Category Archives: ethics

What the President’s Staff Thinks about our Allies

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial panties are at it again. Now the undergarments are in an uproar over the Signal chat wherein some aspects of an attack on Houthis were discussed just before the attacks went in. The discussion certainly presents bad optics for the administration, and maybe it shouldn’t have been done on Signal.

However.

A real security scandal is that the Signal chat apparently included Steve Witkoff, Mr Trump’s envoy to wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. Press reports say Mr Witkoff was receiving these messages on the commercial app while in Moscow. This is security malpractice. Russian intelligence services must be listening to Mr Witkoff’s every eyebrow flutter.

What the editors chose to omit in their hysteria is that Signal is reputed to a very secure means of group communication; it’s also one explicitly approved for secure communications by the Biden administration. To the extent that Signal is that secure—the editors elide mention of any investigation of this—the Russians could listen in to their heart’s content, but they wouldn’t learn anything, unless they had an agent looking over Witkoff’s shoulder at his phone or laptop.

One more item the editors chose to elide, which came out in so many words in Wednesday’s noon o’clock presser hosted by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt: Witkoff had no personal communication devices with him on his trip to Mocow. He had only a Federal government-provided secure cell phone provided to him explicitly for the trip. I’m frankly up in the air between these editors being that ignorant of the facts or if, given my nearby post, they’re simply that dishonest in blithely repeating the disinformation of “press reports.”

There’s this overreaction, especially:

Yet Vice President JD Vance second-guessed the President’s strikes on the chat because he said only “3 percent of US trade runs through the suez [sic]” canal, while “40 percent of European trade does.” That understates the US interest in freedom of navigation. Mr Vance even suggested his boss didn’t understand that striking the Houthis was at odds with Mr Trump’s “message on Europe right now.” He added that “I just hate bailing Europe out again.” So the Vice President is willing to let the Houthis shut down shipping to spite the Europeans?

This really is a cynically offered overreaction. For one thing, which the editors omit to mention here, that conversation occurred shortly before Trump made his decision and ordered the strikes to go in. This is staff—Vance—doing its job of devil’s advocating a decision that’s still only potential, even arguing seriously against it while it’s only potential. The editors also omitted to mention that, in that same chat session, Vance said he supported the President’s decision to go ahead: once the boss’s decision was made, argument stopped, and it became everyone’s duty to get behind it and make it work.

For another thing, how well has Pretty Please worked over the last 70 years, or so, in getting Europe to see to its own responsibilities instead of relying primarily if not solely on American blood and treasure for its economic, even political, welfare? Recall that Europe’s NATO members only started getting serious about honoring their commitments to NATO after Trump threatened to leave the organization during his first term, and today a third of Europe’s NATO members continue actively to betray their fellow members with their refusal to honor their duties to the organization. The matter of the Houthis in this conversation is only tangentially related to the overall principle of freedom of navigation.

Vance is far from the only American who’s sick of bailing out Europe. The continent needs to learn, and apparently the only way they will is if they suffer real harm from their determined dependence.

The editors’ remark about being willing to let the Houthis shut down shipping is just cynical exaggeration. The Houthis may be able to severely impact shipping to-from Europe via the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, but that shipping is easily rerouted, and has been, to go around Africa. That’s a route that only a few days longer, and those few days are significant only for shipping from India, Pakistan, or eastern Africa. From farther Asia, which is the bulk of commerce into Europe other than from the United States, the added days are an insignificant delay—and they avoid the toll Egypt charges for the use of its canal.

Money Saved or Wasted?

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Amanda Bennett, ex-previous head of USAGM, is upset with Kari Lake’s (the new head of the US Agency for Global Media) characterization of the $150 million the agency is expected to spend over the next several years on its lease of a new (relative to USAGM’s prior digs) office building.

The prior building that USAGM occupied for a very pretty penny was rundown and rapidly failing further, so Bennet negotiated a good deal for the new office building, and she’s justifiably proud of the deal she got. As far as that deal goes.

The government didn’t lose money [as Lake claimed], it saved—a lot. We estimated that savings over the 15-year lease—including the free rent and millions in cash incentives—would total more than $150 million.

But the USAGM has long been a Leftist propaganda arm, thoroughly deviated from its ROC of passing along factual information, objectively, to other nations, especially those whose governments seek to prevent such data from getting to their subjects.

My question for Bennett, then, is this: how much money would the Federal government save if those $150 million weren’t spent at all and USAGM eliminated from the government’s books?

As the kids like to say, Madam, get real.

Misplaced Understanding

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A woman wrote to a financial advisor with the following problem. She had just linked up with an old high school woman chum and the two were having lunch together; the writer, at least, having a good time catching up on things with her apparently reconnected-with friend. When the check for the lunch came, this happened:

Since this was not a “date” it should have been assumed we would split the bill, right? I never carried cash (still don’t) and pulled out my Amex card to pay my half. To my complete surprise, she stood up and declared (I will NEVER forget this), “Oh, thank you so much for paying! It was great to see you!” and out the door she went.

