“Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias” Note of the Week: CNN’s Dana Bash Peppers Tom Homan With “Poor Illegal Immigrants” Questions

I try to avoid the Sunday talking-head shows now (once upon a time, my late wife and I would watch them all). For some reason I lighted on CNN’s “State of the Union with Jake Tapper and Dana Bash” this morning and caught the hang-dog, sour-faced Bash trying to bash Trump Administration illegal immigration policing czar Tom Homan.

Bash: “Do you feel at all bad about sending Haitians back to a country where your own administration considers conditions dire?”

Ethics Verdict: Stupid, manipulative, and irresponsible. “Feelz” are not valid considerations in law enforcement, nor are they legitimate topics for inquiry by serious journalists, of which we have approximately none; certainly not Dana Bash.

What exactly does she propose, importing the whole population of Haiti because that accurately labeled “shit-hole country” hasn’t managed to get its act together for its entire, miserable, violent existence since it became independent in 1804? Holman, who has a terrible poker face on which we could see his disgust with each one of Bash’s questions that had the unstated implication that he, and President Trump, of course, are heartless racists. Homan answered this one by saying that he doesn’t feel badly and shouldn’t when he is enforcing the immigration laws as passed by Congress. He also made the obvious, though not to Bash and all the other “Good Illegal Immigrant” bleeding hearts, point that millions of people across the globe are in line to come to “the greatest country on earth” the legal and right way, and there is no justification for allowing those who came here or remain here illegally to block their paths.

Saturday Ethics Review, 7/13/2019: The Uncomfortable Truth About “The Lion King,” The Green New Deal, Children At the Border, Blackface, And Harvey Weinstein

Hi!

Is it unethical for an ethics speaker to drop trow during a program? I think so. It was a situation I narrowly avoided this morning. I am a rather animated speaker, and after I slammed the D.C. ethics rules into the floor to illustrate a point, my effort to retrieve the volume resulted in the rear snap of my galluses pulling loose from the back of my pants. With an unpantsing imminent (and about to be streamed live to hundreds), I asked my moderator to come down from his platform and rescue me by reclipping the devices on, which he did.

Hilarity ensued.

1. “Asshole” ethics. In another episode today, I referred to Harvey Weinstein as an “asshole,” in the context of discussing the multiple David Bois ethics problems in handling the Hollywood mogul’s representation. The exact statement was “Even assholes deserve competent representation.” This came closely after I had mentioned that lawyer incivility was an ethics problem whether there were explicit rules against it or not. One of the attendees in cyber-space texted a query as to whether it was uncivil for me to use the term “asshole.”

I answered that I was reminded of the moment in  “1776” when one of the members of the Continental Congress challenges Thomas Jefferson’s use of the term “tyrant” to describe King George. Is it really necessary, Jefferson is asked, to use such a harsh word? Why resort to an insult? “Because the King is a tyrant,” Tom replies.

I went on to say that I have found that in certain situations, only certain harsh words are sufficiently accurate.  What should I call Harvey, a miscreant? A jerk? No, the man is an asshole, I said. I’m not using the term as an ad hominem attack, but as the most accurate term I can think of for someone who has done the things he has done to so many women while indicating no remorse at all. I do not use the term indiscriminately, and would not use it in certain forums, such as open court. But I do not believe in word taboos, and when the description, however harsh, fits, it is not uncivil to make a Harvey Weinstein wear it.

2. Now, what’s the right word for THIS? In the Washington Post,  Dan Hassler-Forest reflects on the themes of “The Lion King” and asserts that the lions, hyenas, and gazelles are “stand ins for human societal organizations” and that the themes of the movie “incorporates the white supremacist’s worldview.” Hassler-Forest is an author and public speaker on “media franchises, cultural theory, and political economy” who works as assistant professor in the Media Studies department of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. “No matter how you look at it, this is a film that introduces us to a society where the weak have learned to worship at the feet of the strong,” his article asserts. Continue reading