trustworthiness

No, Washington Post, The Republican Party Has No Obligation To Condemn Donald Trump, But Nice Try Anyway.

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments
"Hey Republicans! Step HERE! It's your DUTY!"

“Hey Republicans! Step HERE! It’s your DUTY!”

I’m sure the paper’s editors will get a holiday gift basket from the Democratic National Committee for their nakedly partisan trap.

Erupting with indignation over Trump’s recent “let’s make fun of the disabled reporter” performer and his subsequent lie that he wasn’t doing what video shows he did, the Washington Post editors concluded with a demand that Republicans condemn Trump, or else:

[I]t is time for Republican Party leaders to make clear that they do not approve of Mr. Trump’s politics of denigration. If they do not, their party will be seen as complicit in his hatefulness, and deservedly so.

There are two reasons this is partisan and hypocritical.

  • First, an official or coordinated Republican Party attack on Trump would violate the terms of Trump’s deal with the party that if he was treated fairly, Trump wouldn’t run as a third party candidate should he fail to get the GOP nomination. Since I have never heard of either party ever specifically reprimanding one of its own candidates for the nomination—I don’t think it’s happened—doing so would surely be regarded as “unfair” by Trump, and I’d agree with him. Of course, an independent Trump candidacy would guarantee the election of a Democrat. Fiendishly clever, Post!

The party could have and, I wrote here, should have scratched Trump from the nomination hunt and the debates early on, before it had given him a platform and he had become, for the nonce, a front-runner in the polls. His third party threat would have been more bluster than reality then, and without a national TV audience, Trump would have probably been content to file a lawsuit and throw a few tantrums. But it’s not called “the stupid party” for nothing. The GOP missed its window of escape. Turning on Trump now would undermine the party’s primary mission, not that the Post cares, and that is electing a Republican President. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: CNN’s Jake Tapper

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

tapper-rhodesIt is tragic that it takes bloody murder to raise the press out of its journalism ethics torpor, and force it to ask tough questions of the administration it helped put in power and  has pampered,  pimpeda nd covered for ever since.  Still, progress is progress. CNN’s Jake Tapper, probably the closest thing to an objective journalist in captivity, has obviously had enough of the seven-year pattern of pretending that all Obama policies are working just marvelously thank-you, even as the stench of fakery, dishonesty and incompetence fills the air.

Over the weekend, Tapper was having none of the spin offered by Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), both sent out by the White House for damage control, after the President’s statement that “ISIS has been contained” was rendered ludicrous by the deaths in Paris.“If this is what ISIS looks like contained, I shudder to think what ISIS looks like uncontained,” Tapper told Rhodes.

Bazinga!

President Obama ended the war on terror, put tepid measures in place in Syria, dismissed ISIS as “the junior varsity, ” and in the aftermath of the Benghazi attack, coordinated a campaign of media disinformation to blame it on a YouTube video rather than admit that Al Qaeda was not “decimated” as he had puffed, all while taking unseemly personal credit for the killing of bin Laden and feeding the public what has been called a “narrative of success.”

Maybe the news media will finally insist that he accept accountability for his inept and feckless terrorism strategies. I doubt it, but at least Tapper gave us a reminder of what unbiased journalism looks like, lest we forget.

Ben Carson’s Stories

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

ben-carson

The prevailing political foofaraw right now involves Ben Carson’s account, in his 1990 autobiography, regarding a phantom “offer” to attend West Point. Before some analysis, a word or two..

Ben Carson has no business running for President. His supporters are irresponsible and deluded. I was just on WGAN (Maine) on Arthur King’s show, and Carson was discussed. A Carson supporting caller took issue with my statement that he was flat out unqualified for office whatever had been said to him about West Point, and protested that he was a brilliant surgeon, and successfully managed his surgical team. We ran out of time, and I didn’t get to say, “So what?” Is Ned Yost a potential President because he successfully managed a baseball team to a World Series victory? Yost’s training and experience have as much correlation to political leadership as Carson’s, and arguably more. Carson has no qualifications for high office. He is easily the least qualified candidate in either field, with no management experience, no political talents, weak speaking skills, negligible presence, irrelevant education and training, and terrible political instincts. You could throw a rutabaga  into a crowd and have a good chance of hitting someone who would be a more promising President.

Wrote J. Christian Adams succinctly about the current controversy,

“[T]he incident reveals a recurring and perhaps unrecoverable trait of candidate Carson.  He just doesn’t seem to know what he is talking about, whether it be Cuba, the Voting Rights Act, or how West Point works.”

Yes, and that too.

