Washington Post

Ethics Quote Of The Week: Jonathan Turley

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

“As [the WaPo’s Philip] Bump wrote when he was falsely accusing Barr, “it is the job of the media to tell the truth.” This would be a good time to start.”

—-Prof. Jonathan Turley in an epic defenestration of Washington Post Democratic Party propagandist Philip Bump

The Washington Post continuing to publish columnist Philip Bump’s “advocacy journalism (aka. lies) tells us as much about that once respectable paper as MSNBC continuing to provide a platform for Al Sharpton (and Joy Reid, and Chris Hayes, and Lawrence O’Donnell, and Joe Scarborough…). Bump distorts facts and sets out to disorient Post readers, which is, I was taught in journalism class, the opposite of what newspapers are supposed to do. “But he’s a pundit, not a reporter!” you protest? Fine: as the saying goes, he is entitled to his opinion, but not to his own facts.

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A Black Columnist Employed By The Washington Post Just Revealed Herself As Not Only A Racist, But An Especially Incompetent One….Now What?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

It is seldom that a writer for a prestigious publication spontaneously performs the equivalent of placing a neon “I am a racist moron who should never be taken seriously again!” sign on her head, but that’s what Karen Attiah has done. She’s a columnist for The Washington Post “on issues relating to race, gender and international politics, with a special interest in Africa”—naturally, she minored in Black Studies at Columbia, giving her anti-white racist urges just the boost they needed. One benefit of the disastrous Martin Luther King memorial unveiled this week in Boston is that it has caused lots of pundits, critics and others to reveal things about themselves (hypocrisy, bad taste) that the public needs to know—in Attiah’s case, that she is afflicted by the worst kind of racist hate and paranoia.

Attiah launched into a Twitter rant this week about how the “Embrace” sculpture (above) is a perfect example of how evil whites still distort the legacy of Dr. King as part of the structural racism and vile white supremacy America thrives on…

Boston’s Embrace statue perfectly represents how White America loves to butcher MLK. Cherry-picking quotes about love and non-violence. While ignoring his radicalism, anti-capitalism, his fierce critiques of white moderates. MLK- in his fullness– is still too much for them...And yes, I’ll say it. From another angle, the statue for real looks like one person is performing disembodied oral sex. No matter how much I try, I can’t unsee it. I don’t think MLK would have wanted us to be thinking about cunnilingus on his birthday. Thanks, Boston.…There is nothing radical about the disembodied, de-racialized Embrace statue. It is sending a whitewashed, multi-million dollar message — that MLK and Coretta overcame structural racism and systematic injustice with love– interpersonal, colorblind love….Anyway, since the statue has been revealed, have we been talking about it, or MLK? No. We’ve been talking all weekend about horribly racist/ anti-Black Boston has been– and continues to be. Mission accomplished…? This is what happens when white America tries to grossly distort what MLK really stood for… and ultimately.. what they murdered him for. In making MLK a whitewashed symbol of love, the Embrace statue is both safe AND grotesque. Says little about the man, a lot about America….To have a dismembered statue of a Black man and woman, in a country that killed and destroyed so many Black people, will never sit right with me. MLK Jr. was also murdered by white America. It’s giving -“We are so grateful for Black people’s noble sacrifice” – energy.

Oops! Here’s that virulent white supremacist artist who created “Embrace”:

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The Twitter Hunter Biden Laptop Censorship Proves Social Media’s Anti-Democracy Slant, And The Media’s Rush To Excuse It Proves Theirs

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

This was a test of integrity for the mainstream news media, and they, most predictably, flunked it, and outed themselves as the shamelessly unethical propaganda-spewing hacks they are. Depressing, but good to know, as if we didn’t know already.

As an exemplar of the whole, ugly, revolting effort to dismiss evidence that a biased and partisan Twitter staff deliberately buried a news story that might have harmed Joe Biden’s prospects of winning the 2016 election, Phillip Bump’s “analysis” in the Washington Post could hardly be more damning. Its very headline is an unethical rationalization and an appeal to consequentialism: “No, limiting the Hunter Biden laptop story didn’t cost Trump the election.”

Let’s just start with that, okay? Continue reading →

Dispatches From The Great Stupid, “D.E.I.” Division: This Story From The Washington Post Was Not A Joke…Well, Not Intended As One, Anyway

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Yes, sadly, it’s come to this.

Not only has the Left’s obsession with group identification, quotas and “diversity, equity and inclusion” reached peak madness, but the purveyors of this cult, including the mainstream media, are no longer capable of perceiving its excesses.

The article in yesterday’s Post was not a parody. The headline was not supposed to be funny. The tragically biased Post reporter responsible for this insanity is Daniel Wu, a reporting intern in the Post’s Metro section. Stanford University made him this way. And the editors who agreed to insult Post readers with it? Who knows what made them impervious to common sense? Well, let me take that back: “It’s the Great Stupid, Charlie Brown!”

