Category Archives: ethics

Distractions

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Recall the hoo-raw the NLMSM is raising because President Donald Trump, in a brief press opportunity, used a dated map of Hurricane Dorian’s path.  The map also had been modified with a hand-drawn additional line that forecast Dorian’s progress into lower Alabama.

Howard Kurtz, Fox News‘ journalism critic, was on the case Friday, and as he often does, he exaggerated some and he missed some.

The exaggeration:

Now there’s obviously a legitimate story here. Who wielded the now-infamous Sharpie?

You bet there is. For grocery store tabloids like National Enquirer, Globe, Star.

The miss:

…the constant back-and-forth over a black squiggle feels like a giant distraction.

Sadly, Kurtz should know better than this, being a maven of the industry, and all. The only ones distracted are he and his fellow pseudo-journalists who’ve made the conscious, deliberate editorial decision to obsess over this, to distract themselves with this non-story.

The rest of us have better things to do, and better focus with which to deal with them.

Brexit and Sovereignty

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This is amazing.  And an utter betrayal.

Senior MPs opposing a no-deal Brexit sought assurances from the EU that their bid for a three-month delay would be granted, it has emerged.
European leaders were sounded out before MPs, including the “rebel alliance,” passed a bill…forcing Boris Johnson to ask for an extension.

For the EU to participate in such scruffy deal would seem to be a naked interference in sovereign British domestic politics.

Except that….

On the one hand, this is those MPs selling out British sovereignty.

On the other, this is the European Union, by its ready participation in the sordid affair, telling the British citizens that their nation is not sovereign; it is subordinate to the European Union: Great Britain has no domestic politics that are beyond the reach of Brussels—which is to say Great Britain has no domestic politics of its own.

As Conservative MP and former minister David Jones has it:

Senior EU figures gave private assurances to British MPs…. This confirms the level of EU interference in our internal affairs and makes the need for Brexit all the more pressing.

This collaboration [sic] arguably invalidates the bill just passed. Or would in an honest government and court system, even one like the Brits’ where the courts can be overruled at the whim of a Parliament like today’s mendacious one.

Trust

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Our individual liberty—and liberties—depend on a number of things: sovereignty of us citizens over our government; understanding that our rights and duties are inherent in us as gifts from our Creator and not grants from that government; the tools with which to enforce those rights and duties—free speech and religion, keeping and bearing arms, among others.  And an ability to trust one another.

Laura Ingraham addressed this peripherally.

The Second Amendment be damned. You see liberals don’t really trust regular people. They prefer a system where a small set of elites in Washington make decisions for everybody else. Including on issues of self-defense.

And

Law abiding gun owners are invariably seen as suspicious. Their motives untrustworthy.

This is yet another example of the Left’s contempt for ordinary Americans.

This is yet another example of their projection: the people of the Left don’t trust themselves. Or each other.

This lack of trust is as much a threat to our nation’s commitment to individual liberty, personal responsibility, self-reliance as is the Left’s overt attacks on our right to keep and bear Arms and the rest of our Bill of Rights.

Comey’s “Righteousness”

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The DoJ IG report on fired FBI Director James Comey’s…peccadillos has been out for a few days.  The Wall Street Journal‘s Editors have a good commentary on the report and on Comey.

IG Michael Horowitz didn’t think there was enough to support criminal charges, but the damage done by Comey in

treating his memos as personal documents rather than official FBI records, improperly storing them at home, failing to inform the bureau he had them, or leaking them to the press, Mr Comey ignored FBI and Justice protocols and broke his employment agreement[]

does seem to warrant considerable civil action against and sanction of the man who has so disgraced the FBI.

Indeed, a junior sailor had his career destroyed and his life heavily damaged over a simple photograph innocently/ignorantly taken in a wrong location.

Surely, Comey, who is no junior agent and who behaved with planned deliberateness and careful rule-breaking, can be required to forfeit his government pension.

“Journalists,” Redux

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Recall the kerfuffle over an idle tweet in which a George Washington University Associate Professor, in a mildly snarky tweet, likened New York Times Precious Columnist Bret Stephens to a bedbug.  The Prof was riffing off a headline announcing that the NYT building was infested with bedbugs.

Stephens chose to take offense, and not only did he email the Prof about it, he CCed the Prof’s Provost in a clear attempt to intimidate the professor into silence.  Or into something.  In the meantime, Stephens has earned for himself a new nickname: #BedbugBret.

But there’s something far more important here, and it goes back to the (lack of) integrity in the journalistic industry.

The Prof makes a closely related best in his op-ed in Esquire:

Bret Stephens seems to think that his social status should render him immune from criticism from people like me. …
Stephens…reached out believing my university would chastise me for provoking the ire of a writer at The New York Times. That’s an abuse of his social station.

But it’s much more than an abuse of station—a station that does not exist, properly, in the United States of America, where all and each of us are equal under law and before God.

This is an abuse of the industry of what used to be journalism.  This is a naked claim that journalism and journalists are too high and mighty for the petty rules of ordinary Americans, and we commoners have no business—no right—to tease, much less criticize, any member of the aristocracy of the press, our Betters.

The professor’s university also responded, directly to Stephens:

Stephens, though, as far as I can determine, has not reached out to the Provost or otherwise responded to his invitation to face the objects of his contempt on their turf. He seems willing only to face a single man in the comfort and safety of his own.

Stephens exemplifies the fundamental dishonesty of the press, and of the NYT in particular.  And, apparently, the cowardice of the bullying industry.