Marcus is an American entrepreneur. His depressing but revealing (though hardly surprising quote is in this tweet, which also relates nicely to the previous post:
Hey Douthat! How About Coming Right Out and Stating That U.S. College Students Are Indoctrinated into Radical, Progressive, Marxist Ideology?
Talk about burying the lede.
Sort-of conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat issued what might have been a useful column, What Students Read Before They Protest, about the reasons why students at Columbia and other “elite” educational institutions are demonstrating in favor of Hamas, terrorism, anti-Semitism, and wiping Israel off the face of the earth. But Douthat, who can write clearly and forcefully when he wants to (or, I suppose, when his woke and biased editors let him) instead buries his own objective in foggy rhetoric, Authentic Frontier Gibberish and equivocation to such an extent that 1) few will have the patience to read it and 2) the importance of his point is diluted and lost.
This is how Jonathan Turley used to write until he was red-pilled.
“Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” For Some Strange Reason, Sayeth the NYT, Trump Doesn’t Trust Our Intelligence Agencies…
Wow, what could possibly account for that? The man is paranoid!
I missed “Campaign Puts Trump and the Spy Agencies on a Collision Course” in the Times two weeks ago. Fortunately a non-Ethics Alarms-reading friend sent me this column by the usually astute and trustworthy Holman Jenkins at the Wall Street Journal. (Aside: I continue to wonder why so few of my friends and long-time associates read this blog, and none of my family members. It must be me, or as one friend who does read Ethics Alarms once said in a moment of self-doubt, “All my best friends hate me.”) His assessment of the significance of the piece tracks exactly with mine, and he seems to be coming from a similar point of view: he doesn’t have any illusions about Donald Trump, but he still finds the Times’ dishonest and biased coverage of him since Trump’s election despicable. Except this one initial arch comment—Gee, imagine not trusting intelligence agencies!—I’ll leave the commentary to Jenkins with a few footnotes from me:
Encore: From “The Law vs Ethics Files: The July 24, 1983 Pine Tar Incident, When Baseball Chose Ethics Over Law, And Was 100% Wrong
Several things led me to re-posting this Ethics Alarms entry from 2017.
First of all, the MLB network showed a documentary on the career of George Brett today, and scene above, with Brett erupting in fury at the umpire’s call voiding his clutch, 9th inning home run, is one of the classic recorded moments in baseball history. There was also a recent baseball ethics event that had reminded me of Brett’s meltdown: Yankees manager Aaron Boone was thrown out of a game because a fan behind the Yankees dugout yelled an insult at the home plate umpire, and the umpire ejected Boone thinking the comments came from him.. When Boone vigorously protested that he hadn’t said anything and that it was the fan,Umpire Hunter Wendelstedt said, “I don’t care who said it. You’re gone!”
Wait, what? How can he not care if he’s punishing the wrong guy?
“What do you mean you don’t care?” Boone screamed rushing onto the field a la Brett. “I did not say a word. It was up above our dugout. Bullshit! Bullshit! I didn’t say anything. I did not say anything, Hunter. I did not say a fucking thing!” This erudite exchange was picked up by the field mics.
There was another baseball ethics development this week as well, one involving baseball lore and another controversial home run. On June 9, 1946, Ted Williams hit a ball that traveled a reported 502 feet, the longest he ever hit, and one of the longest anyone has hit. The seat was was painted red in 1984 (I’ve sat in it!), and many players have opined over the years that the story and the seat are hogwash, a lie. This report, assembling new data about the controversy, arrives at an amazing conclusion: the home run probably traveled farther than 502 feet.
But I digress. Here, lightly edited and updated, is the ethics analysis of the famous pine tar game and its aftermath:
***
I have come to believe that the lesson learned from the pine tar incident is increasingly the wrong one, and the consequences of this extend well beyond baseball.
On July 24, 1983, the Kansas City Royals were battling the New York Yankees at Yankee Stadium. With two outs and a runner on first in the top of the ninth inning, Royals third baseman George Brett hit a two-run home run off Yankee closer Goose Gossage to give his team a 5-4 lead. Yankee manager Billy Martin, however, had been waiting like a spider for this moment.
Long ago, he had noticed that perennial batting champ Brett used a bat that had pine tar (used to allow a batter to grip the bat better) on the handle beyond what the rules allowed. MLB Rule 1.10(c) states: “The bat handle, for not more than 18 inches from the end, may be covered or treated with any material or substance to improve the grip. Any such material or substance, which extends past the 18-inch limitation, shall cause the bat to be removed from the game.” At the time, such a hit was defined in the rules as an illegally batted ball, and the penalty for hitting “an illegally batted ball” was that the batter was to be declared out, under the explicit terms of the then-existing provisions of Rule 6.06.
