The Presidents of The United States

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 2018 President’s Day Edition:

/ Jack Marshall / 58 Comments

Good Morning, George, Tom, Teddy, Abe!

I’m in a bad mood. Maybe it will pass.

1 No Presidents Day post this year.  I usually do a special Presidents Day post. I never thought I would ever feel this way, but I’m thoroughly sick of writing about the Presidents after the last year. I blame “the resistance” for this along with the news media, both of whom have created a related but separate ethics issue by relentlessly attacking, disrespecting, mocking and undermining President Trump. [Of course, for those who are interested, this epic post, from 2015, was about four years’ worth of Presidents Day material, and this one, also from that year, is my personal favorite of all the entries here about my favorite 45 Americans. Does President Trump have a Julia Sand out there somewhere? We can only hope…]

Yesterday Ann Althouse, strafing the news media’s obsession with the ridiculous publicity-mad porn star whom Trump either did or did not have an affair with and to whom his to slimy lawyer Michael Cohen paid hush money, was attacked on her own blog by commenters who accused her of  defending the indefensible—you know, the President of the United States, who was never allowed a single second when the entire country unified behind the winner of a hard-fought election, and as one wished him good fortune and success. Not a second.

Ann usually doesn’t get involved in her blog’s comment threads., but she responded this time:

You Trump haters made it so boring to hate Trump. I don’t even like Trump, but you people annoy me.

Above all, I believe Trump won the election, and he deserves support as he attempts to carry out the responsibilities America entrusted to him. We need to help him, not try to screw him up at every turn. I think it’s outrageous what has been done to him, and I regard it as an attack on democracy.

I have always found that once the President is elected, we should accept the result and support him when we can and look to the next election if we can’t. I think the “resistance” is a rejection of democracy…

That is about as perfect an expression of my feelings as anyone could compose, including me. It has been this blog’s position from November 9, 2017 on, and I have never wavered from it. I knew this was basically Althouse’s stance as well, since so many of her posts reflect it, but it is gratifying to have another serious blogger I respect express it so clearly. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Lies, Dunces, Fools, Villains, Hypocrites And Big Liars In The Resistance’s Plan E, “The President Is Disabled!” [Part 3]”

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Here’s another one.

Regular readers here know I’m a sucker for Presidential history, even when I’m not the one expounding on it. I’m also a sucker for posts that I would otherwise have to write myself., and I was outlining a very similar post to this when Steve-O-in-NJ kindly produced this Comment of the Day. For of there is one thing my life-time love affair with the Presidency and the men who have had the audacity to try, always with mixed success, to fulfill its crushing challenges, has taught me, it is that these were all weird men, each in their own unique ways. You have to be weird to seek this job, or survive it.  The argument that Donald Trump’s undeniable weirdness is somehow deserving of less tolerance than any of the other Presidents is  bigotry mixed with ignorance. Leadership is itself abnormal, and has infinite guises.

Welcome to Steve-O-in-NJ’s Comment of the Day on the post, Lies, Dunces, Fools, Villains, Hypocrites And Big Liars In The Resistance’s Plan E, “The President Is Disabled!” [Part 3]

Washington was an inch away from leading an army personally to put down the Whiskey Rebellion. Andrew Jackson had a notorious temper (all his life), fought duels (though not while in office), and said he was going to hang the first South Carolinian who defied Federal law to the first tree he could find if bloodshed resulted from that defiance. LBJ gave interviews while on the toilet, more than once. Jimmy Carter talked about having consulted with his young daughter regarding policy matters and claimed to have seen a UFO. Calvin Coolidge brushed off a reporter who had made a bet that she could get more than two words out o him by saying “you lose.” Grover Cleveland had half his jaw cut out due to cancer and told the press he had two bad teeth extracted. He also married a woman who was young enough to be his daughter. Lincoln of course battled what we’d probably now recognize as clinical depression.

The two biggest offenders for presidential disability were Woodrow Wilson, who was actually completely disabled by a stroke and hid it, in effect making the nation an oligarchy ruled by his wife and closest advisors, and JFK, who hid the fact that he had Addison’s disease (why that didn’t keep him out of the Navy I don’t know), probably PTSD, and crippling back pain that sometimes left him unable to stand without drugs. I also wonder if it would be out of line to diagnose Clinton with satyriasis, given his behavior.

