Tag Archives: ethics

Hysteria

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FBI Director James Comey was fired by President Donald Trump, and the Left is waxing hysterical over it.  Never mind that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein (only just confirmed after another example of Progressive-Democratic Party obstructionism in the Senate) laid out the case for Comey’s inability to function as the FBI’s leader.  Rosenstein’s memo can be read here as part of the document chain culminating in Trump’s letter to Comey.  Via Richard Fernandez:

Keith Ellison tweeted “we are witnessing a Consitutional [sic] crisis unfold before our very eyes.”

No.  A Constitutional crisis occurred when President Andrew Jackson ignored the Supreme Court with is “Indian Relocation Project.”  A Constitutional crisis occurred when Franklin Roosevelt rounded up vast numbers of Americans of heritages of which he disapproved and moved them onto “reservations.”  A Constitutional crisis occurred in President Richard Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre.  A President firing an Executive Branch official in whom he’s lost confidence is ordinary business.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY):

Were these investigations getting too close to home for the president?

America depends on you [Rosenstein] to restore faith in our criminal justice system, which is going to be badly shattered after the administration’s actions today.

And (via the link just above):

Other Democrats attributed sinister motives to Comey’s firing, with two Senators, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Patrick Leahy of Vermont, describing it in press statements as “Nixonian.” Another Democratic senator, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, said the firing “is disturbingly reminiscent of the Saturday Night Massacre during the Watergate scandal and the national turmoil that it caused,” later adding “We are careening ever closer to a Constitutional crisis.”

And

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said the firing “raises the ghosts of some of the worst Executive Branch abuses”

The shrillness of those three remarks speaks for itself.

These squawks come on the relative heels of some other comments by Progressive-Democrats.  Schumer on the occasion of Comey’s October 2016 reopening of the FBI’s investigation of then-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s email escapades:

I do not have confidence in [Comey] any longer[.]

And Pelosi:

Maybe he’s not in the right job[.]

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D, CA), then Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, on the same occasion:

The FBI has a history of extreme caution near Election Day so as not to influence the results. Today’s break from that tradition is appalling.

Harry Reid (D, NV), ex-Senate Majority/Minority Leader, in December after the election results had settled in:

I think he should be investigated by the Senate. I think he should be investigated by other agencies in the government, including the security agencies[.]

In a non-Nixonian comparison, Slate (same link) cited Reid as making this one:

Reid went as far as to call Comey the “new J Edgar Hoover,” saying he had the information of Russian involvement in the election and kept it from the American public.

This is sad because this manufactured hysteria is all the Progressive-Democratic Party has left.  It’s unfortunate, too, because with this being all the Party has left, Progressive-Democrats cannot function as an effective party in the two-party system our Republic needs.

Is Satire

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…a proper style for what’s claimed to be a serious, scholarly journal?  Here, via The Wall Street Journal, is the abstract of Teresa Lloro-Bidart’s When ‘Angelino’ squirrels don’t eat nuts: a feminist posthumanist politics of consumption across southern California [sic] in the journal Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography [also sic]:

Eastern fox squirrels (Sciurus niger), reddish-brown tree squirrels native to the eastern and southeastern United States, were introduced to and now thrive in suburban/urban California. As a result, many residents in the greater Los Angeles region are grappling with living amongst tree squirrels, particularly because the state’s native western gray squirrel (Sciurus griseus) is less tolerant of human beings and, as a result, has historically been absent from most sections of the greater Los Angeles area. ‘Easties,’ as they are colloquially referred to in the popular press, are willing to feed on trash and have an ‘appetite for everything.’ Given that the shift in tree squirrel demographics is a relatively recent phenomenon, this case presents a unique opportunity to question and re-theorize the ontological given of ‘otherness’ that manifests, in part, through a politics whereby animal food choices ‘[come] to stand in for both compliance and resistance to the dominant forces in [human] culture’. I, therefore, juxtapose feminist posthumanist theories and feminist food studies scholarship to demonstrate how eastern fox squirrels are subjected to gendered, racialized, and speciesist thinking in the popular news media as a result of their feeding/eating practices, their unique and unfixed spatial arrangements in the greater Los Angeles region, and the western, modernist human frame through which humans interpret these actions. I conclude by drawing out the implications of this research for the fields of animal geography and feminist geography.

