How Far Is Too Far?

Posted on January 16, 2018 by jilldennison under Free Press Issues, Political commentary

No president in modern times has escaped the criticism of the press. It is a fact of life that if the press are doing their jobs, they will inevitably frustrate and even anger the president from time to time. Most presidents, however, respect the Fourth Estate, realize that what they are doing is precisely what they are supposed to do, and try to work with them. Such is not the case with Donald Trump.

He has denigrated the legitimate press since long before he won the election, and has taken his press-bashing to new highs since taking office nearly a year ago. But last week, he crossed yet another line of propriety. His plan is to have a “Fake News Awards” presentation.

“I will be announcing THE MOST DISHONEST & CORRUPT MEDIA AWARDS OF THE YEAR on Monday at 5:00 o’clock. Subjects will cover Dishonesty & Bad Reporting in various categories from the Fake News Media. Stay tuned!” – 8:05 PM – Jan 2, 2018

Apparently something came up that delayed his plans, possibly his feud on Sunday with the Wall Street Journal …

“The Fake News Awards, those going to the most corrupt & biased of the Mainstream Media, will be presented to the losers on Wednesday, January 17th, rather than this coming Monday. The interest in, and importance of, these awards is far greater than anyone could have anticipated!” – 3:35 PM – 7 Jan 2018

Can you imagine President Obama, or even President Bush speaking in this manner? Now, obviously this is not only poor form and poor taste, but is so beneath the dignity of the Oval Office, the office of the president, that we must ask ourselves if his advisors were even consulted. Surely John Kelly could not have condoned this idiocy?

Even as far back as Thomas Jefferson, presidents have had complaints about the press. In fact, according to a February 17, 2017 Washington Post article …

“Thomas Jefferson was as irritated with newspaper coverage as any public figure of his era. For all the talk of media bias today, it can’t compare to the overt partisanship and personal attacks appearing in papers in our nation’s early years. But Jefferson also knew that our democracy could only flourish with a free press that would keep an eye on people in power and help protect our freedoms. He understood that press coverage comes and goes, but freedom of the press must endure.” – Ken Paulson, president of the Newseum Institute’s First Amendment Center

Trump, on the other hand, has criticized the legitimate media since the day he threw his hat in the ring in June 2015, and I don’t think a single day has passed that we have not had to hear his cries of “fake news”, “lying press”, and worse. He even went so far as to label the press “the enemy of the American people”. He has threatened on more than one occasion to ‘strengthen’ libel laws to keep the press from insulting him. And this would all be a big joke, except …

Some people actually believe him. He cavorts freely with Fox News and Breitbart, both homes of the conspiracy theorists, while shouting loudly about the ‘failing’ New York Times, and the ‘Amazon/Washington Post’. In October, he called for the revocation of NBC’s broadcast license. He has trod that fine line of trampling the constitutional right to a free press. His minions have, more than once, criticized the press, not for getting facts wrong, for that is extremely rare, but for failing to agree with their boss.

The purpose of the press is to keep the public informed and hold those who serve in public office accountable for their actions, accountable to We The People. Their job is not to be ‘yes-men’, always agreeing with the president. In my opinion, they have treated him more kindly than I would have, or than I have, for that matter.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), is a non-profit organization that promotes press freedom and defends the rights of journalists around the globe. They have responded to Trump’s ‘Fake News Awards’ with their own special awards …

From a January 8^th Press Release:

CPJ recognizes global Press Oppressors amid Trump’s fake news awards

Acknowledging world leaders who attack and restrict press

New York, January 8, 2018–As U.S. President Donald Trump announces his “Fake Media” awards, the Committee to Protect Journalists names its global Press Oppressors–world leaders who use rhetoric, legal action, and censorship to try to silence their critics. The list features leaders from China, Egypt, Myanmar, Poland, Russia, Turkey, and the United States who have gone out of their way to attack the press and undermine the norms that support freedom of the media at a time when a record number of journalists are being jailed for their work.

“It’s staggering to see the extent to which some world leaders are so fearful of their critics and the truth,” said CPJ Advocacy Director Courtney Radsch, from Washington, D.C. “At a time when the number of journalists in prison globally is at a record high the failure of President Donald Trump and other leaders to stand up for press freedom risks weakening democracy and human rights.”

The Global Press Oppressors list includes four categories as well as an award for the Overall Achievement in Undermining Global Press Freedom:

Most Thin-skinned

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey

Runner-Up: President Donald Trump, United States

Most Outrageous Use of Terror Laws Against the Press

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey

Runner-Up: President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Egypt

Tightest Grip on Media*

President Xi Jinping, China

Runner-Up: President Vladimir Putin, Russia

*This category excludes countries with no independent media, such as North Korea and Eritrea.

Biggest Backslider in Press Freedom

State Counselor and de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar

Runner-Up: President Andrzej Duda, Poland

Overall Achievement in Undermining Global Press Freedom

President Donald Trump, United States

Note to Editors: Copies of the Global Press Oppressors can be viewed at https://cpj.org/blog/2018/01/press-oppressor-awards-trump-fake-news-fakies.php

Are Trump’s “Fake News Awards” legal? For him, sure, because he has immunity from executive branch ethical standards. His staff, however, are a different matter. According to a number of experts, including former Office of Government Ethics director Walter Shaub, and Norm Eisen, former special counsel for ethics for President Barack Obama, if White House staff members were involved, they would be in violation of the executive branch’s Standards of Ethical Conduct.

