. Continue reading →