My main point is that some of the arguably best presidents like Washington and Jackson, others who were at least popular like Cleveland and Clinton, and some that official history is reluctant to examine too closely like JFK (although that is starting to change) all had issues of risky or extreme actions, bizarre behavior, or concealing disability from the public, and no one now calls any of them unfit for office, nor was that charge ever leveled to my knowledge at any of them with any level of seriousness. As far as I know no Republican leader has ever leveled the charge of mental or other unfitness at any Democratic president with any seriousness, although Clinton’s sexcapades, Carter’s incompetence and errors, LBJ’s open crudeness and weirdness, and JFK’s litany of problems presented the opportunity several times. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 1/7/2018: Lies, Dunces, Fools, Villains, Hypocrites And Big Liars In The Resistance’s Plan E, “The President Is Disabled!” [Part I]

/ Jack Marshall / 43 Comments

I won’t lie to you…

It’s not a good morning,

(until Americas and journalists condemn this for what it is.)

1 The Big Lie Let us begin by calling the pile of news stories spreading the slander, libel and fake news that President Donald J. Trump is mentally disabled what it really is. It is part of a Big Lie strategy by Democrats, “the resistance”, and the mainstream news media to bring down the Trump Administration without having to win an election.

Because the term”Big Lie”  itself was coined by  Adolf Hitler, in his 1925 book Mein Kampf, and because the Nazis were themselves so fond of the tactic, many hesitate to use the phrase when that is exactly what is being done for fear that to do so will be attacked as comparing the Big Lie wielder to Hitler, Goebbels, or fascists. People are free to make whatever comparisons they like. Using a technique the Nazis mastered doesn’t make a group Nazis, but using a sinister, powerful propaganda weapon that honest and fair people recognize as vile and dangerous is unforgivable.

The claim that President Trump is suffering from dementia or some other form of mental disability is a big lie” by definition. Hitler called it a lie so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” The idea, of course, is to make it impossible for the victim of the attack to ignore the lie, and require the victim and others to deny it. The lie is given currency by the denials, and then the Big Lie propagandists can focus on the denials rather than the substance of the lie itself, of which there is none. Brilliant!

An essential element for a Big Lie to work is extreme bias and bigotry. The absence of these in sufficient measure is why other recent Big Lie attempts, such as the theory that the Bush administration bombed the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, and the Birther claims, failed. The past year has demonstrated that, thanks in part to the unAmerican efforts by Democratic leadership to undermine the legitimacy and acceptance of President Trump’s election, and a non-stop negative tone and attitude in the reporting of the news regarding his administration, a very large component of the electorate is steeped in irrational fear and hate of the President that is emotional rather than rational. That’s bigotry, and it is the fertile solid where big lies flourish.

2. Why Plan E now? Plan E is one of the rotating plans (reviewed in #5 here) embraced at various times in the past year by “the resistance” to justify overturning the 2016 election.I touched on this yesterday. Plan J, the effort to force Trump to resign in the midst of the Terror-like, Harvey Weinstein sparked witch hunt to drive from positions of power make any man who ever allegedly engaged in any sexual misconduct ranging from a gross proposition to an impulsive kiss to rape, never came close to working, even though Democrats sacrificed an iconic Congressman and a rising Senator in the effort. The death knell of Plan J was when it was revealed that Democratic supporters, including the shameless Media Matters, were paying women, through lawyers or otherwise, to make accusations and bring law suits. The decision to re-animate Plan E was the furor and media feeding frenzy surrounding Michael Wolff’s latest book of whispered gossip, pay-back, rumors and spin, “Fire and Fury.” Wolff is a muckraking entrepreneur whose past books and articles have been frequently criticized for including speculation and outright falsehoods. Never mind: the timing of a sensational best seller purporting to dish the real dirt about the chaotic early day of the Trump White House as it struggled to find its footing and the man at its center, Donald Trump was too good to pass up. Wolff is no Bob Woodward, but as they say, any port in a storm. The new narrative is that Trump is nuts, or senile, or something. He’s not right in the head. Lots of people who work with him say so (anonymously), and lots of people who would have said or done anything to stop him from being President have been saying so all along.

