lies

Ethics Dunce: Suspended Giants Outfielder Melky Cabrera (And Not For The Reason You Think)

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Who is “Melky Cabrera” really?

Melky Cabrera shocked Major League Baseball by getting caught mid-season using banned metabolic steroids, it’s true. It is also true that this marks him for all time as a cheater, and something of an idiot, since the penalties for PED (performance enhancing drug) use are devastating to a baseball player’s reputation and wallet, and because, unlike when Barry Bonds was breaking records and racking up MVP trophies while being juiced, the game has belatedly decided that it isn’t going to let games, championships and records be distorted by chemical means.

Melky, however, is special among baseball’s cheaters. Only he, as far as we know, decided to attempt an elaborate internet deception to try to duck responsibility after he had been caught.

From today’s New York Daily News: Continue reading →

The Swiftboating of Mitt Romney, Part II: When “Balanced” is Biased

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

“Did you hear? Mitt Romney killed his wife. At least, that’s what they’re saying…”

I was intrigued to see how my home town paper, The Washington Post, dealt with the latest lower-than-low and Nixonian attack on Romney from Team Obama, the “Mitt Romney killed my wife” ad.

If you have been asleep this week or just in the bathroom vomiting over what “Hope and Change” mutates into when it’s time to pay the piper, the TV ad by pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA Action features Joe Soptic, a steelworker who claims that Romney is responsible for the death of his wife, because Romney’s company, Bain Capital, shut down his steel plant.  The facts of Soptic’s case, however, are not in dispute: Mitt Romney left Bain in 1999 to work on the Olympics.  Jonathan Lavine, now a top Obama campaign fundraiser, was running the company when it closed the GST Steel plant where Soptic worked in 2001. Soptic was, he now admits, offered a buy-out by Bain, but declined it. He then took another job but declined to purchase his employer’s insurance plan. Soptic’s wife had her own health insurance plan through 2003. In 2006, seven years after Romney gave up the management of Bain, Soptic’s wife was diagnosed with very late-stage cancer, after being misdiagnosed earlier, and died shortly thereafter.

Based on this, Joe Soptic alleges that Mitt Romney killed his wife. He is either lying, or he is nuts. But the point is that he is willing to say it on camera, and has a sad face. That is enough, you see, to justify calling Mitt Romney a murderer. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Redstate Blogger Moe Lane

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

The other Moe, the one who probably COULD use a search engine…

Redstate blogger Moe Lane is offended that I think emulating Harry Reid to get even with Harry Reid is as despicable as Harry Reid, and since Lane hasn’t the wit or diligence to make a coherent argument against the position articulated in my recent post, which has flushed out a covey of mouth-foaming right-wingers, he plays the hypocrisy card, and like most players, doesn’t really know what hypocrisy is. Unlike many players, however, he doesn’t even bother to get his facts right, apparently because the Ethics Alarms search engine is too tricky for him. As I opined that the Right was attempting to “santorum” Reid by associating his name with something unsavory (in his case, pederasty), Lane fulminates that I didn’t express similar objections when Santorum himself was santorumed. He writes:

“…Hence the aforementioned shocked, shocked response from this Ethics Alarms site, which is very disapproving of the whole thing, and goes so far as to call it ‘santoruming.’ For those unfamiliar with the concept, Ethics Alarms provides a footnote: “Thanks to blogger Dan Savage, the former GOP Senator’s name is now a synonym for a disgusting bodily discharge.” And that, of course, is just as bad when it happens to Harry Reid as it was when it happened to Rick Santorum.”…which, given that (as near as I can tell) this seems to be the first time that Ethics Alarms has bothered to mention to the world that, hey, attacking Rick Santorum like that was bad, just indicates to me that the “Reid is a Pederast” meme is having the desired effect. It’s getting self-absorbed, pretentious websites that hate hardcore social conservatives** to stand up for those self-same social conservatives! Without prompting, even! Lo, indeed, truly we live in an Age of Wonders.”