That made Brett’s bat illegal, and any hit made using the bat an out. But Billy Martin, being diabolical as well as a ruthless competitor, didn’t want the bat to cause just any out. He had waited for a hit that would make the difference between victory or defeat for his team, and finally, at long last, this was it. Martin came out of the dugout carrying a rule book, and arguing that the home run shouldn’t count. After examining the rules and the bat, home-plate umpire Tim McLelland ruled that Brett used indeed used excessive pine tar and called him out, overturning the home run and ending the game.
Brett’s resulting charge from the dugout (above) is video for the ages. Continue reading
Addendum to “The Supreme Court, the ‘Suicide Pact,’ and Ethics Zugzwang”
Thinking about that last post and the issues it raises as I was walking Spuds in the rain just now took me to an epiphany, and an embarrassingly late one.
Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon was more important and crucial than I realized then. It was only one gutsy and maybe prescient act in an otherwise short and undistinguished Presidency, but it delayed the current crisis for half a century.
The conventional wisdom is that Nixon would have been prosecuted for his Watergate involvement, and that the event would have been a divisive and traumatic spectacle that a nation just getting past the Vietnam debacle could ill afford. That wasn’t what was going to happen, though, I now realize. (And I have never read or heard anyone acknowledge this.)
Had he been charged with any crime, Nixon would have immediately claimed immunity just as Trump is now. For the rest of his life, Nixon routinely said that “if the President does it, it’s not illegal.” What would the Supreme Court have ruled in 1975? Here is the Court then:
Chief Justice Warren Burger
William J. Brennan
Potter Stewart
Byron White
Thurgood Marshall
Harry Blackmun
Lewis F. Powell
William H. Rehnquist
The only two reliable liberals on the Court were Marshall and Brennan, but the conservatives were more moderate and less doctrinaire than today’s SCOTUS majority. I have no idea what that group would have done with the immunity issue, and I’m glad we didn’t have to find out.
Thanks, Jerry.
The Supreme Court, the “Suicide Pact,” and Ethics Zugzwang [Corrected]
I confess, I didn’t expect the U.S. Supreme Court to give Donald Trump’s Presidential immunity claim as serious a hearing as it did in last week’s oral arguments. Now that I read the transcript, however, I understand “what’s going on here,” to quote my own starting point for ethics analysis. Its focus, or at least the focus of the conservative members of the Court, is appropriate considering the current assault on our system of government by the totalitarian Left as it tries to use the criminal laws, the courts, and partisan prosecutors to prevent the public from throwing them out of office.
Naturally the Left is furious, and is attacking the justices. The attack isn’t based on legal reasoning, but the same tactic progressives and Democrats used to claim that SCOTUS had “stolen” the 2000 election by finally ruling that enough was enough, and that it was time to settle the identity of the leader of the nation and not paralyze the government fighting over an election with a filament thin edge within the margin of statistical error. The Bush v. Gore ruling was an example of one of the core functions of the Supreme Court as it has evolved: stepping in to guide the Constitution and the nation through unanticipated situations the Founders never considered or prepared for. But Democrats attacked Justice Scalia and the other conservative justices for defying their own guiding principles—“textualism” and “originalism,” the idea that the Constitution should not be extrapolated into new areas never anticipated or discussed in the original document. That judicial philosophy is a conservative bulwark against the arrogant and excessive “legislation from the bench” that marked the Warren Court in the Sixties, and to a lesser extent its predecessor in the Seventies, the Burger Court, the latter most infamously in the purely political Roe decision, finding a right to abortion in a document that didn’t hint of such a thing.
After hearing the oral argument in Trump v. U.S. and detecting signs that some of the Justices on the rightish side of the ideological spectrum agreed that some kind of Presidential immunity might be prudent and even essential, the Axis howled. “Two years ago, conservatives relied on a strict interpretation of the Constitution’s text and original meaning to overturn the federal right to abortion. But on Thursday, as they debated whether Trump can be prosecuted for his bid to subvert the 2020 election, they seemed content to engage in a free-form balancing exercise where they weighed competing interests and practical consequences,” whined Politico. “Some critics said the conservative justices — all of whom purport to adhere to an original understanding of the Constitution — appeared to be on the verge of fashioning a legal protection for former presidents based on the justices’ subjective assessment of what’s best for the country and not derived from the nation’s founding document.”
