race-baiting

Ethics Dunce: Greta Van Susteren

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Newt: ” Honey, I’m divorcing you to marry the woman I’ve been cheating on you with for the last 6 years.” Marianne: “Fine. Just wait til you run for President. I’ll be ready.”

Newt Gingrich’s second (of three) wife, Marianne Gingrich, has said in the past that she had it within her power to  end her ex-husband’s career with a single interview. This is not as remarkable as it sounds; just consider how many political spouses past and present have or had that power regarding their own power partners. Let’s see: Eleanor Roosevelt…Jackie Kennedy…Coretta Scott King…Lady Bird Johnson….Pat Nixon…Hillery Clinton, of course…Bill Clinton…Laura Bush…Tipper Gore. That’s just for starters. I have no doubt that Marianne Gingrich might be able to tell tales that would make any of these women feel fortunate by comparison, but on the other hand, what could she say that would be a surprise? Anyone who doesn’t know by now that Newt is about as miserable an excuse for a human being as one can be and avoid being shot or imprisoned hasn’t been paying attention.

This is the problem, however. People don’t pay attention, and have the memories of Eric Holder under Congressional questioning about Fast and Furious. After Gingrich’s deft response to Juan Williams’ accusatory race-baiting question at the last South Carolina debate sparked a standing ovation, you would have thought that he was the new star on the scene to hear callers on conservative talk-radio rave.* Yes, yes, Gingrich is smart and articulate. So were Richard Nixon, Tom DeLay, Huey Long and Joe McCarthy. So were Professor Moriarty and Goldfinger. We know Newt is smart; we also should know other things about him by now, like the fact that he’s an untrustworthy narcissist and a cur.

Apparently Marianne Gingrich has decided to do America a favor and to remind amnesiac Republicans once and for all who they were cheering this week. She has taped a two-hour spill-the-dirt interview with ABC News. The Gingrich camp is in a panic, and supposedly there is an ethics debate at ABC about whether the interview should air before the critical South Carolina primary, possibly Newt’s last chance to stop the Mitt Romney juggernaut, or after. Fox host and legal analyst Greta Van Susteren comes down on the side of holding the interview in the can until Monday. On her blog, she writes: Continue reading →

Mitt’s Gift

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

South Carolinian Ruth Williams says she was praying for divine guidance as to how she would pay a late electric bill when she found herself in the crowd around the Mitt Romney campaign bus. When she told the Republican presidential front-runner about her plight, he reached into his wallet and handed Ruth around $50 to help her keep her power on.

That bastard!

He only did it for the publicity, of course. (Though there were no cameras present.) Or he did it to show he was better than her. Romney gave her the money because he’s such a rich SOB that it was throwing crumbs to a peasant. Yesterday on CNN, a Democratic operative cited the incident as proof of how out of touch Romney is with the needs and feelings of regular Americans. After all, she said, he just carries all this cash around with him—it was like his betting Rick Perry that $10,000. (Williams says Romney emptied his wallet and gave him everything he had. Wow…the tycoon carries 50 bucks around.)

Over on MSNBC, where every act by a Republican is evil personified,  guest Joy-Ann Reid, a blogger for theGrio.com, was furious; she said that the hand-out proves Romney is a racist. Continue reading →

Recent Race Card Rankings: Trying Out The Knight Scale

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I can see Michael Moore from here!

Ethics Alarms recently proposed the Knight Scale, a way to rank attempts to play the race card or otherwise accuse politicians, satirists, writers, pundits and others of racism in order to silence them, ruin their credibility, or score cheap political points in the media. The Knight Scale was made possible by blogger Christopher Knight, who somehow managed to find a cartoonist’s substitution of Michelle Obama for Marie Antoinette ( as a commentary on the First Lady’s ill-timed–some say—taste for lavish parties and social activities) in a famous painting. Despite the fact that the French queen was not, to my knowledge, black, Knight somehow found this to be blatant racism, thereby establishing the tippity-top of the Knight Scale: you just can’t come up with a more far-fetched, unfair, factually indefensible accusation of racism than that. With that outrageous complaint as a 10, the most outrageous, where would other, necessarily lesser bogus racism claims rank?

Let’s look at last week. From here on, we can count on an ever-increasing number of Knight Scale candidates, since an African-American President  presents such an irresistible temptation for unscrupulous race-baiters, and the entire Obama Administration is seemingly conditioned to cry race bias whenever criticism get hot, so consider this a trial run: Continue reading →

The Knight Scale

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I love extremes, especially the bottom of the barrel. Once we can agree on the worst of the worst, everything else can be ranked from there. I was once in a community theater production of “Sugar,” the stage musical version of “Some Like It Hot,” that was so hilariously messed-up that I was excited about it; I was certain that it would finally set the elusive rock bottom for the worst theatrical production of all time. For example, the actress playing the Marilyn Monroe part had gained about 40 pounds during rehearsals, and the actor playing the tap-dancing gangster was recovering from a heart attack, and could barely move. Sadly, the show was cancelled before it could open. I’ve seen a lot of dogs since then, but nothing close to the disaster that “Sugar” would have been.

<sigh>

This is why I am so grateful for Los Angeles Times blogger Christopher Knight’s demented post claiming that a satirical cartoon above (first published on the right-wing blog Gateway Pundit) is “baldly racist.” Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Month: Attorney General Eric Holder

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“This is a way to get at the president because of the way I can be identified with him, both due to the nature of our relationship and, you know, the fact that we’re both African-American.”