What to do, she asked the financial advisor, especially now that the incident is in her past but she’s having trouble putting it behind her.

The advisor led off with this:

Your friend could have genuinely believed that you were picking up the tab. It may have been presumptuous, but it could have been a misunderstanding; her mistake was to jump to conclusions prematurely in good faith.

He had this, too:

Your friend sounds like a good egg. [She’s a teacher, and that’s hard.] For all our analysis and reflecting on past matters of financial etiquette, I have a feeling that if we met our respective friends again [the advisor had a similar experience], neither of them would even remember.

No, and no. The first is just rationalization for the subsequent advice. The advisor ignored the fact that the “friend” exited the conversation, the table, and the restaurant as soon as she made her “thanks.” Had the other woman truly misunderstood the treat vice dutch nature of the get together, she would have remained, engaging in further conversation while the credit card was taken away then returned a short time later with the receipt to be signed. Then the two would have left the restaurant together.

Too, of course neither of the two “friends” would remember; they’re the ones who skated.

Here, the woman’s “friend” knew exactly what she was doing; that’s why she didn’t tarry after her words of thanks.

My own advice: forgive the boorishness, but don’t forget it. Evaluate the potentially rebudding relationship, and make a conscious assessment of whether continuing the relationship is worth the other woman’s boorishness. If there’s to be another shared lunch, decide in advance whether the woman will pay; it will be a dutch treat; or the other woman will pay that time, it being, in a way, her turn.

“Pinned”

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Pinned? Really? As universities start to pay lip service to acting concretely against the bigotries and ideological indoctrination rampant on their campuses, there’s this comment by a news writer that lies at the core of the universities’ problem.

University leaders, pinned between liberal faculty and the Trump administration, are quietly trying to make friends in Washington amid widespread concerns about research budgets, student aid, and the White House’s quest to push academia to the right.

How is it possible that university leaders can be pinned between faculty—liberal or otherwise—and the Trump—or any other—administration?

The long and short of it is that it isn’t possible for such pinning to occur. Unfortunately, the “pinning” does exist, but it’s university managers who feel pinned; there are no to almost none actual leaders in today’s university administrations.

Faculty has no business being involved in the administration of a college or university; they’re employees of the institution, nothing more—and nothing less—than that. University managers who choose not to act as if they’re in charge, which they should be enforcing, are self-selecting for termination. That includes members of the institution’s “governing” board. Faculty members who won’t act like the employees that they are also are self-selecting for termination.

Only when incumbents act within their roles can colleges and universities go back to being institutions of learning, teaching, and research instead of the institutions of limited speech, limited academic “freedom,” indoctrination, and bigotry that they are currently.

Donald Trump Bullies?

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Really? A letter writer in Wednesday’s Letters section of The Wall Street Journal thinks so. He credulously makes, though, a couple of critical mistakes that no rational, grown adult would make.

Today, Donald Trump’s “bullying” embodies the more contemporary meaning: the cowardly actions of one who seeks to harm or intimidate those he views as weak.

This is risible on its face. Bullies have only the power their putative victims choose to grant them, not a minim more. The cowardice is in those who make the decision to allow themselves to be bullied. Yes, that’s often a hard decision to make, but “hard” means “possible.” There’s no excuse for choosing wrongly here.

The letter writer’s other mistake centers on this—which he, in all seriousness, offers as an example of Trumpian bullying:

[T]he president has issued an executive order stripping security clearances from lawyers at Covington & Burling, who provided pro bono legal assistance to former special counsel Jack Smith. More recently, Ed Martin, interim US attorney for the District of Columbia, sent a letter to Georgetown Law School, demanding that it cease diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, and warning that his office wouldn’t hire the school’s graduates unless it did so.
These actions violate the First Amendment’s protections of freedom of expression.

This is laughable beyond anything related to “bullying” or being “bullied.” There is no intrinsic free speech right, or any other right, to a security clearances—which grants the holder access (given a parallel and simultaneous need to know) to data involving national security. Neither Covington & Burling as an institution, nor any of its lawyers, have any such right. It’s not bullying to rescind the clearances of those entities and persons who no longer work for the government.

Neither is there any intrinsic free speech right—or any other 1st Amendment right or any other right sourced to any other clause or clauses of our Constitution—to a government job. The government, like any potential employer, has its own intrinsic right to determine for itself the qualifications required for a job and then to determine for itself who the best candidate(s) might be to be hired into that job.

Nor is there any such right held by Georgetown Law School to place its graduates into any particular job, including a government one.

Back to the bullying foolishness: if Georgetown managers feel bullied by this, that’s their conscious choice. It would be particularly easy, though, for these worthies to stand up to the alleged Trumpian bullying. The Federal government’s authority to enforce any demand, whether to desist from DEI efforts or anything else, extends only so far as Georgetown Law School takes in Federal dollars. The institution is under no obligation to take those dollars. The school’s managers could eliminate the pressures they’ve chosen to perceive simply by ceasing those acceptances rather than ceasing their DEI efforts.