Translation: “The judges we support do this all the time and we think it’s wonderful, but these bad judges can’t do it no matter how much sense it makes because they have made it clear that they generally disapprove of the practice.”
Well, So Much For the PETA Vote!
To many analysts, South Dakota governor Krtisti Noem checked all the right boxes to be Donald Trump’s running mate. She’s a hard-right conservative, a successful and popular governor, an effective speaker, attractive, and a woman. (I must interject here that I find it just a bit hypocritical that the GOP, as it derides and condemns the diversity fad as it makes tribal membership more important than merit, skill, competence and experience, that Trump is almost certainly going to choose a woman or a black man as his VP. The least he could do to defy the Left is pick a Jew…). Noem seemed to be leading the race to be Trump’s second-in-command, in the view of many experts.
And then, as Frank and Nancy would say, she went and spoiled it all by saying something stupid like ‘I shot my dog because I couldn’t be bothered to train it.’
“Ethics Dunce” doesn’t adequately describe what Noem’s new book “No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward,” which will be released in May, reveals about her. Yes, she’s notably missing some key ethics alarms and some pretty basic ones at that, like “Be kind to animals, because they are innocents,” one of my late wife’s mantras. Noem is also, however, lacking in basic understanding of public sensibilities and has the political instincts of a Kamikaze pilot.
“I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story here,” Noem wrote after detailing the horrible story of how she lured “Cricket,” a 14-month old wire-haired pointer, to a gravel pit and shot her because the dog had failed her first pheasant hunting attempt. This wasn’t “Old Yeller”: Cricket wasn’t sick, or dangerous, or old. Cricket, as Noem’s account makes clear, just hadn’t been trained….you know, like Joe Biden’s “bad” German Shepherd, Commander.
Good News/Bad News On Karine Jean-Pierre’s Status
The New York Post has released a scoop: White House insiders attempted to persuade President Biden’s incompetent paid liar, Karine Jean-Pierre, to leave her post, thus sparing the administration, Democrats and any American who thinks his or her government should be run by people at least minimally qualified for their jobs of ongoing embarrassment.
Whew! That’s a relief. At least a few in the executive branch recognize an unqualified, inept high-profile job occupant when they see one and have the integrity and sense of responsibility to try to rectify the problem. The reason this secret effort to dump Karine was apparently attempted is what anyone watching her painful press briefings already knows: She terrible at her job. She doesn’t understand the issues and isn’t quick enough or smart enough to parry reporters’ questions effectively. Unfortunately, Karine is also a Dunning-Kruger sufferer. “She thinks she’s doing an amazing job,” one of the Post’s sources says.
From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files…
This really does speak for itself, but indulge me as I make a few comments…
1. The “money quote”: “I wish I was more educated.”
2. Ah, yes, the young protesting just to protest, meet people, have fun, threaten Jews! This phenomenon was rife when I was a student, and it so nauseated me that my bias against protests and demonstrations has lasted to this day.
3. When I was 18, I was certain that giving the vote to 18-year-olds was a mistake. People like these women informed that opinion.
4. Immature, uncritical, peer-driven Americans like this are easy marks for propagandists, cultists and hucksters. Imagine: similar zombie activists enabled Black Lives Matter to warp the U.S. culture
5. Good job, American educational system! Well done, parents! The life competence rules that one should never take action on a matter before thoroughly understanding that matter, and that one should never allow others to dictate your conduct absent your informed consent—informed is a key word—have apparently never been taught, explained or conveyed.
6. Nice to see that Rudy isn’t letting his persecution by the legal community for daring to represent Donald Trump, though.
Ethics Observations on Harvey Weinstein’s Reprieve….
The New York Court of Appeals overturned the felony sex crimes conviction of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein yesterday. The 4-to-3 decision held that the trial judge deprived him of his right to a fair trial in 2020 when he allowed prosecutors to call witnesses who said Weinstein had sexually assaulted them despite the assaults having never been charged as crimes or proven to have occurred. Using allegations of past bad acts to prove guilt in a criminal trial is generally forbidden in New York and other U.S. jurisdictions with limited exceptions. Since Harvey is already serving a prison sentence for another set of crimes that will keep him locked away until he is almost 90, the decision is more symbolic than useful to Weinstein. But it still needed to be made.
Observations:
Ethics Alarms 