So if this typical example of the news media blowing a relatively minor incident out of proportion because a Republican poses a threat to Democratic domination should result in Carson’s demise, good. Something has to. It is wrong, another example the double standard we are all used to; and the news media should be called on it hard. Still, if it ends the embarrassing distraction that is Ben Carson, I’m not weeping. The ends don’t justify unethical means, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t enjoy the ends anyway.

Let us pretend that Carson is a competent, qualified and deserving candidate for President, just to try to strip the bias away. How significant and serious are Carson’s various misrepresentations?

These all arise from what Carson wrote about his youth and early years in 1990, 25 years ago, when running for President wasn’t a twinkle in his eye. He…heck, we can’t pretend, because a competent candidate would be smart and experienced enough to say,

“You know, I didn’t expect anyone to read the book, I wrote most of it off the top of my head, my memory was faulty, I didn’t check the facts and I should have. The West Point story is typical. To me, it sounded like I was being told that I could get into West Point if I wanted to, and that I wouldn’t have to pay tuition, which to me meant a scholarship. I wasn’t trying to fool anybody then or now. I’m sorry. I’ve learned a lot in 25 years. I know most of our personal memories are distorted over time, and cannot be relied upon; mistakes like these turn up to varying degrees in all personal accounts. Bill Clinton says he remembered lots of church burning in Arkansas when he was growing up. Hillary Clinton said she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary, who didn’t become famous for climbing Mount Everest until six years after was born. The difference between my memory flawa and theirs was that mine can’t be attributed to political dissembling. Next question.”

If he had said that, then his other statements that didn’t check out could be explained the same way, and reasonably so. Instead, Carson and his defenders are denying, accusing, double-talking and parsing words like the Clintons. This is foolish because

I) Carson’s not as practiced at it as the Clintons,

2) …The truth is always better, and,

3) Unlike when the Clintons lie, most of the news media are looking for justifications to destroy him as it did Herman Cain. Reporters do not want to not be fair or reasonable with Carson, and certainly not complicit in deception as regularly is for Hillary. Continue reading →

Marco Rubio Better Have An Explanation For This Unethical Statement Other Than The Obvious Ones

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments
Seen on Sen. Rubio's Senate office door...

Seen on Sen. Rubio’s Senate office door…

The obvious ones would be:

  • Because I can.
  • Because I lack integrity.
  • Because I’m as immature as I look.

I can’t make the Rubio quote making the rounds this morning an Ethics Alarms “Unethical Quote of the Month,” because it occurred, we are told by the Washington Post, on the evening of September 18 during the last Republican candidates’ debate. Why didn’t I pick up on Rubio’s statement then? I don’t know: no one else did either, based on a Google search.  I guess when there are 11 GOP candidates embarrassing themselves and their party seriatim (By the way, did you know that the WordPress spellcheck program says that the word I wanted to type there is “Maserati’?), it’s easy to miss a few outrageous statements.

Anyway,here is what Sen. Rubio said, however, after being chided by Donald Trump for missing so many Senate votes:

“That’s why I’m missing votes. Because I am leaving the Senate. I am not running for reelection.”

The front page Washington Post story says that Rubio is frustrated with the unresponsiveness of the U.S. Senate to his attempted leadership:

Marco Rubio is a U.S. senator. And he just can’t stand it anymore.

“I don’t know that ‘hate’ is the right word,” Rubio said in an interview. “I’m frustrated.”

This year, as Rubio runs for president, he has cast the Senate — the very place that cemented him as a national politician — as a place he’s given up on, after less than one term. It’s too slow. Too rule-bound. So Rubio, 44, has decided not to run for his seat again. It’s the White House or bust…Rubio had arrived at one of the least ambitious moments in Senate history and saw many of his ideas fizzle. Democrats killed his debt-cutting plans. Republicans killed his immigration reform. The two parties actually came together to kill his AGREE Act, a small-bore, hands-across-the-aisle bill that Rubio had designed just to get a win on something.

Now, he’s done. “He hates it,” a longtime friend from Florida said, speaking anonymously to say what Rubio would not.

So Rubio is missing votes in the Senate because he hates his job?

That’s not exactly indicative of trustworthy character, not just for national leadership but for any position, including busboy. He ran for the job, got it, is being paid for it, and if it isn’t as much fun or as rewarding as he thought it would be, tough. Rubio still has an obligation to fulfill his duties as best he can. Who gets to goof off at work because he or she doesn’t like a job or is “frustrated”? Just Marco Rubio, it seems. Leaders have to be role-models and ethical exemplars. Rubio is modelling the “stop doing the job if you’re not good at it but still collect your paycheck” approach to the workplace. Who does he think he is?

