Protest Too Much

 Jeanine Pirro was born in Elmira, New York to Lebanese-American parents. I ask you to hold on to that fact for a moment. 

Late last week, Ms. Pirro who has a television show on Fox News. The name of that show is Justice with Judge Jeanine. Not just because Jeanine is a Judge, and has experience with the criminal justice system, but because she judges. People. Things. Ideas. There's not a lot that Jeanine has not judged since making her way up the media ladder from syndicated courtroom officiate to Fox Celebrity status. She's got opinions, and the folks at Fox are pleased and happy to give her a great big electronic podium from which to blast them. 

Most recently you may recall that Judge Jeanine was named in a defamation suit brought by voting machine company Smartmatic. Along with some of Fox's best and brightest, she is being sued for two point seven billion dollars for their collective insistence that Smartmatic's software and hardware had been manipulated as part of the evil scheme to keep the former game show host in the White House. Without any facts, of course, but that's not the way that Fox "News" runs.

But my focus today is the hate that Judge Jeanine was spewing last Thursday. From her television bench. “We’ve got people being released at the border right now who’ve got COVID. Wait a minute, I listened to you, you listen to me! They’ve got COVID! They’ve got all kinds of diseases! They are being released into the United States!” And now for the possibly tastiest bit of irony, the person to whom she was insisting that she be heard was the nominal voice of reason in this argument: Geraldo Rivera. It was Geraldo who was attempting to push back on Pirro's anti-immigrant screed by attempting to find some comfortable middle ground between her frothing and the absurd notion that anyone on Fox would become soft on illegal immigration. Especially when those nefarious schemers who are preparing to stream across our southern border are only going to steal the jobs that all those poor Americans who are not fortunate enough to have their own TV contract are aching to find. It was Geraldo Rivera who pointed out that a year ago, all of those migrant workers were designated essential by the administration previous to the current one, and that the jobs that are being snapped up are not the ones that have historically been snapped up by the United States' sea of unemployed. Harvesting our food and packing our meat. People who have traveled hundreds of miles for a chance at work that no one else seems to want. 

And isn't it bizarre that suddenly, a year after insisting that COVID-19 was a liberal scam, the screeching heads at Fox "News" are terrified of "all kinds of diseases!" And Geraldo Rivera turns out to be the bleeding heart in this scenario. 

And when Jeanine's mother returned from Beirut all those years ago to marry her father, I wonder what people said about the diseases she was bringing into our country. I would like to think that no one did, but if they did, they didn't do it with the help of a nationally televised megaphone.