Back in 2024, I posited, only half in jest, that “The View’s” resident lawyer on the all-female idiot panel, Sunny Hostin, had made such a stupid assertion on the program that it should trigger legal ethics Rule 8.3, which mandates that a lawyer who has knowledge of another lawyer’s conduct that substantially calls into question that individual’s fitness to practice law must—must—report that unfit lawyer to bar authorities for professional discipline. Hostin had surmised that “climate change” causes earthquakes and eclipses, and stated this cretinous conclusion on national television, on an ABC News program, which is what “The View” purports to be.
I wrote in part (and in disgust):
“[S]ome people with law licenses are demonstrably too stupid to be trusted by clients. Hostin is screaming proof of the validity of this conclusion, yet there is nothing in the disciplinary rules governing the minimal ethics requirements of lawyers that mentions basic, personal intellectual competence as a mandatory component of professional, legal competence.
There should be. One would think that the challenge of graduating from law school and passing the bar exam would be sufficient to ensure that a lawyer is at least smart enough to come in out of the rain, but in extreme cases like Sunny, one would be wrong….believing that climate change causes solar eclipses is signature significance. You can’t come to such an idiotic conclusion and not be an idiot. This delusion [shows] a crippling deficit in critical thinking skills. One cannot be a trustworthy lawyer without minimal critical thinking skills. When a lawyer demonstrates such a deficit beyond a shadow of a doubt, that ought to be considered a legitimate reason for disbarment.”
Remember, professionals are special members of society whose important roles require that they be trustworthy. True professionals include the clergy, doctors, lawyers, judges, law enforcement officials, military leaders, public servants, accountants, psychiatrists, and teachers, and though it sounds absurd today, journalists. Really, really stupid people are not trustworthy, in fact it is dangerous to trust them. If they are sufficiently stupid, they should not hold any of those societal roles and positions.
Ethics Alarms, as those of you who have read the commenting rules here know, has among its provisions that the moderator, that’s me, may at his discretion ban a commenter who has demonstrated to my dissatisfaction that said commenter is too intellectually deficient to contribute substantively to the discussions. I believe that I have only had to invoke it twice.
Which brings me back to “The View”…
Ethics Alarms 
Jack, I get where you’re coming from here. Truly. But I really can’t agree, in the most part.
Goldberg was entertaining as a comedienne long ago; she was compelling as an actress in The Color Purple and especially in her role as the wise old soul Guinan in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Anyone who has read your work as long as I have knows of your respect for talent – and your understanding that talent onstage or camera doesn’t confer expertise elsewhere. Goldberg is Exhibit A. Respect the work, but don’t assign stage presence as skill anywhere else.
Hostin is glib, gorgeous, and black. That’s a trifecta these days, and she gets extra boosts from regular appearances elsewhere, not limited to The Food Network, where Bobby Flay seems entranced. She does appear to know a thing or two about good cooking. But none of this makes her a shoe-in for a SCOTUS appointment, failing another drooling and deranged Joe Biden.
The problem with your argument is simply one of practicality colliding with free-market concepts. It’s well established that bar associations are more or less useless when it comes to policing lawyers. It’s increasingly obvious that medical associations can’t control MDs. Peer review doesn’t control academic papers. And so on. We don’t even need to mention ethics watchdogs in news media. Or maybe we do.
Each “professional” field has at least one professional oversight body, to say nothing of state licesnsure requirements. And most have been co-opted and proven as failures. Personally, despite those failures, I am NOT ready to assign governments with the responsibility to do any of these things. They’ve proven they can’t even figure out what’s going on, let alone what to do about it.
What I fear far more than Sunny Hostin is an ideological mindset completely different from ours, based on the premise that anyone who doesn’t accept it deserves to be eliminated. That’s a far bigger threat than anything said by the morons on The View. It’s a bigger threat than socialism/communism. And I have no clue how to deal with it while maintaining the concepts enshrined in the Constitution. It may, in fact, be impossible – but as an optimist by nature, I’m willing to consider an argument that threads the needle.
For once, I find myself disagreeing with The Who. “Hope I Die Before I Get Old” was a rallying cry when I was in my teens. Nowadays, I’m more and more thinking “Hope I Die Before It All Completely Falls to Shit.”
These hate mongers have no problem alleging that the President is senile, completely ignoring their own struggles with mental acuity. To whit … they are all morons!