President Jimmy Carter

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 →

The Unethical Deficit Debate, a Cause for Despair

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Our future, thanks to Washington, D.C.

If the bi-partisan dishonesty and unethical conduct surrounding the budget showdown last week didn’t cause you to despair, then you weren’t paying attention:

  • At a time when the federal deficit threatens the long-term (and not all that long, either) solvency of the U.S., risking quality of life, world leadership and security while placing us under the thumb of China, a Machiavellian adversary, both parties—and the President— opted for ideological point-scoring and demagoguery rather than serious explication of the issues.  Irresponsible cowards.
  • The government was brought to the brink of a shutdown over a pathetic, meaningless, 39 billion dollars of cuts that Democrats called “draconian” and Republicans and Obama trumpeted as the “largest budget cuts in U.S. history”. They were draconian only if you think like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who argued that Republicans were heartless to put “cowboy poetry” on the cutting block, and if, as is increasingly looking to be the case,  the Democrats are willing to let the country stay on the road to bankruptcy as long as it also leads them to power. The cuts were the “largest” only in their inflated figures: the budget was cut close to 50% after World War II. Liars and frauds.
  • Even if it were truly”the largest,” the heralded 39 billion dollars cut represented an infinitesimal dent in the overall budget and will have no appreciable effect on the deficit at all. It took a near shutdown to accomplish that. Easy Quiz: what are the chances of our current leaders displaying the political courage to make the substantial, genuine, painful cuts that all serious analysts agree are imperative to stave off financial ruin? Liars and cowards.
  • After all of the drama, after all the condemnation and hype, after “draconian” and “largest ever,” and after the President joined the charade, the no-nonsense Congressional Budget Office announced that by its calculations, the so-called cut was mostly fiction. It boiled down to only $352 million, less than 1% of a 39 billion that was inadequate to begin with. Incompetents.
  • The Democrats chuckled into their sleeves; the Republicans cried that they had been deceived, as if legislators don’t have the resources to find out what the money in the budget they are charged with approving actually pays for. Liars, incompetents and fools.

For me, the low point was President Obama’s speech at George Washington University, announcing his engagement—finally!—in the deficit-cutting debate while resorting that old Democrat stand-by, class warfare; blaming the Bush tax cuts, irresponsible but only one of many contributors to the deficit crisis; and  pledging to cut expenses by ending waste, fraud and abuse while simultaneously stating that the deficit couldn’t be cut by addressing waste, fraud and abuse.  It wasn’t any of those cynical moments that caused me to lose hope, however. It was the President’s insistence that the deficit cutting measures must not interfere with his highest priorities…such as building “new roads.” Continue reading →

Presidents Day Ethics: The Presidents of the United States on Ethics and Leadership

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

In commemoration of President’s Day, Ethics Alarms presents the ethics wisdom of the remarkable men who have served their country in the most challenging, difficult, and ethically complicated of all jobs, the U.S. Presidency.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Presidents of the United States:

George Washington: “I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.” Continue reading →

The Problem With Multi-Culturalism

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

One of many abominations we can blame on Jimmy Carter is the United States’ blessedly half-hearted embrace of multi-culturalism, which Jimmy and his acolytes believed was enlightenment from Europe when in fact it was a disease. This was linked to the ethical value of tolerance, which was in turn used to bludgeon into submission anyone who committed the politically incorrect crime of criticizing conduct that was antithetical to American values engaged in by citizens from other nations.

Civilization needs standards, and culture is the setting of standards, ethical and otherwise. Multi-culturalism is a compact oxymoron that makes society’s standards schizophrenic, impeding efficiency, fairness, and consensus about right and wrong. “Tolerance” requires acceptance of the intolerable, or in its most common permutation here, tolerating the intolerable practices that progressives would like to see established here, while somehow reasoning that other practices that progressives don’t admire shouldn’t qualify for “tolerance.” Continue reading →

Ethics Heads-Up: When the President Talks About “Investment in Infrastructure,” Pay Attention

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Yesterday, a massive water main rupture shut down part of the Washington area Beltway, tying up traffic and swamping cars. From the Associated Press story:

“At one point, water from the broken main shot eight or nine feet in the air, said Lyn Riggins, a spokeswoman for the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission. There was significant damage to the office park, with chunks of asphalt strewn across the parking lot, building windows shattered and three cars filled with water.

“It looks like somewhere where you would go white water rafting,” Riggins said.”

Advance reports discussing President Obama’s State of the Union message tonight note that he will be talking about, among other things, investing the nation’s resources on infrastructure renewal: roads, sewers, bridges and more. Already, Republican budget hawks and the conservative talk shows are mocking this as simply a euphemism for more “out of control spending.”

Addressing this country’s dangerously decrepit infrastructure will be expensive all right, but it is definitely an investment, and not undertaking it immediately is irresponsible, short-sighted, dangerous and foolish. For a quick refresher on why the neglect of U.S. infrastructure has been a scandalous breach of duty  of duty by generations of U.S. leadership, read this.