Well, no, Moe, in fact this was not the first time that I expressed disapproval of Dan Savage’s successful effort to slime Rick Santorum, and if you could search the web or my site with the deftness of the typical Special Ed teen, you would have seen that over a year ago I wrote a post entitled, Dan Savage’s Curse on Rick Santorum: Funny! But Wrong. Note that the title was specifically evoked by the heading for the recent Reid post, which would have been a big fat clue for anyone who cared about being fair and accurate rather than being snide and obnoxious, like Moe Lane. Continue reading →

The Despicable Ryan Holiday

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Sub-title: “Buy This Book—You’re An Idiot”

You know those science fiction movies where a scientist can’t get anyone to listen to him about the threat of a man-made virus getting out of control and destroying the world decides to prove his point by creating a virus that then gets out of control and destroys the world? Or the ones about the government computer geek who drives people crazy complaining that the nation’s systems are vulnerable to cyber-attack, so he creates a bug to prove his point and it sends the country back to the stone age?

Ryan Holiday is like those guys. Fortunately, he isn’t a scientist or tech whiz, just an unscrupulous writer and a liar, so his unconscionable stunts to “prove a point” don’t risk ending civilization. Ethically, however, he is no better than those fictional characters, and arguably he is worse. At least those brilliant boobs were trying to prevent a catastrophe. Holiday is just trying to sell his book.

The book is about the news media’s vulnerability to bad information, so Holiday, a 25-year-old marketing director for American Apparel, decided to prove his thesis with an “experiment.” He got himself listed as an “expert” on an online resource for reporters, and when they contacted him, he lied to them. One of the media sources that fell for his deception was the New York Times, which subsequently published this after a story using Holiday’s lies made it into the News That’s Fit to Print, when it wasn’t: Continue reading →

“The Truth About Human Nature”: Gulliver, Horse People, Absolutism and Lies

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Gulliver among the Houyhnhnms

As I recuperate from air travel hell and try to gather my wits, here is a provocative essay examining how Jonathan Swift explored the complex function of lying in human nature. The essay is by Prof. Lee Perlman, in the New Atlantis, and you can read it here.

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Source: The New Atlantis

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Obama Resorts To Swiftboating

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

“It was despicable what they did to John Kerry. Hey! Maybe it will work on Romney!”

I didn’t see this coming from the Obama campaign, and I suppose I should have. The President has shown a willingness to abandon virtually every one of the principles his piously stood for during his “transformational” 2008 campaign; the unifying, bi-partisan, President-of -all-Americans has meticulously worked to seed distrust and enmity between black and white, Anglo and Hispanic, business owners and labor, rich and poor, non-Catholic and Catholic, young and old, men and women, and, of course, Republicans and Democrats, as a desperate and cynical strategy to stay in power, disregarding the inevitable harm such a scorched earth strategy will do to the nation. If anyone can recall in our history such a total breach of integrity by a major American political figure, please enlighten me. The closest I can find is President Obama’s 2008 opponent, John McCain, who thoroughly disgraced himself to fend off a tea party challenger in his 2010 Senate bid in Arizona….and it really isn’t close.

Still, I didn’t expect the President to resort to Swiftboating, the political tactic that derives its name from the attacks on John Kerry’s military heroics from some of his fellow Vietnam swift boat commanders (“Swift Boat Veterans for Truth”) who financed a devastating series of negative campaign ads alleging that Kerry’s decorations for valor were based on fraud. Though the ads were based on rumor, hearsay and animus, they put Kerry on the defensive in his 2004 campaign against President Bush. I doubt that the smear really lost Kerry the election—he was a terrible candidate—but Democrats have continued to cite the Swiftboat ads as proof of conservative perfidy and ruthlessness. They, of course, would never stoop so low. Continue reading →

Liars For President

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want a liar as President. I’m not talking about the kind of lies that are periodically unavoidable in leadership and governance, as much as we would like to pretend they are not. I’m talking about “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” type of lies, intentional falsehoods designed to deceive the public for  political advantage with no benefit to the nation or its occupants whatsoever. Unfortunately, we are about to elect a liar as President, because lying in political campaign ads, and particularly negative ads, is sunk deep into the system like an inoperable brain tumor. It is fair to say that every President since George Washington has done it, and thus the public accepts it, and the news media shrugs it off. Continue reading →

Why Journalists Can’t Shoot Straight

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

George probably wasn’t lying, but Bill sure was.

