NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo kicked off his Monday show with a review of “Barbenheimer” and the lessons the Barbie and Oppenheimer movies supposedly hold for today. On the latter, Cuomo suggested ending World War II was an abdication of moral responsibility and that today, just as then, nobody is willing to ask real and meaningful questions.
Cuomo lamented, “Nobody wants to deal with hard questions just like during the atomic bomb development, just because we could, did that mean that we should? And you know what? Just like then today, those in power don't have to deal with the hard questions.”
Before anyone could rebut that ending World War II and salting the earth of Japanese imperialism were unquestionably good things, Cuomo tried to offer up several contemporary analogies, one of which was his dislike of the term, “pro-life.” Cuomo claimed, “What's okay? What isn't? When does life begin? The set of a cheap argument about who respects life, and ‘I'm pro-life’ like anybody's anti-life. Why do we deal with the hard part of defining what that actually means and how it's reflected in what we allow in our society that goes way beyond a single medical procedure?”
Pro-lifers ask and attempt to answer the question of when life begins all the time, if anything it is pro-choicers who seek to avoid that question.
Switching back to Oppenheimer and the atomic bombings, Cuomo declared that it “reminds of how we have abandoned the aspect of moral responsibility in the name of progress for self-defense of some temporary suggestion of principle or advantage just like we did then.”
For a segment based around the premise that Americans do not wish to answer difficult questions, Cuomo never explained how ending World War II was an abdication of “moral responsibility” or what he would’ve done if he were Harry Truman.
Seeking more contemporary comparisons, Cuomo recalled the COVID-19 pandemic:
You want to know why things got so complicated and confrontational during the pandemic. How we ever wound up not all on the same page when we were all under attack by the same thing. Watch Oppenheimer. And you'll see how when there's a leadership vacuum and no real discussion about principles and priorities how quickly people can get carried away with reckonings of science and doubt and replacing principles and philosophy and methodology with popularity and pressure from opponents, you can get to a bad place real fast and we did and it ain’t the first time.
If anything, it was the proponents of perpetual lockdowns that were unwilling to have real discussions about tradeoffs. Regardless, Cuomo again returned to the Pacific War, “There’s a real argument to be made that we should have never dropped those bombs on the Japanese in World War II. And you should struggle with your part. So that you can give yourself a chance of making better determinations is going forward. We are too often in America in the doomed to repeat category.”
Cuomo’s inability to ask tough questions in a segment supposedly the unwillingness of Americans to ask tough questions is noticeable. None of the arguments against the atomic bombs are intellectually compelling, but that is not the point. The point is to allow Cuomo to claim he is a better person by casting moral judgments on people who had to make real decisions, that a cable TV host, will never have to make, in the real world with real consequences.
This segment was sponsored by Chevrolet.
Here is a transcript for the July 24 show:
NewsNation Cuomo
7/24/2023
8:06 PM ET
CHRIS CUOMO: Nobody wants to deal with hard questions just like during the atomic bomb development, just because we could, did that mean that we should.? And you know what? Just like then today, those in power don't have to deal with the hard questions. Because they're allowed to make mountains out of mole hills, even if it means ignoring actual volcanoes. Wrestling with hard questions like if we could do something, does that mean we should do it? That's hard. AI, “it's a bogeyman.” Why? Why just dismiss it that way? Because it's hard to figure out. Where it should be and where it shouldn’t.
How do we deal with content moderation on social media? Well, what are these places? What is-- what is Threads? What is Twitter? What is Instagram? Because they're not publishers. You should certainly don't treat them like NewsNation. So who has the responsibility? What is the responsibility? What are the guidelines? Who tells us and how do we keep track of it? Nobody wants to deal with that. They have hearings. They took care of nothing.
Cloning is exploding. And goes in all these different directions. What's okay? What isn't? When does life begin? The set of a cheap argument about who respects life, and "I'm pro-life" like anybody's anti-life. Why do we deal with the hard part of defining what that actually means and how it's reflected in what we allow in our society that goes way beyond a single medical procedure?
If you watch these two movies, Barbie and Oppenheimer, man are they food for thought. Barbie about how forest fringe woke worries can be.
And Oppenheimer reminds of how we have abandoned the aspect of moral responsibility in the name of progress for self-defense of some temporary suggestion of principle or advantage just like we did then.
It is horrifying watching the movie. And it will remind you that we've got to have better leaders. We have to have leaders who don't hide from what's hard, who investigate issues that matter the most and to the most of us that this stuff that we're dealing with now. We increasingly in this country have leadership that avoids doing what's hard and we're okay with it because they keep bamboozling us into going down these false corridors and often I’m running right behind trying to catch up to tell everybody "slow down!"
You want to know why things got so complicated and confrontational during the pandemic. How we ever wound up not all on the same page when we were all under attack by the same thing. Watch Oppenheimer. And you'll see how when there's a leadership vacuum and no real discussion about principles and priorities how quickly people can get carried away with reckonings of science and doubt and replacing principles and philosophy and methodology with popularity and pressure from opponents, you can get to a bad place real fast and we did and it ain’t the first time.
There’s a real argument to be made that we should have never dropped those bombs on the Japanese in World War II. And you should struggle with your part. So that you can give yourself a chance of making better determinations is going forward. We are too often in America in the doomed to repeat category.
