Up with Chris Hayes

My support means zero, but I have wanted to say for some time that Chris Hayes deserves great credit for achieving what I would have thought impossible: he's brought real diversity of opinion to a major cable news network. One episode of Up with Chris Hayes (which is a pretty shitty name, if you ask me) has more genuine diversity of opinion than your average week of Anderson Cooper 360. Largely that's because he's willing to bring on people who are typically dismissed as "loony lefties" by those in the Very Serious Media, but even beyond that there's an admirable range of informed, articulate people on the show.


Still, you see the limits of anything that's regarded as TV-ready mainstream. Check out this panel on Israel-Palestine from yesterday. In the context of our media, it's a remarkably even-handed and fair discussion and panel makeup. But there are some assumptions that are so ingrained in the conversation, nobody challenges them.

Even Jeremy Ben-Ami, the founder of J-Street and an effective and principled defender of the Palestinian people, said that everyone on the panel was opposed to a nuclear-capable Iran. Now, as far as it goes, I'd much rather that Iran not have nuclear weapons than have them; I'm opposed to the existence of nuclear weapons, after all. I'm conflicted on nuclear power, given its dangers but also its potential as a non-carbon producing energy source. However: I am just as opposed to nuclear weapons and power in Israel and the United States as I am in Iran. I didn't hear, and haven't heard, a statement of equitable political principles that explains why it is somehow more legitimate for Israel to have nuclear technology than Iran. Worse, there appears to be a consensus opinion that no such principle needs to be articulated.

I would very much like for Hayes to have asked that question yesterday, why Israel is entitled to a nuclear arsenal and Iran is not. But perhaps that's a bridge too far.