Liz Cheney

No, Rachel Maddow Did Not Demonstrate a Sudden Attack of Decency and Bi-Partisanship By Attending Dick Cheney’s Funeral

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Oh come on. Does anyone really believe this? Seriously?

Dishonest and frighteningly biased like the paper he works for, New York Times pundit Peter Baker actually had the gall to post this on “X”:

To which Sidney Wang quickly responded,

“Changed” since when? Maddow has been allied with the Trump-hating Cheneys and Bushes since at least 2015.

Maddow was invited to Chaney’s funeral, a gathering one wag described as a meeting of the “I Hate Trump” club, by Liz Cheney, who became a favorite of MSNBC’s talking heads once she voted for the second of Nancy Pelosi’s partisan impeachments against President Trump and was complicit in the rigged Star Chamber hearings on the so-called J-6 riots. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” is an ancient proverb that has turned up in many cultures and in the mouths of many philosophers since the dawn of speech. It is simple Cognitive Dissonance Scale reality. Glenn Greenwald gets it, but then do Elmo and the cast of “Jackass!”, I bet:

It isn’t Maddow’s presence at the funeral but the absence of President Trump and Vice-President Vance that shows the collapse of professionalism, mutual respect, decency and decorum in today’s politics. Neither were invited to attend. Trump recklessly (and, as I have written before, stupidly) insulted the Bush-Cheney political machine when he was running for President in 2016, and it wreaked its revenge by abandoning the supposed conservative principles its members stood for to become bitter and fanatic NeverTrumpers. Dick Cheney and his daughter endorsed Kamala Harris, proving that personal vendettas were more important to them than the welfare of the nation. 

If Maddow’s smirking presence at the funeral showed how “politics have changed in America,”it only demonstrated that they have become more petty and and vicious, with its institutions being weakened and the public trust in its motives justly reduced to vapors.

The Liz Cheney Ethics Zugswang Problem

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Now this is an ethics conflict.

It is increasingly clear that former Congresswoman Liz Cheney broke the law as well as several ethics rules while doing her utmost to incriminate President Trump during the all-Democrat/ Never-Trump Republican J-6 committee star chamber orchestrated by Nancy Pelosi. It is wrong to break the law. It is especially wrong to break the law when you are an elected official and law-maker. Such officials should not only be held to a higher standard, but should be role models for the public that elected them. It follows, then, that when they break the law—it seems that Cheney participated in the destruction of evidence as well as coaching a witness, Cassidy Hutchinson, to lie under oath while unethically meeting with her, a represented witness, without her lawyer being present—they should be treated like anyone else who breaks the law.

If elected officials are not prosecuted and held to account when they violate the law, it is the worst manifestation of the King’s Pass, the insidious and pervasive rationalization (#11 on the list) in which individuals who are famous, popular, powerful, accomplished, productive or successful are allowed to escape the earned consequences of their own misconduct when a less powerful or popular individual would face the full penalties of the law. Such episodes seriously erode public trust in our legal system and power structure. The cliche is “No one is above the law,” but except for the case of indisputable bribery or violent felonies, elected officials are seldom prosecuted, and sometimes not even for those crimes.

Continue reading →

Outrageous Hypocrite of the Month: Liz Cheney

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

It continues to amaze to me that there are (once) intelligent and objective people who regard Liz Cheney as anything but a raging, emotion-driven, warped political hack at this point. The Axis and the Trump-Deranged like her for the obvious reasons, but isn’t there some point where even a mouth-foaming Trump-Hater is too silly to take seriously? Cheney crashed through that DETOUR sign when she signed onto Nancy Pelosi’s “Get Trump!” star chamber “investigating” the January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol.

Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month: Liz Cheney [Supplemented]

/ Jack Marshall / 42 Comments

“I will do whatever it takes to make sure Donald Trump is never again anywhere near the Oval Office.”

—Rep. Liz Cheney (NeverTrump-MT) in her head-exploding, self-glorifying, beyond satire concessions speech after being crushed in the GOP state primary.

And there you have it: candor and saying the secret part out loud, though the anti-democratic motives of  the “the resistance”/Democrats/ mainstream media cabal (the “Axis of Unethical Conduct”)is hardly a secret at this point, and was stated on Ethics Alarms, beginning, oh, nearly six years ago.

