ethics

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I’m John McCain, and I Approved These Lies

September 12, 2008 | Permalink

As of right now, the McCain campaign is nothing more than a firehose of lies. Period.

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and countless others from both parties have spoken highly of John McCain, praising his honor and dignity.  I’ll take it on faith that McCain may have once possessed those qualities… but not anymore.  There is not a shred of honor in how the McCain campaign is being conducted.  He may have handed off the reins to subordinates, but it’s his name on the door.  His staff and his campaign are his responsibility.

John McCain is a corrupt, unprincipled, ethically bankrupt old man.  His personal judgment is abominably bad.  And he is a liar.


Betraying My Blogging Principles

June 26, 2008 | Permalink

Well, sort of betraying them. I know, I know… you’re thinking, “Hold on, this blog has principles?” Don’t be alarmed. We can have fun anyway.

In this blog, I aim to avoid what used to be known as player hating (I’d spell it in the street dialect form, e.g., playa-hatin’, but who am I kidding). I say “used to,” because I suspect the term has passed out of fashion; unfortunately I don’t know what expression may have replaced it. The point is, a fundamental characteristic of our National Miscourse™ is the cheap, lazy rhetorical default of saying that everything sucks. For examples of this, I would reference the vast majority of the blogosphere. Therefore, I strive to remain solidly in the remaining minority of bloggers by devoting a large proportion of my writing to things I want to praise; and when I must indict, always including a thorough reasoning for my disapproval.

Dickipedia-logoKind of a lengthy preface for link-blogging Dickipedia, a site that made me laugh pretty hard when I found it this morning. It’s a funnier (IMO) offshoot of the comedic news site 23/6, and, it should be noted, not an actual wiki but a parody of one.

I’m not actually issuing the scorn, I’m just linking to it. I admit may be cutting it pretty fine, but Dickipedia is certainly a few cuts above mere player hating: it simultaneously parodies Wikipedia while identifying prominent individuals as the dicks they are with wit and verve. I don’t have a problem with the inclusion of anyone profiled on the site, but this may be because I apparently share the site owners’ politics. I’ll excerpt a non-partisan example just to be on the inclusive side:

clemensWilliam Roger Clemens (born August 4, 1962, in Dayton, Ohio), is a starting pitcher for the New York Yankees, one of the preeminent pitchers in Major League Baseball history, an alleged user of steroids and human growth hormone, and a dick.

Clemens has won seven Cy Young Awards. He has also won two World Series championships, one for each banned substance he is alleged to have taken during the same two years he “won” the rings.

Clemens throws and bats right-handed. It is unknown whether he banned-substance-abuses left-buttocked or right-buttocked. His nickname is “the Rocket,” though this is not thought to be connected to the fact that his personal strength coach Brian McNamee, as the Mitchell Report put it, “injected Clemens approximately four times in the buttocks.”

Enjoy the dicks, everyone!


C&B Smackdown: Justice vs. Compassion

June 11, 2008 | 5 comments

So I was goofing off and taking silly quizzes on the web when suddenly I came across a question that wasn’t so silly. It went a little something like this:

If you had to make an important decision about something that would affect others, which of these factors would you consider most strongly?

  • Justice
  • Compassion
  • Practicality
  • Self-interest

I sat here for about 5 whole minutes mentally kicking this one around. I immediately eliminated Self-interest – it’s a perfectly worthwhile answer, but given that my judgment is going to carry repercussions for many others it automatically feels least important to me. In the broader scheme of things I’m not sure that this tendency is such a plus; it’s often been suggested to me that I am by nature too unselfish for my own good… but I digress.

justice vs. compassion fight posterAfter another minute or two I eliminated Practicality. A course of action, I reasoned, shouldn’t be considered more right because it’s the easiest or most practical way to go. Here again, I like my decision but readily admit it as evidence that I’m a lousy capitalist.

I finally settled on Compassion, mainly because I’m a big fan of it. If you’re surprised, hear me out.

Justice seems like the obvious answer. Everyone loves Justice, me included, but the problem is that no two people’s notions of Justice are quite the same. For only one example, If you’re deciding what to do with a confessed murderer, the victim’s family is most likely going to have a different idea of justice than the murderer’s mother would have. This, of course, is a single specific example, not necessarily correlative to the hypothetical decision I’d be making.
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Mukasey: Don’t Know Much About Waterboarding

January 30, 2008 | 3 comments

Memo to Sen. Dianne Feinstein: thanks a whole big bundle.

Too well I recall the morning last November when I read your stated intention to vote in favor of confirming Michael Mukasey as U.S. Attorney General. It made what would have been a pleasant breakfast at a local café go down quite a bit less easily. I narrowly averted embarrassment, because your characterizations of Judge Mukasey as independent-minded and repulsed by the idea of torture were such stuff as spit-takes are made on. I couldn’t believe that you, my home state’s senior senator, had watched the same confirmation hearings as I had and not come away similarly disgusted at Mukasey’s craven dodging of the torture issue.

Your op-ed included a desire to see Judge Mukasey come before the senate panel again to have another chat about the whole Dick Cheney/Jack Bauer-iziation of American justice thing. Well, who’s back on the Hill today but your guy Mike the AG, front and center, talking waterboarding and destroyed CIA interrogation tapes. You must’ve been geeked, armed with a bucket of popcorn and ready to see The Muke torque up and bring the outrage, huh?

There are times when a mere “I told you so” doesn’t seem to cover it.
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We’ve Come a Long Way, Baby

October 23, 2007 | Permalink

Over at Balkinization, Brian Tamahana has shared a moment of sickening clarity:

I had lunch today with a prominent German Constitutional scholar who was flabbergasted about something that I could not adequately explain.

He asked me how the candidate to become the top legal official of the U.S. government could say that he does not know whether water-boarding constitutes “torture” (as Judge Mukasey stated yesterday in his confirmation hearings). My colleague insisted that in Germany any person who uttered such a statement would be finished. He found it shocking that a person could say this in America and still become our Attorney General.

At first I was surprised at his genuine disbelief; and then I felt a bit ashamed that I did not also react with disbelief.

And yesterday at Slate, a piece Read the rest of this entry »


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