I do not imagine that there will be any charges levelled at staff members, and I expect Trump’s little ceremony will be a fiasco that will be applauded by his 37% followers. What I would liketo see happen, what I think absolutely should happen, but won’t, is for the press to boycott Trump’s little ceremony. Let Fox and Breitbard cover it, and the legitimate media put up a wall of silence. That would deprive Trump and his little game of any sense of legitimacy, and perhaps he would get the message that We The People are sick and damned tired of him playing elementary school-type games and would like to have an adult in the White House.

I know it won’t happen, for all the news outlets depend on revenue, and “if it bleeds, it leads”, so we will no doubt see this silliness ad nauseam on Wednesday and for the rest of the week. And yes, I will likely succumb and write another post about it also. But beware, my friends, for this is just one more step in Trump’s attempt to oppress our free press by convincing his followers that the mainstream media are ‘dishonest’ and ‘lying’, as he has been telling them all along. Remember … Democracy Dies in Darkness.

An Update … And A New Twist …

Posted on August 15, 2017 by jilldennison under Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Social commentary

Joe Arpaio

On July 2^nd I wrote a post about the former Sheriff of Maricopa Country, Arizona, Joe Arpaio. You may remember that he had lost his bid for re-election in 2016, after serving for 24 years, since 1993. At the time of my last post, Arpaio was standing trial in federal court on charges of ‘criminal contempt of court’.

In December 2011, U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow ordered Arpaio’s office to halt detentions based on nothing more than suspicion that a person might be in violation of federal immigration law. Arpaio’s response? “I’m still gonna do what I’m doing. I’m still gonna arrest illegal aliens.” And he did keep on doing what he had been: racial profiling and inhumane treatment of prisoners, refusing to investigate sex crimes, and closing cases without investigation, to name a few. I meant to write an update to that story when a decision was handed down by the court, but I got sidetracked and failed to do so. I shall do so now, with another, new interesting twist.

On July 24^th, United States District Judge Susan R. Bolton found Mr. Arpaio, age 85, guilty of criminal contempt of court, a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail. In her decision, Judge Bolton wrote, “Not only did Defendant abdicate responsibility, he announced to the world and to his subordinates that he was going to continue business as usual no matter who said otherwise.”

His lawyers, of course, immediately said they would appeal the verdict. Some supporters of stricter immigration enforcement rallied behind Mr. Arpaio. Dan Stein, the president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said the election of President Trump had vindicated Mr. Arpaio’s policies.

“Clearly Joe Arpaio won the war, even though he lost this particular battle. Like any good American citizen, he recognized his obligation and was willing to pay the price for a form of civil disobedience.”

At this point it bears remembering that Arpaio’s tent-city jail required prisoners to wear pink underwear and sleep in tents in the brutal Arizona heat. They were served only two meatless meals per day, often consisting of moldy bread, rotten fruit and other contaminated food. Prisoners were frequently denied care for serious medical and mental health needs. At one point, Arpaio made the statement that even if he had a billion dollars he wouldn’t change the way he runs his jails. Now, this is the man who Mr. Stein claims “paid the price”. No, the prisoners – Arpaio’s victims – paid the price for his racism and inhumanity. It was precisely this that earned Arpaio my Idiot of the Week award last October.

Which brings me to the present. With all the news about last weekend’s horrors in Charlottesville, this tidbit went largely unnoticed:

“President Trump told Fox News he is “seriously considering” issuing a pardon for former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio. Trump told the news outlet during a conversation in Bedminster, N.J., that the pardon could come quickly, perhaps in a matter of days.

“I might do it right away, maybe early this week. I am seriously thinking about it,” Trump said, according to Fox News. He said Arpaio was a “great American patriot” who had “done a lot in the fight against illegal immigration.”

“Is there anyone in local law enforcement who has done more to crack down on illegal immigration than Sheriff Joe?” Trump said, according to Fox News. “He has protected people from crimes and saved lives. He doesn’t deserve to be treated this way.” – Matt Zapotosky, The Washington Post, 14 August 2017

Arpaio told Fox News, “I would accept the pardon because I am 100 percent not guilty.”

I predicted in my last post about Arpaio that he would never serve a single day of prison time, even if found guilty. My main reason for believing so at that time was primarily his age. He is 85 years old, and I thought an appeal was likely, which could drag on for another year or two, and at that point I expected his attorneys to plead for leniency based on Arpaio’s age. Never in my wildest dreams did I even consider a presidential pardon.

There can be no denying that Arpaio is a racist. That much is obvious and he doesn’t even bother to deny it. So … if Trump pardons Arpaio, what message do you think that sends to the very white supremacist groups who perpetuated the violence and death in Charlottesville last weekend?

