A few posts fewer than usual this week, even after (mostly) being relieved from the burden of dealing with last week’s paired “Attack of the Trolls” and “The Return of the Banned Commenters.” Sorry. Maybe today’s Open Forum can cover some of the important ethics topics I missed.
I’ve been laboring over a tricky ethics report on a tough issue, and it has literally been keeping me awake at night. I did have a “Eureka!” moment yesterday, while walking Spuds. Does that make any part of my dog-walking duties legitimately billable time?
Meanwhile, the various pundits on the Left and Right—are there any from the center?—all are annoying me. I’ve encountered several conservative writers who can’t resist mocking Chris Christie’s weight while attacking him on other grounds. (“Just drop out and get back to the buffet,” one advises the former N.J. governor this morning.) On the other side of the great divide, Charles M. Blow, arguably the biggest asshole in the New York Times stable of them, actually wrote a column rationalizing the brawl in Montgomery, Alabama, in which a mob of blacks attacked a handful of whites who were arguing, then fighting, with a riverboat co-captain who was trying to clear a berth for his vessel. Since the man is black, this made the the episode presumptively a racist incident, though there is no evidence that the same jerks who attacked Damien Pickett wouldn’t have behaved in exactly the same, Cro-Magnon manner if he had been white like them. Wrote Blow: “Black people coming to the defense of that Black man wasn’t just a specific thing that happened at one place and time; it was also a departure, in some ways, from the most memorable images in a history that includes centuries of Black-targeted brutality, which traces the journey of Black people in this land that became the United States.”
Is everybody an asshole?
