You gotta love MSNBC for giving us the gems that are their "Lean Forward" ads. They never disappoint to boil down to 30-second spots the hard-left views of their hosts.
Take Chris Hayes, host of the primetime weeknight program All In, who, in his latest promo spot sounds an almost utopian note when he recalled how his parents -- whom he previously called his heroes, as opposed to, say military personnel -- taught him that while "life isn't fair... it should be":
The thing I learned from my parents is life isn't fair, but you don't have to accept that it isn't fair and you don't have to accept that it isn't fair and shrug your shoulders and say, that's how it is. In fact, it should be fair. The most powerful idea in the universe, the basis of all progress, the engine of everything that's good that's come about in this country from the Revolution to the New Deal to the Civil Rights movement to the movement for marriage equality is to look at the status quo, to look at unfairness and injustice and say it is not okay for it to be this way.
Of course what Hayes is doing is conflating life in general with the realm of public policy, unless, of course, he somehow thinks there's ultimately no "unfairness" in life that can not be ameliorated if not eradicated by concerted government action.
Hayes also seems to be confusing justice and "fairness."
Justice is concerned with safeguarding the rights of the parties involved and appropriately addressing violations of those rights. "Fairness," by contrast, is a nebulous concept predicated on raw emotion rather than reasoned examination of the merits of a particular case. Calls for "fairness" often undergird plans to tax "the wealthy" and redistribute it to "the poor," for example.
But to Hayes, it seems, there is no real justice without "fairness," and "fairness" and "progress" are conveniently tied to liberal Democratic agenda points and that's how we're all supposed to "Lean Forward" into the future.
"Life should be fair" is fine for a bumper sticker rant, but it's rather absurd as a political philosophy and even worse as a journalistic one.
