Recently Lindell TV reporter Alison Steinberg queried Illinois Senator tricky Dick Durbin about illegal aliens. Here’s how that went:
Steinberg: Hi, Senator. You’re here talking about getting work permits for illegal aliens, but …
Durbin [interrupting Steinberg]: Is that what you call them?
Steinberg: Well, yeah. I mean …
Durbin [interrupting again]: Oh, come on, honey. Get better. Please don’t be so …
Steinberg: Okay, what do you want to …
Durbin: Don’t be such a hater.
Steinberg: That’s not hate. That’s legally what they’re called.
Durbin: Yeah, I know where you’re coming from. Who are you with?
Steinberg: Lindell TV.
Durbin: … Listen, I believe that people who are in the United States, working hard, raising families, with children who are American citizens, deserve a chance to prove that they can stay. That’s not illegal, that’s not unsafe, it is American. It’s the reason my family’s here and yours too. So, let’s face it: if we’re going to be honest about immigration, we should be honest about the people that are affected by these laws.
Steinberg: Well, the people affected are the American citizens who now can’t get these jobs because …
Durbin [interrupting Steinberg a third time]: Oh, give me a break. These are jobs that go wanting. People don’t want to work in the back room of a restaurant. People don’t want to work in the back room of a restaurant. That’s the hardest job. You ever done it?
Steinberg: Yeah, I actually have. I had to. I didn’t have a choice.
Durbin: Front of the house or the back of the house?
Steinberg: The back.
Durbin: The back? Okay, then you know what I’m talking about. Did you disagree with me?
Steinberg: It’s a tough job, no doubt. But you’ve got to start somewhere, right?
Senator: Yes, you do.
A closer examination of this brief encounter between an arrogant U.S. Senator and a reporter reveals exactly why dinosaur Durbin should have been booted out years ago.
What man in the 21st Century refers dismissively to a professional woman with whom he has no relationship by the condescending, chauvinistic term “honey”? What makes his chauvinism even more ironic is that Durbin, a white man and a Democrat, is a leader in the party of feminist harpies and wokesters who relentlessly castigate whites, men, and chauvinists. Durbin is either a hopeless troglodyte stuck in the Mad Men era, or supremely arrogant, or both. My money is on both.
His arrogance was further demonstrated by his repeated interruptions of a reporter doing her job, which is not to lick the boots of politicians who no longer see themselves as public servants.
Durbin has spent far too much time in the fetid political swamps of D.C. and Illinois surrounded by bootlickers, including legacy press leftists, which has robbed him of humility, common courtesy, and a proper understanding that he serves the people. We don’t serve him.
And the press exists not to curry favor with politicians or to promote their candidacies or agenda. The press exists to hold people in positions of power accountable to the people. The goal of good journalists should be to ferret out and expose facts in a quest for truth and transparency.
Journalists Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel write in the classic The Elements of Journalism,
In the end it is good judgment, and an abiding commitment to the principle of first allegiance to citizens, that separates the journalist from the partisan.
They make clear that journalistic integrity does not require impartiality or neutrality. Rather, it requires independence and a commitment to base opinions on evidence rather than blind allegiance to a party or demagogue like Durbin.
Demagoguery dripped from Durbin’s lips in this one-minute exchange during which he interrupted Steinberg, patronized her, and then hurled the epithet “hater” at her—all tactics to avoid providing a substantive answer to a question important to the public Durbin purportedly serves.
Leftists took George Orwell’s warning about Newspeak as an instructional plan. They’re continually trying to impose language rules on the entire country, putting into practice what Orwell feared: “the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained” of the meanings leftists hate.
So, like “mother,” “father,” “woman,” “man,” “breastfeed,” and “homeless,” the word “illegal” must be censored. Can’t have words that convey ideas leftists hate just floating around the linguistic universe. Wouldn’t be prudent.
Then there was the substance of his implied argument, which was as troubling as his insults.
Durbin implied that somehow working hard and raising a family magically erases the illegal status of illegal aliens. How does that square with commitments to equity, equality, fairness, or justice? Should his principle apply not just to immigration lawbreaking but to other laws as well? Who will be the arbiter of which criminal acts may be rendered legally null and void if the lawbreaker works hard and raises a family?
What does Durbin even mean when he claims border lawbreakers “deserve a chance to prove that they can stay”? I can’t make that assertion make sense.
Durbin followed his ad hominem fallacies with a hastily constructed straw man, stating that people who are “working hard, raising families, with children who are American citizens, deserve a chance to prove that they can stay. That’s not illegal, that’s not unsafe, it is American.”
I feel comfortable in saying that no one has ever argued that working hard, raising families, or having children who are American citizens is illegal or unsafe. But those who break our border laws to enter America are, by definition, illegal. And that is un-American.
I bet if Congress and state legislatures did the hard work of reforming our system of welfare and entitlements, we would see more American citizens willing to do the jobs Durbin claims we need illegals to do. Ironically, Durbin agrees with Steinberg that people need to be willing to start in these hard jobs. Maybe, just maybe, if we stop subsidizing and incentivizing dependence on government handouts, more Americans will be willing to do the hard jobs that Durbin believes only illegal aliens will do.