Category Archives: ethics

Should We Forgive Barry Bonds?

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That’s the lead-off question The Free Press asked in its Wednesday piece. The article then just beat around the bush on the matter while spilling endless pixels on the marketability of Bonds memorabilia and those of other disgraced baseball players, and on other baseball players alleged (with greater or lesser amounts of supporting data) to have cheated. But Bonds did cheat—he used performance enhancing drugs.

So: should we forgive Barry Bonds? Of course; we should have done so a long time ago. But that doesn’t mean we should forget his cheating. That cheating was of a magnitude—increasing, for instance the number of hits and the number of homeruns he would have gotten absence his PED use—that he has been, and rightly should continue to be, barred from baseball’s Hall of Fame. The stats he accrued from his PED use overshadowed other, honest, players and deprived them of their leading stats.

That some other players similarly cheated, or seriously violated other baseball rules (viz., betting on baseball games) in no way absolves Bonds. The existence of those other cheats and baseball’s spotty record regarding them only point up baseball’s atrociously inconsistent enforcement of its own rules.

And: just to drive home the point, forgiving is not the same as forgetting, and it’s long past time to stop conflating the two.

Wrong Answer

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This time it’s Jason Riley, of The Wall Street Journal, who’s missing the street for the potholes. He wrote in his Tuesday op-ed,

The latest results from the National Assessment of Education Progress were released earlier this month, and they weren’t pretty. High-school seniors recorded the worst reading scores since 1992, and math scores were the lowest since the current test began two decades ago. Elementary-school students have also lost ground. Just 31% of eighth-graders scored at or above the proficient level on the science assessment.

And,

The ramifications extend far beyond our borders. The Program for International Student Assessment exam is a global assessment of 15-year-old pupils. In 2018 only 8% of US test-takers scored in the top tier in mathematics, compared with 15% in Canada, 18% in Japan, and 29% in Hong Kong. Today’s students will populate tomorrow’s labor force, and employers who rely on workers with math, science, and engineering backgrounds have been complaining for decades that too many Americans are uninterested or ill-prepared to fill these jobs.

 

But then he wrote,

Which brings us back to Mr Trump, who wants to make it harder for US companies to hire foreign nationals. On Friday the president announced that he was imposing a new $100,000 fee on applicants for H-1B visas, designated for skilled migrants who disproportionately specialize in science, technology and math occupations.

It’s true enough that we benefit from suitably skilled foreigners who enter our nation legally—those immigrants and Riley’s “migrants.” But the problem, which seems to have blown right by him, even as he wrote it, is identified by those employers…complaining for decades that too many Americans are uninterested or ill-prepared to fill these jobs.

The answer to the problem is not making it easy for qualified immigrants to enter our nation legally, even as that helps at the margins. The answer is to fix our education system. That must begin with eliminating, root and branch, the rent- and fee-seeking teachers unions who collect massive dues and lobby (too successfully) for government money while they work just as assiduously to block local, State, and Federal efforts to improve the public school systems those unions hold in thrall. An early move in this beginning step would be to recognize that teachers and their unions who work for public schools are public servants and public service unions just as are the civil servants and their unions working for any other arm of government, and bar them from striking, just as many civil servant unions are barred.

Our education system would be further improved by getting those unions and their hip-pocket politicians at the various levels of government out of the way of voucher and charter schools and home schooling, accepting that competition works toward product improvement in education as well as it does in industry.

At that point, the cherry on top would be to have local, State, and Federal funding not go directly to the schools, but instead follow the student to the school or home to which he transfers, or with which he stays after having transferred, for use then by the school or parent receiving the student.

The Party that Invented Political Weaponization

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Progressive-Democratic Party politicians have been bleating for most of this year about the alleged weaponization of the Department of Justice. However, Party invented that weaponization with ex-President Barack Obama’s DoJ and his Attorney General Eric Holder, who swore fealty to Obama with his “I’m his wingman” oath, and then proceeded to use his AG office to go after us American citizens for daring to disagree with Obama’s pen and phone activities. Obama expanded that weaponization with his use of the IRS to go after Conservative nonprofit political organizations.