Barack Obama? Continue reading →

Ethics Corrupter Weekend, Part II. Unethical And Corrupting Quote Of The Week: PBS Anchor Judy Woodruff

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

who_cares

“But, for the audience, why does it matter? Why did that — why does it matter whether she was saying one thing?”

—PBS anchor Judy Woodruff, in a discussion of the Benghazi hearings and the revelation in her e-mails that Hillary Clinton immediately discounted the YouTube video explanation that she later embraced without equivocation in public statements and interviews, as well as in discussions with the victims’ families.

Has there ever been a more self-evident unethical quote from a U.S. broadcast journalist?

What does it matter if the Secretary of State lied to the public?

What does it matter if the liar is a candidate for President?

What does it matter if our leaders “say one thing” to confidants—in Clinton’s case, her daughter, and another to everyone else?

What does it matter if the Obama administration falsely and intentionally  blamed four deaths on a YouTube video, rather than the fact that Obama’s claims of eviscerating al Qaeda were campaign hype?

What does it matter???

Sure, Judy, and what does it matter if the mainstream news media doesn’t care if our leaders are trustworthy and honest, and regard outright lying by them as trivial?

I’m not going to waste any more time explaining what’s unethical about this statement. Any adults who can’t figure it out on their own are lost causes, and to explain it to normal people insults their intelligence.

_____________________

Pointer: Newsbusters

Assessing The Clinton Testimony On Benghazi

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

Hillary testifies

In the end, we either learned something worth learning, or we didn’t. It comes down to how important one thinks it is to know that your government lies to you, and to know that a party’s Presidential candidate is a liar as well.

Early in the questioning yesterday, Hillary Clinton was confronted with previously unrevealed e-mails showing that within hours of the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, she emailed her daughter, Chelsea, and said that Americans had died at the hands of “an al-Qaeda like group.”   Clinton also informed Egypt’s prime minister and Libya’s president that the attacks were “preplanned” and “had nothing to do with” an anti-Islamic video posted on YouTube.

Days later, Clinton told the American public and families of the Benghazi victims that a YouTube video incited protesters in Benghazi and spontaneously launched assaults.

Why had the e-mails not been unavailable earlier? Well, they were sent via that private server that Clinton set up and used for official government business when she was Secretary of State. They were not originally turned over in response to public records requests and subpoenas, because that’s what the private server was designed for in the first place: to provide protection for Clinton and e-mails that might cause political embarrassment or worse.

Am I being unfair so far? If you think so, wait for the next post. You’re hopeless. The Benghazi committee discovered the existence of Clinton’s private server last year. Was that important information worth knowing? Again, if you don’t think so, do not pass GO. You are corrupted by bias.

The e-mails showed… Continue reading →

Obama’s Avoidance Of Accountability Reaches Previously Unimagined Heights

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Obama shrug

Having encountered this immediately prior to last night’s debate among the Democratic contenders for the 2016 Presidential race, the praise heaped on Barack Obama’s abysmal record, repeated defiance of law and ignorance of basic leadership mandates—never honestly identified as such, of course—approached head-exploding levels of dissonance. It briefly subsided when Jim Webb, answering the question of what the candidates would do differently, so diplomatically delivered damning criticism that I doubt many in the room realized it. He said in part…

[If] there would be a major difference between my administration and the Obama administration, it would be in the use of executive authority…I have a very strong feeling about how our federal system works and how we need to lead and energize the congressional process instead of allowing these divisions to continue to paralyze what we’re doing. So I would lead — working with both parties in the Congress and working through them in the traditional way that our Constitution sets up…

Translation: Under Obama, the Constitution has been violated repeatedly because this President won’t deign to work closely with Congress, and has chosen instead to govern by executive fiat, which is not how the Constitution requires laws to be made.

He also said he would lead, which he undoubtedly would do. Obama, just two days earlier in his “60 Minutes” interview, demonstrated yet again why he can’t lead. He is incapable of accepting accountability for what he does, and what those under his authority do. Sometimes the utter awfulness of his values, usually because of his narcissism, makes me want to challenge his supporters to defend what is manifestly indefensible.

This is such a time.

Here is the section of the Steve Kroft interview: Continue reading →

Democratic Candidate Debate Integrity Watch: Will Anderson Cooper Make Hillary Defend Her Unethical Private E-Mail? Will Her Opposition?