3. This Big Lie’s essential smaller lies.

  • Prime among them is that anything new has occurred, or that there is evidence of the President’s mental/emotional unfitness that the public was not fully aware of long before they elected him. There isn’t. The re-emergence of the Plan E narrative is nothing more than a re-litigation of the campaign.

Trump critics (like me, as I variously described him during the campaign—and before–as unstable, narcissistic, infantile, stupid, deranged and worse, based on specific statements and incidents) always believed that he did not have the appropriate intellect, instincts, emotional make-up or character to lead the country, but the electorate did not agree, and that’s all that matters. Conservatives, Republicans and those just sick of the arrogance and divisiveness of the Obama administration adopted  the long-accepted Democratic position, specially reinforced to get Bill Clinton (and, hopefully, his equally ethics-challenged wife) elected and keep him in office, that only results matter, not character. This coalition  elected Trump despite his obvious flaws, and to some extent, because of them.

  • The second attendant lie to Plan E—maybe it should be #1– is that the 25th Amendment’s Section 4 allows the Cabinet to remove any President who isn’t literally unable to function. Section 4 states,

“Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.”

Until the Democrats began pretending otherwise, no one, not legal scholars, not Constitutional experts, not people who can read English, ever interpreted “unable” to mean anything but completely disabled: a major stroke, a coma, debilitating illness. A disabled President can’t sign documents, can’t make decisions, can’t delegate, can’t hold meetings, can’t even tweet. If the definition of “unable” bleeds into “doesn’t make decisions or express himself in ways others think are wise or prudent,” then the 25th Amendment becomes an open-ended means to achieve a coup….which is the real purpose of distorting it now. Underestimating the seriousness of this effort, or its existential danger for the nation, would be mistake.

  • Even if Trump were handicapped by a new mental or emotional problem, and there is no evidence that he is, Presidents battling such problems are practically the natural state of the office.  Too many Presidents have suffered through various health issues, physical and mental, in the course of their terms in office to count. The 25th Amendment was not put in place to allow a coup any time a President was temporarily diminished or not in top form. Several Presidents, including Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, suffered from clinical depression. They dealt with it. Others dealt with alcoholism, drug addiction, serious illness, narcissism, old age, and often many of these at once. FDR was dying during his entire last term, until he did in fact die.

Most of our leaders have been mentally and emotionally abnormal in one way or the other, because normal people don’t become President.

  • Finally, contrary to what “the resistance” and the media are peddling, the evidence indicates that the President has been doing his job surprisingly well. Those who hate him and his policies can’t accept or admit that, but it is a matter of record. There is no legitimate, objective evidence to support Plan E. That is why this is, in reality, a Big Lie.

Exposing a Big Lie takes a Big Post. I’ll get into the fools, dunces, villains and liars next.

 

 

Which Presidents Would Have Tweeted Trump-Style If They Had A Twitter Account?

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

The tweet above from the President as he doubled down on his unusually stupid attack tweets against Joe and Mika got me thinking. He’s not entirely wrong. Trump is the first President to use social media personally and for candid statements and observations, bypassing the news media, and almost all of the previous Presidents had no choice in the matter. Fourth of July weekend always gets me thinking about the Founders, and the Founders get me musing about the Presidents, and I found myself playing this mind game: Which of our Presidents, had they has access to Twitter, would have used it in a Trumpian manner?

I should clarify some issues at the outset. None of the Presidents would have used Twitter in a stupid, juvenile and boorish manner like President Trump, because none of them were that stupid, juvenile and boorish. (On the other hand, none of their critics, being comparatively responsible and sane, would have argued that stupid, juvenile and boorish tweets were justification to remove the previous 44, as Keith Olbermann thinks.) By using Twitter in a Trumpian manner, I mean using it…

..Personally…

…for the purpose of by-passing the news media and White House spokespersons…

…in order to make declarations of intent, emotions or satisfaction, or

…to attack, accuse, denigrate, compliment, rebut, defend, joke, troll, or otherwise

…communicate directly with the public.in an unfiltered manner.

