“Tea Party” movement

The Unethical Ethics Attacks on Arizona

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

The anger, ridicule and threats being heaped on Arizona for its illegal immigration enforcement law defies fairness and rationality, and has been characterized so far by tactics designed to avoid productive debate rather than foster it. Now, with the help and encouragement of professional bullies like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, Arizona is facing an economic boycott, which, like all boycotts, carries the message “we’re going to force you to do what we want, whether we’re right or not.” Meanwhile, all of the over-heated rhetoric diverts the focus to side issues rather than the major problem that prompted the Arizona law in the first place: out of control illegal immigration, and its very obvious—and very serious—negative consequences to the entire nation.

Whether they know it or not, opponents of Arizona’s law are using a common ethics misconception to its advantage. Illegal immigration enforcement is an ethical conflict, which occurs when two or more ethical principles dictate different results, and thus have to be weighed against each other. The attacks on Arizona, however, have framed the argument as an ethics dilemma, defined as a problem in which the ethical course is clear, but powerful non-ethical considerations make rejecting it seem attractive. This allows the opponents of Arizona’s law to inaccurately place themselves in the moral high ground, sniping at Arizona as it supposedly wallows in a pit of greed, meanness, nativism and bigotry….non-ethical considerations all. Much of the media, to their discredit (but the media has so much discredit now that they don’t seem to care any more), is accepting this spin.

The spin, however, is nonsense. Continue reading →

Tea Party Vengeance

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

What possible justification can there be for setting out to get someone fired for expressing a private opinion, however crude or confrontational? Vengeance isn’t a justification. Intimidation isn’t a justification. Neither is “because I can.” Causing someone to lose his or her job as retribution for legal conduct with no connection to that job is meanness for the sake of meanness, bullying, and a bright-line violation of the Golden Rule.

This is what the head of a prominent Tea Party organization did to Lance Baxter. Continue reading →

The Hannity-Fox-Tea Party Connection

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

When you don’t stop something that is obviously unethical until people start screaming and pointing fingers, the reasonable presumption is that it wasn’t the fact that it was unethical that made you take action, but that you were going to be criticized for it. Thus Fox honcho Rupert Murdoch’s last-second cancellation of Sean Hannity’s appearance at a Tea Party event get no ethics brownie points—in fact, quite the contrary. Continue reading →

Crash the Tea Party Today, Teach America’s Youth Tomorrow?

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Jason Levin is a media lab technology teacher at the Conestoga Middle School in Beaverton, Oregon, and for all I know, a good one. Jason Levin is also a passionate political activist whose sense of fair politics is a little bit skewed: he has gained notoriety through his plan, detailed on his website http://www.crashtheteaparty.org, to discredit and undermine the political movement through a series of unethical tactics, such as infiltrating rallies and shouting racist and homophobic slogans, seeking out reporters and making wild claims posing as Tea Party advocates, holding mis-spelled signs, and dressing in Nazi uniforms.

Needless to say (I hope), Levin’s idea of political warfare is unethical in every way. Misleading the public and media about a party or group rather than contesting its positions on the merits is dishonest and a disgrace to the democratic system. Continue reading →

Unethical Website of the Month: Bloomberg News

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Seldom does any news media organization make its absence of fairness and objectivity on a topic so obvious that there isn’t some room for argument, but Bloomberg managed to scale the heights with its headline to a story by reporter Heidi Przybyla. Her report covered the results of a Bloomberg poll designed to create a profile of the members of the Tea Party movement, which has been holding multiple demonstrations across the country to protest passage of President Obama’s health care reform bill.

The poll results themselves were unremarkable, given what we already have learned about the Tea Partiers’ objectives and objections. Over 90% of those polled by Bloomberg said that they feared that the nation was turning to socialism, with the federal government trying to control too many aspects of  Americans’ lives. In answer to another question,  70% felt that Obama’s Administration needed to put more resources into job creation. So Przybyla, her editors and Bloomberg’s management chose to headline the report with this:

“Tea Party Advocates Who Scorn Socialism Want a Government Job” Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

“I know how the “tea party” people feel, the anger, venom and bile that many of them showed during the recent House vote on health-care reform. I know because I want to spit on them, take one of their “Obama Plan White Slavery” signs and knock every racist and homophobic tooth out of their Cro-Magnon heads.”

——Washington Post columnist Courtland Malloy

That’s it, Courtland, just the ticket for helping to cool the inflammatory rhetoric, encourage mutual respect and restore civil discourse. As long as it makes you feel better, go ahead and use your space in the Washington Post to be just as hateful as those whose conduct you deplore. Next step: call anyone a Cro-Magnon racist who takes you to task for it.

Any journalist or columnist who stoops to this kind of irresponsible and emotional name-calling needs to be taken off the job and given a nice, long paid vacation in the Bahamas to get his perspective back. There is too much primal screaming in print already, and it only raises tensions and entrenches both bad feelings and bad conduct. Malloy has been simmering for a long time, so his outburst comes as little surprise. A responsible newspaper, however is foolish to print such a column.

Marco Rubio Trips an Ethics Alarm

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Florida Republicans have a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate the proper response to a bracing ethics alarm. They can vote against Marco Rubio, the Tea Party-backed opponent of Governor Charley Crist in the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate.

Whatever Rubio’s virtues, ideological or otherwise, he set off the alarm with this: according to a carefully researched story in the Miami Herald, Rubio used his party credit card—his business credit card, issued to him by the GOP to use for party-related expenses only—to pay for things like: Continue reading →

Glenn Beck vs. Teddy Roosevelt? No Contest!

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

Listening to Glenn Beck disparage Theodore Roosevelt is a little like listening to Ed Wood, auteur of the deathless classic, “Plan Nine From Outer Space,” condemning John Ford as an unimaginative hack.

At his uproariously received speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Beck, the libertarian talk-show host, flamboyant TV showman on Fox and current Tea Party hero effectively racked up cheap applause by pulling a quote out of Teddy’s “New Nationalism” speech and deriding it. Beck didn’t analyze and critique the speech, of course, because that would have required a discipline of scholarship and a rigor of intellect that he simply does not possess. He simply quoted this section… Continue reading →

The Racist Slur on Tea Parties, and an Ethicist’s Lament

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I thought long and hard about whether to write this post, and I resent the fact that I had to think about it at all. But it involves piggy-backing on a theme that has been finding voice on conservative talk radio, and concerns an unfair and dishonest theme being pushed by liberal talk television and certain media pundits. That means that whatever I write will immediately be taken, by those who view the world in narrow ideological terms, as a declaration of alliance when it has nothing to do with politics at all. It has to do with unethical journalism, sloppy reasoning, and dirty politics. I resent the fact that Right Wing radio is so frequently uncivil and unfair  that it sullies every legitimate observation and position that it takes. I resent the fact that so much of the public decides what they believe, not by the quality of the ideas in question, but by the identity of who advocates them. Communication is hard enough without bias serving as a perpetual hurdle to comprehension.

Oh, well….

The effort by certain commentators, TV hosts (notably MSNBC’s troika of Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann), liberal columnists and Democratic Party flacks to stereotype the Tea Party movement as a thinly-veiled racist protest is despicable, unsupportable, dishonest and unfair.  It is also insulting to Americans generally. And yes, I resent that too. Continue reading →

Final Ethics Alarms on the Coakley-Brown Race: Fairness and Honesty Take a Holiday

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Some concluding Ethics Alarms from the Brown-Coakley Senate race, many with the same dispiriting lesson: hyper-partisan zealotry is causing many Americans to abandon their senses of fairness, proportion, and common sense : Continue reading →