Tag Archives: ethics

Shades

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US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley has new ambassadorial digs, and those digs have new curtains.  The rent for the digs is 58 large each month, and the curtains were almost $53k.  If you think those numbers are outlandish for some office space and window coverings, you’re right.

Then we get The New York Times castigating her for spending that kind of taxpayer money.  Never mind that the NYT carefully buried some key facts regarding these expenses.  Facts like it being the Obama administration that committed to the rent and that bought the curtains; Haley had no say in the matter. Facts like the rent in particular, to Obama’s credit, being much lower than other administrations have spent on their UN ambassador’s digs.

Jeez.  At least the NYT‘s sister tabloids, National Enquirer, Globe, Star, et al., have some entertainment value.

Book or Smear?

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Bob Woodward wrote a book about President Donald Trump, and his “on-the-record” sources are coming out of the…woodwork…to deny they said the things Woodward claims they said or that they were misrepresented in misleading ways (redundancy deliberate).

I have to ask: does Woodward have any “on the record” sources about whom he hasn’t seemed to have lied? He claims to have tapes and transcripts of those conversations and of his claimed conversations with anonymous “sources.”

Regarding the latter, he should explain why we should believe anonymous sources who’ve demonstrated their dishonesty by speaking against their terms of employment if not their oaths of office.

Publish the tapes and transcripts, or there’s no reason to believe they exist.  If they don’t exist, there’s no reason to believe those “on the record” sources were honestly cited or that those anonymous “sources” actually exist.

Sadly, even the Wall Street Journal‘s author of the piece at the link, Rebecca Ballhaus, has chosen to go along with Woodward’s game.  Citing a statement by Rob Porter in which he said he was struck by the selective and often misleading portrait in the book, she wrote,

Mr Porter didn’t dispute any specific elements….

Gary Cohn said in a separate statement that that the book does not accurate[ly] portray my experience at the White House.  Ballhaus again:

He, too, didn’t dispute any specific anecdotes.

This is a cynically misleading over-parsing of their statements, carefully designed to leave the impression that Woodward’s claims are true, just because the two men chose not to enumerate and explicitly deny every jot and tittle of Woodward’s missive.

A Townhall Campaign Event

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This one in Navasota, Texas.  Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for Senator from Texas Beto O’Rourke is running against first-term incumbent Republican Ted Cruz, and O’Rourke had his townhall event at the VFW hall in Navasota.

This is what drew my eye to what would otherwise have been a rather ordinary campaign event.  VFW Post #4006 Commander Carl Dry:

[T]hey wanted to take the flags down, I didn’t only say no, I said hell no, you don’t take the flags off the wall. I can’t believe any American would ask us to do that and I don’t know why he wanted them down or what he was going to put up instead.

Yeah.  Why on earth would anyone claiming to want to represent Texans want to take American and Texas flags down from the VFW hall’s walls?

O’Rourke is making a habit of being contemptuous of our nation’s flag; now he objects to our State’s flag and those of the other States, too?  Just who does O’Rourke really represent?

Another Miss

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This time by The Wall Street Journal.  In an op-ed about the coward’s piece in The New York Times (if that individual actually exists, otherwise it’s the cowardice of the NYT editorial staff), the WSJ closed with this remark.

The tragedy of this Presidency is that his rants and insults—even toward people who work for him—threaten to overwhelm his policy achievements.

This is true only because the persons of the press choose to enable that. It’s their conscious editorial choice to give emphasis to President Donald Trump’s rants and insults over his policy efforts and achievements. It’s their carefully deliberated editorial choice to give primacy to form over substance.

Unitary Executive

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Senator Ben Sasse (R, NE), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee that held hearings last week on Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, had an op-ed in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal that opened with this.

Brett Kavanaugh has been accused of hating women, hating children, hating clean air, wanting dirty water. He’s been declared an existential threat to the nation.

He’s also accused of favoring a unitary Executive and thereby ceding dangerously broad power to the President.

What the accusers carefully ignore is that it’s Congress that has so broadly expanded the power of a unitary Executive, while eliding the fact that our Constitution’s Article II created the unitary Executive in the first place.  It is, after all, Congress that has created all of the Agencies and Cabinet Departments that are in the Executive Branch.  It is Congress that has delegated all the power to those facilities by ceding to them rule-making authority.  All the Executive can do is hire and fire the facilities’ management teams–the only check he has on an overreaching Congress and its abuse of power.