OK, maybe I’m exaggerating.
But not much.
L.Z. Granderson’s role model. I’m not kidding.
In a horrifying opinion column, the regular CNN political pundit L.Z. Granderson evoked the virtues of public apathy and unchecked government conduct with warped logic and unethical rationalizations, to make the case that the public should merely shrug off scandals like “Fast and Furious.” I was only able to finish reading it without retching it by imagining Granderson’s motives for writing such mind- and culture-poisoning swill. At least, as an African-American journalist, a liberal and a Obama supporter (I know I repeat myself), he has the self-respect, fairness and integrity not to claim that critics of Attorney General Holder’s Waterloo are being racist. Like the race-baiters, however, he is in denial, and willing to throw principle to the wolves to protect the first African-American Attorney General, though far from the first corrupt and incompetent one.
In a column with the descriptive and idiotic title, “Don’t be nosy about Fast and Furious,” Granderson argues…
“…Times have changed. Yet, not everything is our business. And in the political arena, there are things that should be and need to be kept quiet…..there comes a point where the public’s right to know needs to take a back seat to matters like national security and diplomacy. Heads should roll because of the Fast and Furious debacle. We don’t need every detail of that operation to be made public in order for that to happen. If it were an isolated sting, maybe. But it is at least the third incarnation of a gun-running scheme stretching across two administrations, which means we could be pressing to open Pandora’s Box. We do not want to open Pandora’s Box, not about this and certainly not about a bunch of other potentially scandalous things the federal government has been involved with.”
There’s a simple retort to Granderson’s assertion, and it is this: “We sure damn do!“ We want to know when the government is breaking its own laws. We want to know when it is violating the core principles of American democracy. We want to know when it is corrupt, and is lying to us, not for our own good, but to protect miscreants in the power structure. We want to know whether or not our leaders can be trusted, or whether, to the contrary, they are incompetent, lazy, greedy, stupid, cruel or unable to control their lust for power. We want to open Pandora’s box, because at the bottom of that box,as the legend goes, is Hope…hope for a better American government and leaders who are truly committed to our ideals, and not just frauds who give them lip-service.
Astoundingly, Granderson ends his irresponsible appeal to apathetic democracy and unbridled power by evoking Jack Nicholson’s classic line from “A Few Good Men,” saying that many of us “won’t be able to handle the truth.” That quote was uttered by the bad guy, L.Z.
I think you need to watch the movie again.
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Source: CNN
Graphic: sbrownehr
Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at jamproethics@verizon.net.
Ethics Alarms 
“We do not want to open Pandora’s Box, not about this and certainly not about a bunch of other potentially scandalous things the federal government has been involved with.”
We need to though. It’s our duty to do so, no matter how uncomfortable that makes us feel. This attitude resulted in the scandals over child abuse, spousal abuse, the Tuskagee experiment, and God alone knows what else. It’s the root cause. It needs eradicating.
Yes, this is why it really might be the most unethical column of the century. And on a news organization’s webpage, no less.
Agreed. It’s not just a “want”… it’s a requirement of any democracy that wishes to actually a government of the people, by the people, for the people.
*be* a government of the people, by the people, for the people.
I’ve got to say that I was with him for the first half of the section you quoted, and the article as a whole isn’t as inane as the inane “Pandora’s Box” analogy or the quoting-the-bad-guy tag. It is true, I think, that there are sometimes political (in the sense of statecraft, not partisanship) or security issues that trump the public’s right to know everything. I don’t need to know all the details of this scandal, of Iran/Contra, of warrantless wiretaps, to know what’s most essential: that the government, or certain specific people within that government, even if perhaps acting with the best of motives, over-stepped the bounds of ethics and/or the law.
That is, it’s unnecessary to know the identities of undercover agents, the means by which cartels were infiltrated, etc. But I do need to know in general terms what happened, and that appropriate steps have been taken to discourage (actual prevention, of course, would be impossible) similar debacles in the future.
It’s true, too, of course, that national security arguments tend to be trotted out, with or without legitimacy, by every administration that doesn’t want to be embarrassed by some revelation, and that would be… yep, every one of them.
And none of the foregoing should be interpreted to argue with the basic premise of your piece: that knowing, in general terms at the very least, is better than not knowing–and that an aversion to finding out about “a bunch of other potentially scandalous things the federal government has been involved with” is just plain stupid.
I agree with everything you write here, Rick. There is a legitimate need for secrecy, and their are times when it is not in the best interest of the nation to know what’s going on behind the curtain. But why anyone would pick “Fast and Furious” as the situs for a leap onto that slippery slope is beyond me.