The piece begins by describing the tragic circumstances of LisaWhitenack, now a biology professor at Allegheny College, a shark researcher who was tormented as a child she didn’t see many shark researchers on the Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week” that looked like her. So she decided to study this dire and under-recognized phenomenon “Was “Shark Week” feeding audiences the wrong messages about sharks — and who studies them?” The Post continues,

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Look! The Washington Post Realizes That The John Fetterman Senate Campaign In Pennsylvania Is A Threat To Democracy!

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Wow. CNN starting to criticize Democrats is remarkable enough, but the Washington Post biting the metaphorical hand that feeds it?

Theories abound. Maybe, as my freind Tom Fuller says, the Post editors have concluded that “there is some shit I will not eat.” Maybe Biden’s Speech From Hell that had fascist techniques all over it while calling half the nation fascist was too much even for these long-time accessories. I don’t know, but yesterday the Post editors erupted with rare disgust over the unethical machinations of Democrat John Fetterman, who is, essentially, trying to cheat his way to a victory in the crucial Pennsylvania U.S. Senate race.

Maybe what aroused the Post’s dormant sense of ethics was Fetterman’s absurd pandering to the pro-abortion crown in a 9/11 campaign rally—kind of appropriate, since 9/11 was about taking innocent lives just like abortion is—in which he shouted, “My name is John FetterWoman!” to a cheering crowd of idiots.  Fetterman reiterated his support for abortion until  birth, and pledged that he would vote to codify Roe v. Wade, which makes no sense since Roe outlawed most abortions after the first trimester.

“Women are the reason we can win. Let me say that again: Women are the reason we win.” Fetterman told the crowd. “Don’t piss women off!”

To quote Olson Johnson in “Blazing Saddles,” “Now who can argue with that?” Continue reading →

The Washington Post Found An “Expert” To Explain Why Trump Is “Semi-Fascist”…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Some Big Lies die hard…particularly if the mainstream media is committed to keeping them alive. The “Trump is a fascist” smear was one of the first out of the box when the Axis of Unethical Conduct (“the resistance”/Democrats/news media) reacted to being foiled in the glorious post-Obama re-making of America they had assumed was assured by setting out to cancel the verdict of the electoral system and sabotage a legally elected President of the United States. (Nah, nothing undemocratic about that!) The claim that Trump and his supporters are crypto-fascists has been nonsensical from the start (as President, Donald Trump eliminated many kinds of government control over individual liberties, and opposed others), and the absurdity has exploded as the Biden Administration and the Democratic Congress have embraced so many markers of totalitarianism, like legally favored groups, censorship by a captured media, political show trials, politically manipulated science and a “truth agency” (which, fortunately, never got off the ground. Then we have the attempted government intimidation of political opposition, lock-step partisan indoctrination in the universities and public schools, official disinformation (“Recession? What recession?”), the effort to punish judges for opinions that go against the party, demonizing the opposing party and, most notably, the targeting of political opponents for prosecution and imprisonment. Tonight, the President of the United States will give a national address accusing the opposing party of being a threat to democracy.

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What Do You Call Those Who Deliberately Encourage Hate And Division?

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

A much-esteemed member of the Ethics Alarms commentariate alerted me yesterday that he would be eschewing the blog indefinitely because it was making him anxious and depressed. I’m glad he won’t be reading this post. It made me anxious and depressed.

Fresh off of yesterday’s note about the woman who asked “The Ethicist” whether she was ethically obligated to “out” a friend at work who harbored horrible conservative opinions—you know, like not believing that there is a Constitutional right to kill human fetuses—and news of another study showing that Democrats increasingly don’t want to associate with anyone not buying into their progressive, crypt-totalitarian world view (I can’t locate the recent one right now; a similar study from last December found that “5% of Republicans said they wouldn’t be friends with someone from the opposite party, compared to 37% of Democrats,” and “71% of Democrats wouldn’t go on a date with someone with opposing views, versus 31% of Republicans.”), comes more evidence that hate-mongering and Big Lies are working for the Left. They will destroy the democracy in order to save it, and promoting incurable divisiveness and distrust is just the way to do it.

The tough conservative blogger who writes The New Neo reported on a Washington Post opinion piece from last week headlined, “No, Trump voters aren’t incapable of changing their minds about him.” I confess: I saw the article and jettisoned it after this section in the third paragraph:

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Even More Weird Tales Of The Great Stupid! WaPo Publishes A Peak Stupid Op-Ed, Then Censors Readers Who Say It’s Stupid

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I really do wonder at what point the vast majority of Americans who have not become irreversibly deranged by the confluence of the Trump Freakout, the George Floyd Freakout, the Trans Freakout ,the Wuhan Virus Freakout and the Roe Reversal Freakout sharply slap their foreheads “I could have had a V8!” style and ask, “Why are we letting these unstable, untrustworthy people dominate our discourse and manipulate our culture?”