Why Obama’s Party Is Going Down

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The excuses are already coming fast and furious as President Obama and his party faces a rebuke in Tuesday’s election of historic proportions. The lack of accountability so far may be forgivable; after all, nobody admits they have done a lousy, hypocritical, incompetent and dishonest job while they are running for re-election. The voter’s fury and the Democrats’ peril are being blamed, alternatively and collectively, on George Bush, on Sarah Palin, on racism, on the sad stupidity of the American public, who just are so impatient and unsophisticated that they don’t comprehend all the wonderful things that have been done for them.  It’s also the Supreme Court’s fault for allowing large corporations the right of free speech, although the union money flowing to Democrats as the result of the same decision has dwarfed corporate money.

All of these excuses are demeaning to Obama and his party, and insulting to the intelligence of everyone else.

The reason the Democrats are going down to a party that had thoroughly disgraced itself out of power just two years ago, is illustrated by a shocking report that barely caused a ripple in the news cycle. Continue reading →

Rahm Emanuel, History and Hyperbole Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

There are times when obvious exaggeration is nothing worse than politeness, nothing more than an expression of admiration and affection. “You’re the best boss anyone ever had,” is in this category, especially when the boss is retiring or dying. But when one is speaking in public about controversial and historical matters involving well-known public figures, the margin between excusable hyperbole and unethical dishonesty or worse is much smaller. Al Gore learned this when he played loyal Vice-President on the day his President was impeached by vote of the House of Representatives. Gore’s statement that Bill Clinton was “a man I believe will be regarded in the history books as one of our greatest Presidents” was intended as supportive, but interpreted as a toadying endorsement of Clinton’s unsavory and dishonest conduct, impeachable or not. It probably cost Gore the Presidency.

Worse yet was Trent Lott’s clumsy effort to praise the ancient, infirm and mentally failing Sen. Strom Thurmond at his 100th birthday party. Lott said, “I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have all these problems over all these years, either.” Thurmond, running on the Dixiecrat ticket, had opposed segregation, and Lott’s comment, less fact than flattery, made him sound like he longed for the days of Jim Crow and “white only”rest rooms. The lessons of these hyperbolic gaffes are similar: if the well-intentioned compliment concerns a public figure in historical context, historical exaggerations either appear to be unjust to history or its important figures, seem to make inappropriate value judgments, or come off as a blatant effort to mislead the public.

Rahm Emanuel hit the Trifecta with his fawning farewell to President Obama, as he left the White House to run for Mayor of Chicago. Obama, he said, is “the toughest leader any country could ask for, in the toughest times any president has ever faced.”

Wow. Continue reading →

Should Jimmy Carter Annoint Himself As The Best Former President Ever?

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Last week, former President Jimmy Carter told NBC’s Brian Williams:

“I feel that my role as a former president is probably superior to that of other presidents’. Primarily because of the activism and the — and the injection of working at the Carter Center and in international affairs, and to some degree, domestic affairs, on energy conservation, on — on environment, and things of that kind. We’re right in the midst of the — of the constant daily debate.  And  the Carter Center has decided, under my leadership, to fill vacuums in the world. When — when the United States won’t deal with troubled areas, we go there, and we meet with leaders who can bring an end to a conflict, or an end to a human rights abuse, and so forth. So I — I feel that I have an advantage over many other former presidents in being involved in daily affairs that have shaped the policies of our nation and the world.”

Many commentators felt that Carter’s self-annointment as the best post White House POTUS was unseemly at best, immodest and ungracious at worst. Continue reading →

Blame Everyone for Infrastructure Ruin: Unethical, Irresponsible Priorities from Reagan to Obama

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

In the early Eighties, I oversaw an independent study funded by the Highway Users Federation and the National Chamber Foundation called “Transport Tomorrow,” exploring the immediate need for transportation infrastructure repair and expansion in all modes of transportation: roads, railway, waterway, and airports. In the process of learning how dire the need for massive construction and repair was if America’s future commercial needs were to be met, the study commission made a disturbing discovery: urban water and sewer systems were crumbling too. There was literally not enough money to fix all the roads, bridges, tunnels, water mains and sewer pipes that had to be fixed, and the consequences of not doing so would be economic paralysis and worse, disease and even social unrest.

In the face of this looming and undeniably real disaster, the Reagan Administration did—pretty much nothing. Neither did the Bush, Clinton and Bush II administrations, and even the Chamber of Commerce failed to make infrastructure repair one of its key issues. Oh, there were new projects, of course, and when a major bridge started to dump cars into rivers it was repaired. Holes were patched, pipes were replaced here and there. But the full-fledged commitment to the unsexy and incredibly expensive job of keeping the infrastructure sufficient to meet the needs of the nation, and protecting it from the ravages of use and time was deferred, and deferred, and deferred. Something was always more important: wars…tax cuts…the environment…health care. The Obama Administration is following this irresponsible pattern, except it has combined with the profligacy of the Bush Administration to push the Federal deficit into unprecedented dangerous territory. New taxes on just about everybody and everything are going to be needed to stave off financial ruin, and there will be little political will to spend any of the income on something as mundane, but crucial, as sewers.

The problem, however, has become infinitely worse since 1983, when “Transport Tomorrow” was released, and then as now, the attitude of our elected leaders is to let the next guy deal with the problem. Is this responsible? No. Is it cowardly? Yes. Is it a blatant, intentional and knowing distortion of priorities that will threaten American prosperity, jobs, and lives? Absolutely.

Here is a small glimpse of the enormity of the crisis: Continue reading →