The right thing for the wrong reason nonetheless strikes gold. Thanks, Matt Lauer!

January 7, 5:41 PMDC Ethical Issues ExaminerLaura Harrison McBride

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NBC's Matt Lauer

I'm so happy NBC capitulated to the conservative harangue about uninviting Ann Coulter to appear on Today. It would be better if they had done so on an ethical basis...but this isn't a perfect world.

What is perfect is the way Matt Lauer methodically challenged Coulter on her outrageous and unethical use of language to unfairly skewer Barack Obama. He asked her why she referred, in her newest book, to B. Hussein Obama, noting that she didn't refer to Mr. Bush as G. Walker Bush. Coulter replied that Obama himself had said he liked his middle name. Lauer said he was sure Mr. Bush liked his own middle name, too...and then Lauer noted that Coulter could be using the Hussein because it would be incendiary among those who continue to believe, erroneously, that Mr. Obama is Muslim.

After watching a video of the interview twice, I could not detect a viable or cogent answer from Ms. Coulter.

It was nice, though, that Coulter was significantly less hyper on Today than she had been on The Early Show. One must wonder whether letting her cool her heels and rant her rants elsewhere made for a calmer subject for Matt Lauer to interview.

Because she actually did allow Lauer to get a word in now and then, Lauer thus got to challenge Coulter, also, on her assertions in the book that most of society's problems are caused by single mothers. Naturally, she had--or said she had and had included in her book--statistics to support this claim. Mr. Lauer cited respectable sources that claim that single motherhood is not the main reason for the problems in society.

If there is any truth at all in what Ms. Coulter contends, however, here's the ethical dilemma:

• Conservatives of Ms. Coulter's stripe are typically rabidly against abortion, which would certainly diminish some of the unwed/single motherhood.
• They are also typically rabidly against spending tax dollars for social programs either to prevent pregnancy (that is, birth control beyond abstinence, which is a pipe dream generally speaking), or to nurture and educate those born out of wedlock or otherwise outside the nuclear ma-and-pa family (as opposed to alternately constituted families).

So the only conclusion to reach--unless one or more parts of that conservative viewpoint is unethically held--is that single motherhood is the cause of societal problems, and the conservatives believe that those societal problems are a good thing.

On its face, that assertion seems ludicrous, unless you look at it from the top, rather than the middle or the bottom, of the heap. If one happens to be a white, employed, well-compensated Protestant Republican conservative, insulated in many ways from those societal problems--not least by voting yourselves tax breaks and other perks so that you need only see the great unwashed staff and household help when you must--then the discrepancy makes a lot of sense. If one keeps society problem-beset, and one does not have to engage with that society, then one's life is necessarily, by contrast, even better.

Machiavelli knew this. Keeping the hoi polloi in disarray (and what better way than through unwanted, unsupportable births and the societal problems those births cause as they grow into insufficiently nurtured and educated adolescents?) is a sure way to keep one's hold on power. The only thing better than that--than keeping the population underserved--is by terrifying it. And sure as shootin', those who are underfed and undereducated are going to be terrified into submission by extra-societal threats--such as, for example, people named Hussein--once they have been convinced that Muslims (the people who bear such names, they have been told) are deadly.

It is possible to wonder how much of her own skewed rhetoric Coulter believes. If she believes it, logic could not possibly have been her strong suit. If she doesn't, then it's probably ethics she failed.