The issue in the Washington Post’s weekly Outlook section concerned the virtues and dangers of honesty in a Presidential campaign, a matter that interests me from the perspective of ethics, presidential history, and citizenship. Two Post reporters were given the assignment of creating sidebars to the main article, one on candidates who told the truth and were punished for it, the other on campaign lies that came back to haunt the Presidents involved.

These are not difficult assignments, by any means. Either would be a legitimate term paper topic for a high school senior’s history class; both would be rejected as a history major’s thesis topic as overly simplistic. Yet both Rachel Weiner and Aaron Blake botched their tasks, and would have earned D’s at best in high school history, and that’s only because of grade inflation. The reasons for their failures exemplify the inadequacy of the mainstream media for the job we need it to do during a Presidential election.

Continue reading →

Ethical and Unethical Adultery Advice: There is Carolyn Hax, and Then There Is Emily Yoffe

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Sometimes, you just have to tell your slimy boss “No.”

Emily Yoffe is Slate’s advice columnist, in its “Dear Prudence” feature. She specializes in extreme situations: a recent column involved a teenager who realized that his mother had breast-fed him far too long because she was sexually aroused by it, and then had him fondle her breasts for years after he stopped be willing to suck on them. He asked what he should do now that his mother was subjecting his younger sister to the same treatment. (Emily did get that one right: she told him to call child services on his mother, and to seek professional help for himself.)

Last week I congratulated Carolyn Hax for her advice to a woman torn between the adulterous relationship of one friend with another friend’s husband. Notwithstanding the persistent argument of one crusading commenter who felt that I should have stood for universal adultery whistleblowing on friends and strangers alike, Hax gave, as usual, practical, ethical and measured advice.  She suggested that the inquirer tell the cheating husband that his secret was out, and that she would not lie to protect his illicit affair.  I believe that’s the right ethical balance. Hax’s advice to the woman was to be proactive in both extracting herself from the split loyalties and to be a catalyst for either disclosure or ending the affair. I also noted that the ethical duty on the questioner may be different when the betrayed spouse is an especially close friend, or a family member. Then loyalty and trust could require disclosure.

That same week, Yoffe got an inquiry from a “well-paid assistant of a successful business mogul.” Among her duties, she told “Prudence,” is to facilitate her boss’s extra-marital affair: lying about his whereabouts to business associates, deceiving his wife when she calls, and even buying gifts for the illicit lover. “Next month he’s going on a weeklong business trip,” she wrote. “He only needs to be gone for two days, but he’s taking his girlfriend with him and staying longer. I know I’m doing wrong by his wife. But I love my job, and I’m not sure what I could or should do to behave honorably in this situation.” Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Animal Planet

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently felt that it was necessary to put out this statement, which reads in part:

“Mermaids — those half-human, half-fish sirens of the sea — are legendary sea creatures chronicled in maritime cultures since time immemorial…But are mermaids real? No evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found. Why, then, do they occupy the collective unconscious of nearly all seafaring peoples? That’s a question best left to historians, philosophers, and anthropologists.”

Why, you ask? Wasn’t the mummy of the Fiji Mermaid, a famous P.T. Barnum humbug, debunked almost two centuries ago? Yes, it was. Now, however, instead of a famous showman whom people expected to be fooling them, we have unscrupulous and irresponsible TV executives, who run channels with trustworthy names like The History Channel, Discovery and The Learning Channel, and then use these venues to make Americans even more stupid and ignorant than they already are. Continue reading →