Unfortunately, the full article is behind a paywall, but the abstract is sufficient unto the day.  And it raises a question: how much of the…research…behind this piece was done with the proceeds of a Federal grant to California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, where Lloro-Bidart is an Assistant Professor in the Liberal Studies Department?  Is our tax money funding satire, now?  If so, Congress does need, indeed, need to revisit funding for the NSF and similar entities.

Do Big Things Quietly

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Which is not the same as doing them secretively.  Just don’t bruit about any wonderfulness about you for doing them.  Let the little things you do do your talking for you.

Morally, do the little things quietly (but not secretively), also; let your efforts speak for themselves.  I’m writing here, though, about practical politics, and two examples illustrate the matter: Obamacare and efforts at managing climate change.

Recall that Obamacare was an effort to redo a sixth of our economy in Government’s name, for our own good: a big thing.  It also was highly controversial, the Democrats made a big deal out of how wonderful they were for doing this.  And it was, and is, universally hated.  Except for the Republicans’ efforts here.  Undoing Obamacare is as big a deal as doing it, and the Republicans are making a big deal out of how wonderful they are for working to undo it.  And their efforts are not at all popular, either.

Notice: both parties spent/are spending as much, if not more, energy on their virtue signaling as they did/are on the actual effort.  The outcomes were disasters for the Democrats in Congress, the White House, and in state and local governments.

Look, too, at climate change.  Dawn Wilson, a purchaser and customer relations manager (currently between jobs) in Roseville, MI, had some thoughts.

Of Clinton having a campaign office here—only to skip visiting the struggling working-class manufacturing town and send in Hollywood surrogates Ted Danson and his wife Mary Steenburgen, who scolded voters about climate change—she is sardonic:

Your message and your optics are everything when you are trying to persuade people to buy something from you or vote for you. Does this look like somewhere that needs to be schooled on climate change?

Never mind that what mattered to the folks in Rosemont, and everywhere else in the US throughout the failed Obama recovery, was the immediacy of their economic well-being, whether they would be able to keep their job—Wilson was fired after 17 years in her job—or having lost their job, whether they would be able to get another.  After all, at the time of the election campaigns throughout last year, the average time out of work, for those who hadn’t given up altogether, still was measured in severals of months, not the few weeks that’s typical of a normal recovery.

Yet the Democrats made lots of noise about their importance to preventing future climate problem of questionable likelihood and of no immediacy in the minds of voters, and made little noise at all—and so no effort at all, at least perceptually, about solving that today problem of voters.

As the Washington Examiner put it,

For the Clinton campaign to send Hollywood liberals here in the closing days of the race to preach about climate change was tone deaf on a Guinness record-level.

Like a shoe maker says: just do it.

Handling Classified

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FBI Director James Comey had this about Huma Abedin and her role in the ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (D) classified email scandal:

Somehow, her [Clinton’s] emails were being forwarded to Anthony Weiner, including classified information.  His then-spouse, Huma Abedin, appears to have had a regular practice of forwarding emails to him for him to print out for her, so she could deliver them to the secretary of state.

Comey justified his lack of action with this:

We didn’t have any indication that she had a sense of what she was doing was in violation of the law[.]

There is, however, no requirement for mens rea under the relevant law; if nothing else Abedin’s actions fit the law’s gross negligence felony charactistic.

With such a bold, declarative statement about what Abedin was doing, then, I have to wonder why there’s been no indictment and subsequent prosecution.

Probably for the same reason he declined to bring a case against Clinton after having said her actions were excessively careless: it’s not politically expedient.

Military Academies as Professional Sports Farm Teams

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Or not.  Secretary of Defense James Mattis has reversed an Obama administration late 2016 move that

allowed academy students with exceptional sports talent to bypass active-duty and serve out their time in the military reserves to play in professional leagues.

Dana White, Pentagon spokesman, on the matter:

Our military academies exist to develop future officers who enhance the readiness and the lethality of our military services.  Graduates enjoy the extraordinary benefit of a military academy education at taxpayer expense.

Unfortunately, the new policy still lets these Academy-trained officers to apply for a waiver after just two years on active duty.  An Academy grad, like ROTC grads, normally have rather longer commitments.  An Air Force Academy graduate, for instance, must on entering the Academy

accept an appointment and serve as a commissioned officer in the Air Force for at least eight years after graduation, five of which must be active duty and the remainder can be served as inactive reserve. You will become eligible to request a separation from the Air Force after five years of service.

Mattis’ move is a good start, but Academy graduates should serve their full commitment, not just two years of it.

Having honored their commitment, only then should they be able to move on. Special treatment is uncalled for.

You’d have thought that to be obvious.