President Barack Obama

To the Pro-Obama Race-Baiters: “Have You No Sense of Decency at All?”

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Ah, if only Joseph Welch and his well-aimed indignation were here today!

We knew, way back when President Obama was running for his first term, that the temptation to paint any opposition to his leadership or his policies as proof of racism would be irresistible  for the less ethical among his supporters in the Democratic Party and among the media. This came to pass, but we should prepare for much worse.  Now that the President has a thoroughly wretched record and is, to an extent I personally haven’t seen since the paranoid days of Richard Nixon, attempting to avoid accountability by blaming everyone in sight—a thoroughly unleaderly display—the race-baiters have served notice that they will be out in force this time as well, more shameless than ever. Continue reading →

Oh, Shut Up, Rush.

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I tuned in to Rush Limbaugh this afternoon expecting what I got, but hoping otherwise. Sure enough, Limbaugh spent the first half-hour of his broadcast mocking President Obama for taking “single-handed” credit for Osama bin Laden’s death, counting the number of times the President uttered the words “me,” “I,” “my,” and “mine,” and minimizing any credit due to the Chief Executive and Commander-in-Chief when the nation he leads finally accomplishes something it has been trying to do for a decade.

The President of the United States gets the blame and is held accountable for gas prices he cannot control, international upheavals, incompetent local disaster management after hurricanes, economic meltdowns caused by lazy regulators, irresponsible investors, unqualified homeowners and greedy business executives, the botched clean-up of unprecedented oil spills, the abuse of prisoners by hillbilly soldiers thousands of miles away, and every other  social, societal and economic ill imaginable. That’s his job, and he wanted it: fair or not, he has to take it. Continue reading →

Colbert King, Obama Abuse, Bias and Double Standards

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Washington Post columnist Colbert King is an around-the-clock Ethics Hero, a relentless journalist investigator and critic of government corruption in Washington. D.C. He has an impeccable sense of right and wrong, as well as intolerance for public betrayal by elected officials. Yet this undeniably ethical, fair man, who eschews rationalizations at all costs while applying rigorous ethical analysis, cannot see a double standard when it is staring back at him from his own computer screen. His is a frightening tale of the power of bias.

In today’s Post, King expresses fury and pain over last week’s despicable birther drama, feelings that I share. He is revolted at the racist undertones of the “joke” photo e-mailed to friends by an Orange County Republican official as am I. He is horrified by the high percentage of Republicans polled who question Obama’s religion and national origin, as indeed he should be And without any sense of irony, King writes… Continue reading →

Unethical Website of the Month: Wonkette

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

That's right, Wonkette---GET HIM!!!

Wonkette the left-leaning political snark site, showed its true colors ( I flagged the site as ethically unbearable in a post six years ago, when it defended Dan Rather during “Memogate”) when it allowed editor Jack Steuf to post “satire” early this week  ridiculing Sarah Palin’s toddler son Trig, who is a Down Syndrome child. Entitled “Greatest Living American: A Children’s Treasury of Trig Crap On His Birthday,” the post contains sick-humor jokes about the 3-year-old ( After quoting from a Palin posted birthday poem for Trig referencing his dreams, Steuf snickers, “What’s he dreaming about? Nothing! He’s retarded!”) and proceeds to use the child as its target while demeaning Palin.  A sample:

“That strange man yelling unintelligibly at Sarah Palin? He’s merely a lowly shepherd proclaiming the birth of our savior. Today is the day we come together to celebrate the snowbilly grifter’s magical journey from Texas to Alaska to deliver to the America the great gentleman scholar Trig Palin. Is Palin his true mother? Or was Bristol? (And why is it that nobody questions who the father is? Because, either way, Todd definitely did it.) Continue reading →