One other caveat: Trump would definitely be establishing new Presidential norms were his tweets less obnoxious and embarrassing. By the time his term(s) are over, he mat have given Presidential tweeting such a bad reputation that no future POTUS will dare use Twitter for fear of being compared to the Mad Tweeter of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

All right, on to the inquiry!

Which of our previous Presidents would have used twitter in one or more of the ways Trump uses it. based on what we know of their character and leadership styles?

Continue reading →

It’s Presidents Day! Our Special Guests: the 22nd and 24th Presidents, Grover Cleveland [UPDATED]

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

grover-2

Grover Cleveland has all sorts of unusual distinctions among the Presidents. (No, he wasn’t “normal,” either.)  He was one of several Presidents to drop a more prosaic first name for his less common middle one (like Grant, Wilson,  and Eisenhower). He was the second biggest President at over 250 pounds, and had the largest collar size. Despite his reputation for being a tough guy, Grover ended a string of Civil War heroes elected President by being the only POTUS who had paid a poor man to take his place in the Union army. That was legal, but it was not especially admirable.

Cleveland was one of only two bachelors elected President, and was the only one married in the White House (to a 21-year old beauty, the Melania of her day, who was less than half his age). Grover also lost the Presidency when he ran for re-election despite winning the popular vote, in the most similar election (1888) to our last one. This set up his most famous distinction, serving split terms, as he came back to beat President Harrison in 1892.

My favorite Cleveland tale is how the President pulled off the amazing feat of having part of his jaw removed and replaced with a rubber prosthetic without the public learning about it, by secretly having the operation performed on a yacht.

Ah, but all of these pale compared to his central role in the worst scandal ever to strike in a Presidential campaign, which he survived, incredibly, by telling the truth.

Or so we have been told.

Maybe not.

On July 21, 1884, a bit more than three months from the Presidential election, , the Republican Buffalo Evening Telegraph broke a story that seemed like it would determine who was to be President. Ten years earlier, a Buffalo woman named Maria Halpin had given birth to a son with the surname Cleveland, and then been taken to a mental asylum while the child was adopted by another family. The mother claimed that former Buffalo mayor and current New York Governor and Democratic Presidential nominee Grover Cleveland was the father.

In a remarkably quick display of candor, then or now,  Cleveland admitted that indeed he and  Halpin had been “illicitly acquainted,” and the son might indeed be his. As the only unmarried man among several Cleveland friends who, the campaign implied, may have “known” the woman,  Cleveland had claimed paternity and helped Halpin place the boy with a caring family. Still, this was the Victorian era, and the clergy, in particular, was disgusted.  “It seems to me that a leading question ought to be: do the American people want a common libertine for their president?”  wrote a preacher from Buffalo to the editor of the Chicago Tribune.

While Cleveland, whose nickname was “Grover the Good,” had sex problems, Maine Senator James G. Blaine, the Republican candidate, had been caught taking bribes. Why he was nominated with such a record of dishonesty and influence peddling, I will never understand. (No modern political party would do something that stupid, fortunately.) being able to use the catchy mocking anti-Cleveland chant, “Ma, ma, where’s my Pa?” was a godsend for the struggling Blaine campaign.

To make things worse for Grover, reporters tracked down Halpin, and her version of the relationship differed from the candidate’s in unpleasant ways. Days from the election, the Chicago Tribune quoted her as saying, darkly, “The circumstances under which my ruin was accomplished are too revolting on the part of Grover Cleveland to be made public.”

Continue reading →

A Presidential “Othering” Ethics Puzzle: What IS This Statement? Misleading? Ignorant? Biased?

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

jfk-oval-office

In a column today, Washington Post political columnist Chris Cillizza writes,

“The simple fact is that Trump has never had real friends in the sense you or I think of the term. The relationship world of Trump has long been split into two groups: (1) his family and (2) people who work for him. And people who work for you are rarely your actual friends.”

This was written in the context of an article titled “The very peculiar isolation of Donald Trump.”