This is a woman (a Republican official who is aping Democratic Party talking points) who claims to be trying to save democracy by interfering with democratic processes and institutions. Does “anything it takes” set off an ethics alarm? If you’re Trump Deranged, it probably doesn’t. Cheney’s mad logic is that Donald Trump is an exception to the laws, rules and principles of democracy: he doesn’t get the benefit of them because he’s bad….mostly because he’s not in lock-step with the entrenched elite political class like the Bidens, Cheneys, Bushes and Clintons, and also a bit because he’s an unmannerly boor. Another crazed Trump hater, the Washington Post’s self-parodying Jennifer Rubin, writes in today’s Post that “Taking the Fifth should disqualify a politician from taking office.” Continue reading →

Ethics Nightcap, 8/16/2022: Bias, Ignorance, Contrived Ignorance, And Just Plain Dumb

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

To no one’s surprise, Rep.Liz Cheney lost her primary in Wyoming. Good: she deserved it. She is a “bias makes you stupid”—also ridiculous—case study. Nothing is more ridiculous than someone who repeatedly behaves in an undemocratic manner and then claims that she is fighting for democracy.

In many ways, her fall, though so, so deserved, is an ethics tragedy. She’s smart and serious, but placed her family loyalty above her duties to her state, the public, the House and the nation, and all because she hates Donald Trump for personal reasons. He dared to insult her father and the Bushes, repeatedly and nastily, by declaring their Iraq War a “disaster,” though it certainly was. Cheney has been full NeverTrump ever since, but even that bias isn’t justification for voting for two contrived and hyper-partisan impeachments, especially the second one, which went forward to the Senate without evidence, inquiry or due process supporting it. Then Cheney facilitated the January 6 witch hunt, which was so obviously a Democratic “Get Trump!” exercise that Nancy Pelosi didn’t allow the traditional and sensible party balance that investigative House committees have always had before.

You can tell if someone is Trump Deranged if they express admiration for Liz Cheney. Here is a Republican who joined with Democrats in a their effort to use unethical means to hold power. That Democrats asked their party members in Wyoming to temporarily switch parties so they could vote for Cheney was the perfect embodiment of what that party has become: the fact that they support Cheney and she has supported them proves mutual corruption.

1. Why we don’t trust the news media, Reason 765,988, 204: You can still read news reports saying that the motive for the nearly fatal attack on writer Salman Rushdie is “unclear.” This is the same false media narrative circa. 2001 that Islam is a peaceful religion and only bigots have concerns that radical Muslims aren’t as rare as pigeon teeth. The Washington Post’s op-ed about the attack doesn’t even mention the attacker, but somehow compares it to the Trumpites’ rioting against the 2020 election. The attack was political, you see, not religious. (It was religious.)

Continue reading →

Weekend Ethics Frolics, 5/9/2021: Birthing Persons Day Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Frolicking

Surely you have heard by now that a few addled Democrats in Congress have begun using the hilarious term “birthing people” to describe mothers. This is in order to pander to the trans population, because the special problems of this tiny minority are worth turning the entire culture inside out and upside down. So far it’s three certifiably silly people on the Hill whose credentials as ethics dunces are unusually strong, even for Congressional Democrats (the links go to signature significance EA posts: Senator Cory “Spartacus” Booker , certifiable Rep. Ayanna Pressley, previously heard arguing that “girls” have a right to attack other girls with knives “uninterupted”, and the spectacularly unqualified Rep. Cori Bush, who was supposedly on Biden’s short list for VP, which is terrifying—yes, even more terrifying than Kamala Harris:

birthing person tweet 1Birthing person 2

This is fascinating from an ethics perspective, specifically the slippery slope. The Great Stupid that has descended over the land, with special focus on progressives, has led to vocal support for so many ridiculous ideas—defunding the police, paying people more to stay out of work than to have jobs, open boarders, electing Joe Biden, packing the Supreme Court, and more—that the once fairly bold line between “progressive” and “batshit crazy” appears to have been erased. At some point, and maybe “birthing people” is it, even left-tilting Americans will wake up and say “Whoa! These are wackos!”

And indeed they are.