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

HillaryClinton phone

The Democratic Party is in the process of ridiculing democracy at work on the other side of the aisle, as it seems to be emulating the Communist Party, USSR style. Its pre-anointed nominee for President, Hillary Clinton, is being exposed—exposing herself, really—as a liar, as incompetent, as a terrible campaigner and as possessing no core values (but she’s a fighter!), and yet her alleged rivals refuse to call her to account on the issue that has revealed so many of her deficits, the private e-mail server. The party is limiting debates to protect her from the public realization that she’s a dud, and Democratic talking points keep surfacing to confuse and distract regarding the e-mail issue. The story was broken by the New York Times, the lies were authored by the Clinton campaign team, and the irregularity was sufficient to spark an ongoing FBI investigation, yet everyone from Clinton’s surrogates, loyal pundit supporters and the candidate herself—and her Deceit Sensei husband—continue to represent the matter as a GOP concoction.

The evidence is strong that CNN, which hosts tonight’s debate, is in on the fix. Here’s an exchange from last week between CNN’s Ashleigh Banfield and Democratic strategist, a.k.a Hillary Clinton strategist, Robert Zimmerman:

BANFIELD: But you’ve got to – you’ve got to admit, Robert, that the Republicans are delivering any script that – that Bernie Sanders may need to go after [Hillary] Clinton. What’s her ammo against Bernie Sanders?

ROBERT ZIMMERMAN, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: Look, here’s the deal: any Democrat who resorts to reciting Republican talking points is going to hurt themselves amongst the grassroots-

BANFIELD: So you’re saying you don’t think he’s ever going to touch the e-mail scandal – or, it’s not even a scandal-It’s really a controversy. But ‘scandal’ is the Republicans’ word for it-

ZIMMERMAN: Yeah-

BANFIELD: So far, no one has determined there’s any scandal there.

ZIMMERMAN: Of course not! And I think Senator Sanders is too fine a person to engage in reciting Republican talking points like that. But there will be debates around issues; debates around policy; and it’s going to be pretty exciting. This is going to be an historic debate, because CNN’s present – really, bringing the Democrats to the nation for the first time.

Some notes on this disgraceful example of a journalist behaving as a partisan flack:

Continue reading →

Your “Hillary Clinton Is Too Unethical To Be President” Update

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Hillaryshrug

Because of foreign policy catastrophes, Republican idiocy, natural disasters and more, many of Hillary Clinton’s short attention span supporters have returned to the fold. even though, polls say, 65% of Americans don’t trust her. The astounding stat is that 35% do trust her, which raises the question of what politician could do or say to make such walking, talking Nigerian Prince targets not trust them. They know Hillary lies; they know she is dishonest; they know she is greedy for wealth and power, as well as constantly conflicted and a hypocrite,but never mind, it’s ideas that matter with Hillary. She can, her cheering section insists, be the best choice for President even if you can’t trust her.

OK, if honesty, candor, and independence don’t matter, how about the integrity of those all-important “ideas”? One of those ideas was the Trans Pacific Partnership. The Washington Free Beacon gathered 24 Times Hillary Clinton Championed the Trans-Pacific Partnership While Secretary of State. This week, however, Clinton announced that she now opposes the  Trans-Pacific Trade agreement that she had previously taken bows for negotiating in  2012, and virtually nobody thinks she is doing this for any reason other than the fact that Bernie Sanders, like Jack Frost, is nipping at her nose, and she wants to keep her leftest supporters from flocking to him. Tell me, you “Ideas mean more than character” rationalizers, what good are those great ideas when a cynical, values-free manipulator will abandon them like kittens or change them like socks to win votes? This is Clinton’s integrity deficit, and hardly on display for the first time. Her “ideas” aren’t devised because they are “good” or even really her ideas; they exist because they help her gain power at the moment. You don’t like an idea? Well, be patient. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Al Roker’s Unethical Selfie And Malfunctioning Ethics Alarm

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Roker-selfie

The question here is a simple one.

On the scene of the devastating flooding in South Carolina, Today Show weather man Al Roker tweeted a selfie of him and  NBC colleagues beaming happily in front of a collapsed highway and a trapped car, with the caption “My crew and I getting ready to report on East Coast flooding from S. Carolina on @NBCNightlyNews with Kate Snow.”

Yes, after many complained on social media about the discordant juxtaposition of cheerful self-promotion and tragedy, Roker apologized, but not before.  The basic question is “What the hell is the matter with these people?“, or as today’s Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz asks,

Is Roker’s insensitivity signature significance of a malfunctioning ethics alarm, or just an excusable one-time mistake?

Continue reading →