What’s going on here? It is definitely one more “othering” exercise from the news media, part of a concerted effort to avoid “normalizing” this President so that tactics previously regarded as unthinkable, undemocratic and unAmerican will be accepted by the public when they are used against him. The message is that this President is strange, weird. He’s not like us. He’s a monster. Today, for example,  MSNBC’s Katy Tur insinuated that the President might be planning to start murdering journalists, asking a guest.

“As we know, there’s, since 2000, been a couple dozen suspicious deaths of journalists in Russia who came out against the government there.Donald Trump has made no secret about going after journalists and his distaste for any news that doesn’t agree with him here. Do you find that this is a dangerous path he is heading down?”

I was struck by Cillizza’s column  because the topic is one of several upon which I wrote my honors thesis in American government. (If you are in Cambridge, Mass., you can find a copy in Widener Library.)  Cillizza’s statement made me realize, for the first time, really: “Ah! There’s at least one aspect of his personality that is typical of American Presidents!” I studied exactly that aspect of Presidential biographies to test my thesis that the U.S. Presidency attracted a specific character type, and the type was not “normal” by the public standards. Continue reading →

NBC’s Chuck Todd Offers Dubious History To Cover For Democrats

/ Jack Marshall / 68 Comments
One of these things is not like the other...

One of these things is not like the other…

[A frequent and valued commenter asked Ethics Alarms to examine this, and I am, as many of you know, always eager to delve into the history of My Favorite Men, the Presidents of the United States.]

Yesterday, NBC presented the nauseating display of a prominent member of Congress attempting to undermine the peaceful transfer of power after a legal and fair election. This was unprecedented, and not surprisingly. Only a hyper-partisan ethics dunce who believed that he was beyond criticism and accountability and who was confident that journalists would rationalize his conduct would do such a thing.  In this regard, at least, Rep. John Lewis was correct. The news media had his back.

Before the actual interview was broadcast, news of Lewis’s statement was out regarding Lewis’s attack, and Donald Trump, as he has with Gold Star parents, beauty queens and others and award-winning actresses, had foolishly reacted with an insulting tweet that allowed his critics to shift public attention from the provocation to the target. Is Trump really incapable of learning how stupid this is, no matter how many times he suffers for it? Apparently.

Meanwhile, it was time for the news media to play defense for Lewis, because that’s what they do when Democrats misbehave.

Chuck Todd, the host of “Meet the Press,” used hsiMSNBC show “Meet the Press Daily” to argue that a prominent member of Congress claiming that an elected President isn’t legitimate is just not that big a deal, saying

“In case you missed it, Congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.), civil rights hero and icon, said Donald Trump does not believe is a legitimate president because of the Russian meddling in the election. Leaving aside how you feel about Lewis’ position, it’s not first time a president’s legitimacy has been questioned.”

Then, no doubt thanks to some intern’s searches on Google, he regaled his audience with misleading American history:

In 1824 when John Quincy Adams won the presidency over Andrew Jackson, despite getting clobbered in the popular vote, a lot of people questioned the legitimacy of his victory. In fact, this happens pretty much every time the popular vote loser moves into the White House.

After the 1876 election, Rutherford Hayes, who was called Ruther-fraud Hayes when Congress gave him the electoral majority.

The same in 1888 with Benjamin Harrison. You may remember the occasional cry of foul in 2000 when the Supreme Court stopped the Florida recount and George W. Bush won the election.

Sometimes, though, it has nothing to do with voting. When William Henry Harrison died a month after taking office in 1841, a lot of people didn’t accept the idea that as vice president John Tyler or any vice president for that matter could legitimately ascend to the presidency. A lot of people just called him an ‘acting president.’

Most recently, of course, the conservative right and and some Republicans claimed to doubt President Obama’s citizenship and therefore the legitimacy of his right to serve in the office of the presidency.

None of this is meant to pass judgment on John Lewis’ position, it’s just to remind us all this isn’t the first time someone has questioned the legitimacy of an American president. Surely won’t be the last.

This is what our political system does, we have this back and forth. It doesn’t make it any less shocking, frankly, to some of us when you do hear it from people with big influence. That’s all for tonight.

See? No big deal! Happens all the time! Everybody does it! Continue reading →