1. Also from the “What an idiot!” files…On baseball and Giants’ Hall of Fame immortal Willie Mays’ 90th birthday last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Twitter account posted a picture of Willie McCovey. Willie Mays is a national icon, probably the greatest African-American baseball player of all-time, and any American, especially any American elected official, who does not know what he looks like is too ignorant of America’s culture and history to serve competently. (I’m only exaggerating a little.) Not only is this an insult to the Say Hey Kid (What does that nickname mean, Nancy? Huh? Come on, you represent San Francisco!), it’s the kind of “they all look the same to me!” mistake that white officials are typically savaged for, as when Senator Rubio mixed up Rep. John Lewis with Rep. Elijah Cummings. At least Cummings and Lewis looked a little bit alike. McCovey, who was also a Hall of Fame slugger and who also played for the Giants,

Willie McCovey Holding Baseball Bat

looked nothing like Willy Mays…

Willie-Mays-US-2155529

…and to make the distinction easy for baseball ignoramuses, Willie McCovey is DEAD.

Continue reading →

“The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Impeachment” Becomes An Ethics Fiasco: Ten Observations

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

johnson-impeachment

In this post, “Nancy And The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Impeachment “—could it really have just been 12 days ago?—I wrote in part,

Nancy Pelosi came right out and said that her objective in impeaching Trump this time was to stop him from running again. That’s not what the Founders designed impeachment for. She’s admitting that this Congress and her party regard impeachment as just one more political stunt, like ripping up the State of the Union message, boycotting the inauguration, or nominating Kamala Harris. Worse, unless the Senate agrees to rush through a trial the way Pelosi rushed through the impeachment, Trump will already be out of office and a private citizen before he can be convicted—which he wouldn’t be anyway. The Constitution speaks of impeachment and the Senate trial as a means of removing a President, not as a device to say “I hate you! Ooooh, I hate you to pieces!” to an ex-President.

Thus it’s a joke. The first impeachment was a dud. Trump hasn’t been embarrassed, but Congress and the news media have been embarrassed and exposed as fools.

Not that they hadn’t been exposed as fools already.

But “Wait!”—as they say on infomercials–“There’s more!” And it only gets worse:

1. Since the impeachment vote in the House, further investigation of the attack on the Capitol and its time-line has shown that many of the participants had planned to storm the building in advance, in fact had begun preparations before the President addressed the protesters, and had begun to take action while the President was speaking on January 6. Thus the House’s impeachment theory that the President had incited a riot by providing a lit match to an obvious powder-keg is unsustainable n the facts: the powder had already been lit. Nor do the facts support the argument that the President intended to spark a riot, since the words of his speech never suggested violence or alluded to it.

Continue reading →

Is The Democratic Party the Party of Anti-Semitism, Infanticide, And Socialism?

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Rep. Liz Cheney, the third-ranking Republican in the House, told NBC’s “Meet The Press” last week that Democrats have become the party of “Anti-Semitism,, infanticide, socialism.” This wasn’t quite as inflammatory as when Samuel Burchard, speaking at a GOP pro-James G. Blaine campaign event during the 1884 race against Democratic candidate Grover Cleveland, denounced the Democrats as the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion,” but you wouldn’t know it from the howls coming from progressives, because, as we all know, the truth hurts. Well, that’s not quite fair: Cheney was engaging in hyperbole and being intentionally inflammatory, but she wasn’t entirely wrong.

Let’s look at the “infanticide” accusation. Obviously Democrats don’t favor killing babies as a general proposition, but Virginia’s  Democratic governor and renowned Michael Jackson impressionist described exactly how he would make an abortion-survivor “comfortable” before making the newborn dead. (Many states have laws that allowed condemned men to go free if they survived an attempted execution. Seems fair…)

Democrats in the Senate—all but a handfull—blocked a GOP bill requiring doctors to use all means available to save the life of a child born alive after an attempted abortion. They must, it said, “exercise the same degree of professional skill, care, and diligence to preserve the life and health of the child” as they would for “any other child born alive at the same gestational age.”

Senator Ben Sasse, the Nebraska Republican who authored the bill, had called it an “infanticide ban.” Rationalizing like mad, Democrats said that the bill was aimed at discouraging doctors from performing legal abortions—in other words, they were pandering to the pro-abortion extremists—and that it was unnecessary because a similar law already exists, the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2002.—you know, because the Democrats have always opposed redundant legislation. Continue reading →

Five Ethics Questions and Answers: Bristol Palin’s Undeserved Survival On “Dancing With the Stars”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

This week, once again, the clunky Bristol Palin, Sarah’s daughter, survived elimination from “Dancing With the Stars,” and now is in the Final Three. A far better amateur dancer, pop singer Brandy, who had one of the week’s best scores, was sent home instead. The entertainment media is howling with indignation. What does it all mean?

Question 1. Is Bristol Palin Sanjaya? Continue reading →