Rep. Stephen Lynch

Ethics Hero: Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.)

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

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I am obligated to name as an Ethics Hero any Democratic official  who is principled enough to try to lead his party, its supporters and the complicit mainstream news media away from their current dangerous and destructive scorched earth efforts to destroy the President of the United States.

Ethics Alarms has been calling for responsible leadership in this matter since November 9th, to no avail. President Obama is backing “the resistance,” behaving unlike any previous  ex-President since John Tyler joined the Confederacy. Hillary still has her own confederates calling for preemptive impeachment. The new Vice-Chair of the DNC claims that President Trump can and should be impeached immediately.  The new Chair thinks it fair and honest to call Trump “the worst President” in history after a single month in office, and issues outright lies like claiming the President wants to eliminate overtime pay. (Come back, Debbie! All is forgiven!) Schumer and Pelosi look the other way, or gently applaud, their most outrageous and uncivil colleagues. Senator Warren reads a decades old letter to call a Senate colleague a racist, and becomes a feminist martyr through some twisted logic.

In this vacuum of integrity, statesmanship, decency, fairness and responsibility, even an obscure House Democrats stands out for just meeting minimal standards of fairness and rationality.

Moreover, this obscure House member is from Blue on Blue Massachusetts, where presumably he risks partisan fury for not following the “Trump is Nazi Satan Hellbeast and Must be Detroyed By Fire! ARGHHHHHH! “ narrative.  Congressman Stephen Lynch didn’t exactly celebrate the President’s recent address, he was just open-minded, thoughtful, and responsible—you know, unlike everything else we have heard from his party and colleagues. He said in part,

“I think his words were a significant shift from his previous, sometimes inflammatory rhetoric. I thought he was much more conciliatory.He urged us at one part to get past the trivial differences and work together. That’s not been his mode of operating, at least up until this point.”

Lynch went on to say that he remains skeptical of the President’s agenda and ability to achieve it, and that is fine. He’s a Democrat. He should feel that way.

“We’ll just have to wait and see if his actions are similar to the speech last night, or more akin to what we’ve seen thus far,” Lynch said.

Fair enough. Continue reading →

Now Showing: “The Benghazi Chronicles,” or “How The Absence Of A Trustworthy And Objective Newsmedia Undermines Democracy”

/ Jack Marshall / 90 Comments
If you think she would lie to Congress, you must be one of those Obama-hating conservatives!

Never mind what the e-mails say: if you think she would lie to Congress, you must be one of those Obama-hating conservatives!

Did you know that the Obama Administration’s handling of the Benghazi fiasco last September and its subsequent explanations to the Congress, the American people and the world is under legitimate scrutiny once again, and that there may be credible and irrefutable evidence that the Administration both botched the response and lied about it? Did you know that at least three whistleblowers—Mark Thompson, deputy assistant secretary of state for counter-terrorism; Gregory Hicks, the former deputy chief of mission/charge d’affairs in Libya; and Eric Nordstrom, who acted as a regional security officer in Libya for the State Department—who had direct knowledge of the inner workings of the government during and after the crisis, will be testifying before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, perhaps this week? Did you know that there is a significant possibility that, as Conservative pundits and Republicans were screaming at the time, the Obama Administration executed a deliberate and purely politically motivated cover-up operation designed to withhold the truth about the Benghazi attack that killed the U.S. ambassador and other U.S. personnel until after the elections, if not permanently?

Since this is an important and perhaps transformational developing news story, one would hope that you would know at least some of thus if you have frequented any “respectable” news source over the past few days, and not been spelunking. One would hope, and one would have that hope dashed. There was nothing about Benghazi over the weekend in the New York Times, or on NBC, ABC’s Sunday Morning news show. There was plenty of coverage, all day long yesterday, at Fox, and you know what that means (and is supposed to mean, and in carefully manipulated by the rest of the media to make sure it means), don’t you? The re-opening of the Benghazi issue is a “conservative story,” just concocted, twisted and massaged by the Obama-hating cabal!

To its credit, CBS, via “Face the Nation,” covered the story on Sunday while ABC, NBC and CNN chose to focus almost exclusively on Syria and immigration reform. Bob Shieffer opened the segment by referring to it as “the story that will not go away,” a self-revelatory intro, I think, since Bob, like most of his Obama-worshiping colleagues, probably wishes the story would go away. Yet he quoted one of the so-called whistleblowers, Greg Hicks, who  reportedly told investigators that the Administration, contrary to what Susan Rice was sent out to tell the public and what the President told the world, knew “from the get-go” that the attack wasn’t a spontaneous demonstration against an anti-Islamic video, but a coordinated terrorist act. Continue reading →