For the provocation keep escalating. The Washington Post’s editors actually thought that a Poe’s Law evoking piece headlined “My name is a Confederate monument, so I cross it out when I write it” was worthy of publication. In an orgy of narcissism, U.S. history-hatred and virtue-signalling, a writer named Bayard Woods saluted his ridiculous habit of crossing out his own name, which he says, “had stood as a Confederate monument over every story I had ever written.” See, the Bayards and the Woodses had owned slaves. By this brilliant logic, I should cross out my name too, since Chief Justice John Marshall was a slaveholder and “Jack” honors Jack the Ripper.

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Today’s Intellectually Dishonest Dobbs Leak Freakout: “A Lot Of Powerful People Seem To Have No Clue What Motherhood Means” (Washington Post)

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

You have to admit, the pro-abortion hysterics and fanatics are doing a bang-up job proclaiming their fury at the possibility that the U.S. Supreme Court may be about to strike down Roe v. Wade without making anything that hints of a good faith argument on the merits. The latest example of this massive exercise in “appeal to emotion” and “let’s keep the American public as dumb as we can, all the better to manipulate them” is an op-ed by Monica Hesse, the Washington Post’s resident gender bigot. Previously, Ethics Alarms had highlighted her fantasy that Mary, Donna Reed’s character in “It’s A Wonderful Life,” is the “real hero” of the classic (Right–she’s the one who gave up her chance at al education and a career to save her father’s rinky-dink savings and loan so Bedford Falls didn’t become a cesspool under the thumb of the richest and meanest man in town) and this article attacking the Trump White House Christmas decorations and using them to excoriate Melania Trump for existing, sneering that any one who referred to Trump’s First Lady as “elegant” meant it as a code word for “White.” Yes, she’s a race bigot too. I would no more have sampled a Hesse column in the Post than tried a fried centipede as a snack, except the Ann Althouse pointed me to it.

[A side note regarding Ann: she’s written 14 posts including the May 2 entry in which she reported on the leak and proclaimed the looming cancellation of Roe “a calamity.” She has never explained why she thinks it’s a calamity, although in 2006 she opined on what the results of Roe going down might be. She’s a law professor, and her blog has no borders, like this one, which is constrained to examine ethics only. Those 14 posts cover everything from her usual linguistic nit-picking to musing about the leak, but there is no explanation of the “calamity” verdict. That’s irresponsible, and, frankly, cowardly. But I digress.]

Here’s the crux of Hesse’s argument, if you can call it that: the supply chain-triggered shortage in baby formula shows how cruel and ignorant the Supreme Court majority is. She writes,

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Ethics Quiz: The George Washington Hating George Washington Student’s Washington Post Op-Ed

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

A black college senior named Caleb Francois who is currently attending George Washington University in Washington, D.C. persuaded the Washington Post to publish his op-ed of surpassing ignorance and stupidity. His thesis (or theses)?

The racist visions of James Madison, Winston Churchill and others are glorified through building names, programs, statues and libraries that honor their memory.

The controversial Winston Churchill Library must go. The university’s contentious colonial moniker must go. Even the university’s name, mascot and motto — “Hail Thee George Washington”— must be replaced. The hypocrisy of GW in not addressing these issues is an example of how Black voices and Black grievances go ignored and highlights the importance of strong Black leadership.

The Post is being roasted in various conservative forums for publishing the 800-word essay.  One pundit (at Breitbart) writes,

The arrogance of the Post knows no bounds. Publishing this editorial is just another troll from the Post, a way for the Post to stick its finger in the eye of its critics by relishing the hypocritical double standards the former newspaper now lives by.

I hate to defend the Post, but I don’t think for a second that the paper finds the student’s argument persuasive. It’s just provocative, and like other off-the-wall opinion pieces published by both the Post and The New York Times (remember the op-ed recommending that children and babies get to vote?), publication doesn’t imply endorsement. Yet the author in this case isn’t a historian or a crackpot professor; it’s a maleducated, indoctrinated young black man imbued with the 20-something’s unique certitude that he has everything figured out. If Caleb learns anything after graduation, I think it is very likely that he will want change his name and keep a bag over his head. Should a national newspaper help a young man to make a fool of himself?

Predictably, even the Post’s progressive readership entered an overwhelmingly negative verdict on the piece (which the author will surely dismiss as more racism and white supremacy.) Here is the “most liked” and the most representative of the over 1200 comments:

History professor here. If GW was only known for being a Confederate General or a slave owner, cancel away and rename away. But he was not. He is known for so much more… one of the biggest things is the idea that a president is not a king. And the office is not for life. Without him, our country would not be free. He kept order at a time when fractions would have torn us asunder. For God’s sake, do not rename George Washington University… I’m a liberal, and I believe in equality for all. But this is just stupid.

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