Category Archives: Ethics

Growing GOP Menagerie Of Morons (The Bristol Bump And Grind)

Ethics, Media, Morality, Pop-Culture, Relatives, Republicans, Sarah Palin, The Zeitgeist

I have long argued in this space that Republican women, with two exceptions, are either vulgar or vacuous, and sometimes both. We’re approaching a critical mass of evidence.

Bristol Palin is yet another exhibit in the GOP menagerie of morons. Granted, she is not a Republican, but she is closely allied with a prominent GOPer. With respect to Bristol’s bump and grind routine on “Dancing With The Stars,” allow me to apply a line often applied in such emergencies by the one-and-only Joan Rivers:

Bristol, I don’t need to see your v-gina.

At the same time that Bristol bared her chubby thighs, Katherine Schwarzenegger—who, like Meghan McMoron, is indubitably a Democrat at heart like her parents— used the celebrity of her mom and dad to launch a career in “journalism.” More bad, banal books to crowd out the good.

Still, as contemptible and unethical as this celebrity career path is (a path trodden by the silver-haired, silver-spooned Anderson Vanderbilt Cooper), you have to admit that young Schwarzenegger looks like a sweetie (and ever-so pretty) compared to her Republican cohort.

For grotesque, nothing beats Meghan McCain and her appendages.

UPDATED: Pimp My FLOTUS

Barack Obama, Debt, Economy, Ethics, Etiquette, Government, Politics, Pop-Culture

I can’t bring myself to break a sweat over Michelle Obama’s lavish vacation. The First Lady and daughter took along to Spain “68 Secret Service agents from the US,” and for “her entourage she had reserved 60 of the 129 rooms.”

The comparison to Marie Antoinette, down to the wave, is flattering, of course—to Michelle. But how stupid is it to suggest that individuals so privileged as these—who have set themselves and their offspring up for life by working the political process (i.e., by pelf)—could, by “toning down the flash,” humanise themselves “and signify that they sympathise with the setbacks of the people they were elected to serve.”

That was New York Daily News columnist Andrea Tantaros’s much-publicized criticism and attendant advice.

Yes, precisely: if the Obamas and their hangers-on tone down, I’ll feel so much better about them and their undeserved riches.

Dumb.

Besides, the metaphor is all wrong. This sojourn to Spain, the “sedate” soiree for Mexican President Felipe Calderon, down to the pelvis-shaking Beyonce—this is out of the MTV series, “Pimp my Ride.” Or Pimp my president.

UPDATE (Aug. 9): The Idiocracy at large has taunted Michelle and her posse by saying that the American economy could have done with their dollars. The royal party should have spent its money stateside.

The American cognoscenti knows so little about the money in their society. Government workers are paid out of taxes. In other words, the money they spend is money confiscated from taxpayers. Productive activities were suspended in order to fund these parasite. It’s a zero-sum game. The BHO family doesn’t produce anything; it consumes wealth. All told, even if Michelle vacationed in the US, the money she blows has already resulted in less economic activity somewhere unseen. It’s Bastiat’s elegant argument about ‘What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen’ all over again.

Meet Saint Shirley Sherrod

Affirmative Action, Ethics, History, Human Accomplishment, Journalism, Media, Political Correctness, Race, Racism

The following is an excerpt from my new WND.com column, “Meet Saint Shirley Sherrod”:

“‘Expectations tend to be self-fulfilling,’ said an anonymous wag. Expect nothing and you’ll get nothing. Except very little and that’s all you’ll get. In modern-day USA, a kid so much as dials 911 in an emergency, and he is decorated for bravery. And if an African-American rejects her birthright, and demonstrates less prejudice toward whites—she is up for beatification.

Repudiate this elevated ethical standard, and a deranged, fulminating Keith Olbermann will pelt you with a panegyric on the imagined martyrdom of one Shirley Sherrod, now the most celebrated public servant in the United States, and perhaps the world. …

… Keith Olbermann is a crude pamphleteer who imagines himself a modern-day Emile Zola. Most recently, the anchor has sunk to the level of fraud and falsehood in comparing Ms. Sherrod—a contemporary black woman, who has, hitherto, enjoyed safe and secure sinecure in liberal, post-Civil-Rights-Act America—to Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a nineteenth-century Jew living in illiberal France, falsely accused of the worst military breach possible.

The similarities are as startling as Olbermann’s leveling logic.

In 1894, this patriotic Frenchman was charged with spying for the Germans. Dreyfus was tried and convicted of treason with no due process of the law. He was sentenced to a lifetime on Devil’s Island, a penal colony in South America. There, Dreyfus languished until 1899. Outraged at the miscarriage of justice, French writer Emile Zola penned a stirring tract, ‘J’Accuse,’ in defense of Dreyfus, who was eventually exonerated twelve years after his ordeal began.

Dreyfus’s fate clearly mirrors that of Sherrod. Especially glaring are the parallels between Sherrod’s 48-hour, celebratory ride on the cable news merry-go-round, and Dreyfus’s four-year romp around Treasure Island, in French Guiana.” …

Read the complete column, “Meet Saint Shirley Sherrod.”

Read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

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The Unbearable Lightness Of Being Republican

Barack Obama, Ethics, Government, Law, Morality, Politics, Republicans

The Joe Sestak “scandal” is nothing but garden-variety politics routinely practiced by both parties. Yet as Rome burns, such quid pro quo is what is consuming the Republican Party’s bobbleheads. The signal dishonor of which Obama operatives stand accused, via Sam Stein, is offering a job to “Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Penn) in exchange for him not entering the Pennsylvania Senate primary.” The act has “seasoned political observers, historians, and lawyers responding with veritable yawns”:

American presidential history is littered with quid pro quos, implicit and explicit secret job offers, and backroom deals, so much so that the Sestak offer may be more the norm than the exception to it.
“It is completely unexceptional,” said Dr. Russell Riley, associate professor and chair of the Miller Center’s Presidential Oral History Program at the University of Virginia. “I read some place today that this is evidently illegal, which was shocking news to me. I don’t know what the statutes are that would bear on this… it just doesn’t seem to me to particularly rise to the level of being newsworthy in the first place and the fact that it’s spun out into a scandal has been surprising.”
George Edwards, a Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Jordan Chair in Presidential Studies at Texas A&M University, says: “There is no question whatsoever that presidents have often offered people positions to encourage them not to do something or make it awkward for them to do it. Presidents have also offered people back-ups if they ran for an office and lost. All this is old news historically.”

The complete column is HERE.

Note, this is not to say the shenanigans of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and President Bill Clinton were legal. They could very well be illegal. They are certainly morally dubious. But politicians are by definition immoral. By blowing the scandal du jour out of proportion, an unspeakably crooked class is made to sweat the small stuff only.

I guess Republicans have a stake in perpetuating this state-of-affairs.