Walter Shaub

Remember Walter Shaub, former head of the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) about whom I wrote last month ? He resigned his position because the Trump administration was making a sham of the word ‘ethics’ and Shaub felt that he was no longer able to do his job. Today, Shaub posted a single tweet about Trump’s proposal to pardon Joe Arpaio …

“Scrambling to reassure the white supremacists and nazis that he didn’t really mean what he said to the “normies” today…”

Can anybody disagree? I said to another fellow blogger earlier that I could picture Trump on the phone with Richard Spencer or David Duke after his speech, saying, “Don’t worry … I didn’t mean a word I said, but you know … my staff told me I had to say all that stuff or else we might have riots here in Washington … but I am in your court, so … no worries.”

Ladies and Gentlemen … the man who is occupying the White House, the man who refers to himself as “president”, is in bed with the worst bunch of people to be found in the United States. Expect many more weekends like the past one.

Ethics, Shmethics …

Posted on July 18, 2017 by jilldennison under Political commentary

When a person is in a position of extreme responsibility and trust, and is no longer, due to situations beyond his control, able to perform his duties to the best of his ability, if he is a person of good conscience, he will resign his position. That is exactly what Walter M. Shaub, Jr., head of the Office of Government Ethics, has done. Although I am distressed by his resignation, I hail him as a man of honour, and quite honestly I would have done the same. This move, however, speaks volumes about the lack of honesty and integrity in the White House, and it opens the door wide for even more abuses of power and greed than we have seen in the past six months.

“It’s hard for the United States to pursue international anticorruption and ethics initiatives when we’re not even keeping our own side of the street clean. It affects our credibility. I think we are pretty close to a laughingstock at this point. There isn’t much more I could accomplish at the Office of Government Ethics, given the current situation. O.G.E.’s recent experiences have made it clear that the ethics program needs to be strengthened.”

The Office of Government Ethics (OGE), with a staff of only 70, is an advisory agency only and cannot enforce rules on ethics. Since the November 2016 election, their advice has been largely disregarded. For example, rather than divesting himself of his business interests, or placing them in a blind trust, Donald Trump simply transferred them to a trust run by his two oldest sons. According to Shaub, this “doesn’t meet the standards that the best of his nominees are meeting and that every president in the past four decades has met. OGE is nonpartisan and does its work independently. Our goal—our reason for existing—is to guard the executive branch against conflicts of interest. We can’t risk creating the perception that government leaders would use their official positions for profit.

The Office of Government Ethics was created in 1978 by the Ethics in Government Act, as a result of the Nixon Watergate scandal and the Saturday Night Massacre. OGE is tasked with:

Establishing the executive branch standards of conduct;
Issuing rules and regulations interpreting the criminal conflict of interest restrictions;
Establishing the framework for the public and confidential financial disclosure systems for executive branch employees;
Developing training and education programs for use by executive branch ethics officials and employees;
Ensuring that individual agency ethics programs are functioning properly by setting the requirements for them, supporting them, and reviewing them.

As it is turning out, the scandals within the Trump administration are many, deep-rooted, wide-spread, and I firmly believe will far exceed those of Watergate. And yet now the gatekeeper’s slot is empty and it will be up to Trump to appoint a new one. That reeks of putting the fox in charge of the henhouse.

Many these days, myself included, have made the comparison between Nixon and Trump, but Elizabeth Drew, author of the definitive Washington Journal: Reporting Watergate and Richard Nixon’s Downfall, says that comparison is unfair to Nixon. She cites a number of reasons, starting with the fact that Nixon remained in office for five years, during which he had some major accomplishments, as compared to the chaos-engulfed Trump presidency that has not even been able to staff up, has no significant legislative wins to its name and is already, at just six months in as of this week, the most unpopular in seven decades. Nixon was smarter, she argues. He read books and cared about policy.

According to Drew, while Watergate was a “constitutional crisis” that involved “a whole array of abuse of power, where they used the instruments of government against Nixon’s perceived enemies, the Trump investigation could yield even more serious abuse of power or failure to execute the office than the years’ worth of Nixon probes.” In addition, she cites differences in today’s political culture:

Politics was not as mean.
Congress still had the capacity to do things in a bipartisan fashion.
Republican moderates were not an endangered species.
Twitter hadn’t corrupted the news cycle of the political class—or the attention span of the president himself.

In just six long months, we have entered a new realm … a realm of alternative facts and alternative language. It is a world where ‘no’ may mean ‘yes’, where ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are interchangeable, and in this alternative vocabulary, the words ‘ethics’, ‘honesty’, and ‘integrity’ no longer exist. There is, if Congress and the American public do not wake up and demand action be taken against the destruction of the office of presidency, only one path where this decay, this hedonistic administration can lead us, and it is not the path of a democracy where leaders are held accountable for their actions.

Walter Shaub has accepted a position with the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan organization of election-law experts, where he hopes to “have more freedom to push for reform. I’ll also be broadening my focus to include ethics issues at all levels of government.” I wish Mr. Shaub the very best and hope that he is able to make a difference for our nation, working from the outside, since his hands were tied while working from the inside.

Filosofa's Word

Cogito Ergo Sum

Tag Archives: Walter Shaub

How Far Is Too Far?

Ethics, Shmethics …