Biden expanded, while particularizing, that Party weaponization with his DoJ and its subordinate FBI categorizing concerned mothers as domestic terrorists and traditional Catholics as far-right extremists that bore watching. He and his followers engaged in explicit, politically motivated prosecutions of Trump over the riots at the Capitol and over his concerns about election integrity in the aftermath of the 2020 election.

Trump has been attacking political opponents during his second term? Or is he going after wrong-doers who happen to be, also, in the other party?

Whatever those answers might be, here’s Party’s House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D) promising more, explicitly more, Party weaponization with promised attacks, not just on Trump, but on anybody “doing the bidding of the Trump administration.”

One thing to understand as people who are flirting with the Trump administration, or doing the bidding of the Trump administration, or engaging in the “pay to play schemes” of the Trump administration, the statute of limitations is five years…there will still be accountability to be had. And that process begins now, but it will not be complete until there is an independent Department of Justice and certainly an independent House of Representatives in Democratic hands.

In Democratic hands—my irony meter pegged hard.

This is the level of integrity Party has on offer for 2026, 2028, and in the out years.

Useless Argument

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Amid the hue and cry over Jimmy Kimmel’s TV show being put on hiatus over his lies about Charlie Kirk and his murderer—some saying the government shouldn’t be in the business of pressuring news outlets and others saying Kimmel got what he deserved—there is this argument, as articulated by Ben Shapiro among others:

But I do not want the FCC in the business of telling local affiliates that their licenses will be removed if they broadcast material that the FCC deems to be false. Why? Because one day the shoe will be on the other foot.

What Shapiro, et al., are eliding, though, is that the shoe has been on the other foot since at least the 2016 Presidential campaign season. That’s when The New York Times announced in a front page article that its news room would no longer attempt balanced coverage; it was so dismayed over then-Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump that its news room would pick a side and openly bias its supposedly objective news writing to favor whoever the Progressive-Democratic Party candidate might be.

Not so long later, a broadcast news outlet announced that there were not two sides to every story, and it began nakedly favoring the Left’s side.

The bias became blatant when the Progressive-Democrat-run Executive Branch began pressuring—threatening—social media outlets if they didn’t start suppressing Conservative commentary.

The bias became overt election interference when CNN participated in the circularly created Russian interference to favor Trump’s election hoax by publishing the “intelligence experts'” letter.

This then was followed by all news outlets (save The New York Post) spiking all “reporting” on the Hunter Biden laptop.

As a result of the Post breaking that story anyway, social media blocked it from posting on the social media outlets.

Then we had Progressive-Democratic Party Congressmen, of whom California’s Adam Schiff is one of the more infamous examples, overtly lying about then-President Donald Trump (R)’s being in cahoots with Russia. Schiff expanded on this with his lies about having the intelligence reports (from the same intelligence community of the letter infamy) to prove it.

I’ll elide the argument that CEOs who fold under mere pressure are unfit for their positions. That the Left and Party politicians have a long and hoary prior history of this pressure and overt action against free speech is no excuse for Republicans to do the same. Spare me, though, the foolishness that one day the shoe will be on the other foot. It already has been, for far too long.

Note: As I write this post (22 September 2025) ABC has taken the position to restore Kimmel to his show and airtime with effect 23 September 2025.

Leaks

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Leading off a Wall Street Journal article alleging Pentagon internal lawyers’ concerns regarding the Trump administration’s targeting of drug boats in international Caribbean Sea waters, there’s this:

Some military lawyers and other Defense Department officials are raising concerns about the legal implications of President Trump’s expanding military campaign against Latin American-based drug cartels, according to people with knowledge of the discussions.

Leave aside the worries about the legality of destroying boats and the crews on them that are targeting American citizens with those poisons. Of course, there’s nothing illegal about destroying those attacks in progress.

The larger question is this: who are those people with knowledge? They’re speaking without authorization, discussing in public matters of national security, and they’re doing so in direct violation of their terms of employment by the government, and depending on who they are, perhaps in violation of their oaths of office.

Some defense officials and career military lawyers have provided written and verbal legal opinions to decision makers inside the Pentagon, but believe they are being ignored or deliberately sidelined, according to one of the people.

This is pretty dispositive—in the WSJ‘s own words—of these people’s deliberate violation of their employment parameters. And all because these wonders actually think they run the show, and are quite cross that they’re not being heeded on the spot.

These are people—these are leakers—who need to be identified and fired for cause.