Tag Archives: culture

A Thought on Trust

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Fay Vincent, erstwhile Major League Baseball Commissioner, had an op-ed in last Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal centered on the moral and legal aspects of why we swear to be truthful on those occasions when we are called on explicitly to tell the truth.

The oath warns that the testimony is a serious matter and that failing to be truthful has consequences.
The invocation of God reflects the traditional view that lying has consequences beyond legal bounds. The old-fashioned belief is that lying is wrong morally.

So far, so good. He added,

My generation believed and accepted a person’s word was a bond.

Indeed. And it still should be; although far too often today it is not.

Then he told this story:

I once accepted an oral offer to buy my Connecticut home and minutes later received a higher bid. I turned down the higher offer, though I was legally free to accept it since nothing had been agreed to in writing. Years later my buyer told someone we both knew he was surprised I hadn’t taken the higher bid. But I never considered walking away from the deal.

Vincent is more generous than me, apparently. I would have been insulted by the surprise. Why would the buyer have expected something different from me?

My word is, indeed, my bond. Expressing surprise at having done a right thing only provides a pathway for continuing to be surprised by leaving doing a right thing not the normal state, leaving being trustworthy not the normal state.

Now We Know

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Recall that House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R, KY) subpoenaed the FBI for an FD-1023 form that is supposed to contain information concerning a potential criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Joe Biden (D) and a foreign national relating to the exchange of money for policy decisions. The subpoena also required the FBI to advise the committee concerning what it did to investigate these allegations.

Both Comer and Senator Chuck Grassley (R, IA), who also wants the document and information so he can run his own investigation (however limited by being in the minority party in the Senate) into the doings of Joe Biden and his family, were confident of the document’s existence, but since their position was based on a so far unidentified whistleblower’s claim, there were doubts about the form’s actual existence.

When the subpoena’s deadline went by without the FBI’s producing either the document or the information, FBI Director Chris Wray wrote a letter to Comey explaining his refusal to produce them. That refusal, despite Wray’s standard “neither confirm nor deny” mantra, now confirms the document’s existence and emphasizes the importance of its production, along with what the FBI did—or didn’t—do about it to the Oversight Committee. Wray wrote a number of things in his letter, but one stands out.

[Y]our request for a single FD-1023 report that you say includes a “precise description” of an “alleged criminal scheme” risks the harms that our confidentiality rules protect against[.]

There are a couple of things about that standout. One is Wray’s naked insubordination in this. FBI “rules” do not supersede the House’s constitutional authority to conduct oversight of the Executive Branch and of Executive Branch agencies. Last I looked, the FBI was an Executive Branch agency. Wray knows full well that his agency’s “rules” are subordinate to that constitutional mandate.

The other thing is this: to the extent that producing the FD-1023 and its activities pursuant to it puts at risk the FBI’s needs for confidentiality regarding its sources and methods and any investigations the FBI may or may not have in progress—and the concerns themselves are valid—the form can be produced to Committee members in a SCIF in the House. The House already has a SCIF; that’s where classified intelligence documents get viewed by specified House members. Wray is fully aware of this, too; his refusal to produce the document and related information altogether rather than in the House’s SCIF is disingenuous at best.

That raises a question in my pea brain: who sent Wray? Who does he work for?

He Told the Truth

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And it’s a shameful truth for what passes for journalism in our nation.

CNN President Chris Licht defended his news outlet’s hosting a Donald Trump town hall and the job Kaitlan Collins did moderating it.

Kaitlan pressed him again and again and made news[.]
Made a lot of news, that is our job.

No, a news outlet’s job is to report the news, not to make it. That’s how far the American journalism guild has sunk. A symptom of how deeply into the cesspool it’s gone is that Licht is completely oblivious to the nature of the truth he revealed.

Cowardice

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And yet another reason to not buy any Anheuser-Busch beer.

Anheuser-Busch…sent a letter to jittery distributors telling them it had cut ties with the firm responsible for the concept that has led to Bud Light sales cratering since Mulvaney last month posted a video on TikTok touting the best-selling beer in the country, multiple sources said.
The Belgian-based conglomerate said the beer can at the center of the firestorm, which features Mulvaney’s face, was not produced by Anheuser-Busch or in any of its facilities, several distributors told The [New York] Post.

To an extent, the Bud Light producer’s managers are right. John Skeffington, family-owned Skeff Distributing CEO:

The single can was produced by a third-party ad agency, not Anheuser-Busch.

However. Anheuser-Busch’s managers have final approval of its ad agencies’ advertisement campaigns, whether or not the campaigns then are produced in house or by third-parties. A-B’s managers already have placed “on leave” Bud Light’s Marketing VP, Alissa Heinerscheid, and A-B’s Group Vice President for Marketing, Daniel Blake, over their failure to exercise their control over advertising done in Bud Light’s name.

Even if the unidentified-by-A-B “third-party ad agency” had produced and released the advertising move without that prior approval, A-B’s managers had after the fact approval/disapproval, and those worthies chose not to speak up at all. If they actually disapproved of the ad, they would have blocked it in the first place, or immediately after the fact spoken against it.

Only in the aftermath of the hooraw that’s threatening company sales, are those managers, from A-B CEO Michel Doukeris on down, speaking at all, and they’re still refusing to acknowledge straightforwardly their mistake, and they’re still refusing to say what they’re going to do to not repeat their mistake in future. They’ve only issued weasel-worded remarks that don’t even pretend to address the matter in any serious way.

Their latest move, now, is to insist “twarn’t us” and blame an anonymous “third-party” agency and throw it under the bus.

They still won’t accept their own responsibility for the fiasco.

Their company’s products still are not worth our purchase money.

In Which Riley Gaines is Right

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Riley Gaines thinks the only way left for women to protect their sports and their sports programs, to go back to being able to compete on even ground, is to boycott competitions in which a trans athlete(s) is competing, and to be joined by their coaches in the boycott.

We have to have girls who, when the whistle blows, they don’t run, they don’t swim. They stand up on the block and they don’t go[.]
…
I think this will get worse before it gets better. How many girls have to be injured playing against a male, how many girls have to lose out on scholarships and trophies and titles? How many girls have to feel violated in the locker room?

Progressive-Democrat House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY) gives the lie to Party’s and its Leftist supporters’ “argument” against barring trans athletes from women’s sports with his smear against MAGA (Make America Great Again) and Republicans, using those terms as some sort of condemnation:

MAGA Republicans are trying to sensationalize an issue that doesn’t really exist in the way that they are falsely portraying[.]

He deepens his lie by claiming that the problem with biological men competing in women’s sports isn’t a problem.

Trans athletes and their Progressive-Democratic Party supporters could make a better case, or at least an honest one, by arguing, under Title IX, for requiring sports programs already receiving Federal money (which is to say, receiving the tax dollars remitted to the Federal government by us citizens, and then transferred to those programs) and which already have separate men’s and women’s sports programs to have, also, substantially equally funded and supported trans athlete sports programs.

The better solution, and one which likely would have broad bipartisan support (depending on the actual details), would be to amend Title IX, which already mandates program separation based on biological sex, to explicitly include a third separation, trans.