—-Attorney General Eric Holder, explaining what he believes to be the motives of “extreme factions” in their efforts to hold him accountable for the Justice Department’s “Fast and Furious” debacle in an interview with the New York Times.

That's right, Eric. It's not because you've been a pathetic Attorney General---heck, aren't they all?

Ah, the race card! What a versatile, powerful weapon in the arsenal of public figures under scrutiny, criticism and attack who happen to be African-American! How comforting it must be to know that when it gets really difficult, even impossible, to talk your way out of a mess of your own making, there us always this last ditch, accountability-ducking tactic that will cause reporters to recoil, accusers to quail, public sympathy to shift, and Al Sharpton and Tavis Smiley to leap to attention. Play the race card! Jesse and Al have made a career doing it. Clarence Thomas, Barry Bonds, Marion Barry, Armstrong Williams, Herman Cain, and so many others resorted to it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s always worth a try…unless, of course, you have sufficient dignity, honesty and integrity to resist the impulse. Say what you will about Charlie Rangel, and I’ve said plenty, but he never claimed that his ethics problems were due to his race. It’s strange to praise someone for not resorting to dishonest and unconscionable tactics, but so automatic is the race card ploy among prominent African Americans in peril that I think Rangel deserves more credit than I gave him. Continue reading →

(Pssst! GOP? Awful Human Beings Are Not Qualified To Be President!)

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Coincidentally, this newt is also a miserable human being...

I suppose that it was inevitable that the “Anyone but Mitt” bloc of Republican voters would eventually give Newt Gingrich a second look. After all, he can put a complete sentence together and stays current on world events. He doesn’t take pride in being inarticulate (like Rick Perry) or think it’s cute not to know a thing about foreign countries (like Herman Cain).  Unlike Michele Bachmann, he could pass a junior high exam in American History; unlike Ron Paul, he doesn’t live in a parallel universe. Newt isn’t bland and weightless, like Rick Santorum, and he doesn’t appear to be a holograph, like Jon Huntsman. He’s obviously smart.

This is all true, and yet Newt is a wretched choice. Not because he has virtually no executive experience (and we should be learning what that means.) Not because in his only extended attempt at filling an important and challenging leadership position when he was Speaker of the House, he squandered a position of strength with ethical misconduct and unrestrained hubris worthy of the House of Atreus.  Newt is unqualified to be president because he is demonstrably an awful human being. Continue reading →

Double Standard Ethics: What the “Occupy Wall Street” Demonstrations Have Revealed So Far

/ Jack Marshall / 41 Comments

1. When well-behaved middle-class Americans held rallies protesting specific U.S. policies, notably excessive spending, a CNN  reporter challenged them on camera and accused the effort of being a creation of Fox News. When incoherently chanting anarchists, radicals and unemployed youths hold rallies advocating nothing constructive whatsoever, reporters are invariably respectful.

2. Thanks to the efforts of snickering CNN and MSNBC hosts, the emerging Tea Party was immediately referred to using a crude term for a gay sexual act. No such denigrating term has been employed to describe “Occupy Wall Street.” Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Actor Morgan Freeman

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Ah, God...you disappoint me.

As long as shameless, irresponsible race-baiters keep attributing opposition to President Obama’s presidency to bigotry, I’ll keep naming them Ethics Dunces.

The latest in this disgraceful parade is distinguished African-American actor Morgan Freeman, who told CNN’s Piers Morgan in an interview that the Tea Party and the Republican Party antipathy to the President is motivated by racism, saying…

“Their stated policy, publicly stated, is to do whatever it takes to see to it that Obama only serves one term. What’s, what does that, what underlines that? ‘Screw the country. We’re going to whatever we do to get this black man, we can, we’re going to do whatever we can to get this black man outta here’…It is a racist thing…it just shows the weak, dark, underside of America. We’re supposed to be better than that. We really are. That’s, that’s why all those people were in tears when Obama was elected president. “Ah, look at what we are. Look at how, this is America.’ You know? And then it just sort of started turning because these people surfaced like stirring up muddy water.” Continue reading →

Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: Rep. Andre Carson (D-Ind.)

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Worse than Joe "You Lie!" Wilson; worse than Allan "The Republicans want you to die!" Grayson. Will anyone say so?

Many Members of the Congressional Black Caucus have specifically stated in the past that they have no interest in budget-balancing issues, and that their primary and over-riding objective is to keep government money flowing to their neediest constituents. That’s a narrow and irresponsible position, but defensible if your view of the duty of elected representatives is that they are only advocates for the voters who elect them, and not bound by any obligation to national welfare  as a whole. Even if one accepts this approach (shared by many in the Tea Party), it does not excuse executing that advocacy by stirring up race hatred with diatribes attributing monstrous and unjustified motivations to political adversaries.

In other words, it doesn’t excuse slanderous comments like these about the Tea Party and its adherents, issuing like flaming vomit from the uncivil mouth of Rep. Andre Carson:

“This is the effort that we are seeing of Jim Crow. Some of these folks in Congress right now would love to see us as second class citizens. Some of them in Congress right now with this Tea Party movement would love to see you and me… hanging on a tree. Some of them right now in Congress right now are comfortable with where we were fifty or sixty years ago. But it’s a new day with a black president and a Congressional Black Caucus.”

Continue reading →

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 →