It’s ordinarily a violation of the ethics of discourse to use the question-and-answer period of a talk to make a speech rather than ask a bona fide question. A question is a request for information. A request can, as a condition of its intelligibility, require a brief clarification or bit of context-setting, but there’s a difference between that and a speech. 

However, most norms, no matter how stringent, have exceptions. What if, day after day–hundreds or thousands of times across a solid year–the spokesperson for a person in authority engages questioners in egregious, obvious bad faith? What if, day after day, he tells smirking lies about life and death matters, makes up random bullshit at will, and evades the meaning of obvious questions in order to serve up whole stinking, decaying schools of red herrings? What if his bosses are concealing complicity in mass murder, and are about to lead the country into an insane, ill-conceived war (the second one in the last few years), not just on behalf of their own country, but on behalf of a foreign country?

In that case, it becomes perfectly justifiable to do as Liam Cosgrove did yesterday with State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller. He made an unapologetic speech, threw a question in at the end, and called Miller a bullshit artist to his face. That’s the only way to deal with people like Matthew Miller. Ideally, the entire press corps would follow suit. No one can complain that doing so would impede the give-and-take of a question-and-answer period, or the receipt of authentic information. It’s only too obvious that the basic impediment to both things is precisely how full of shit Matthew Miller and his bosses are. 

It’s a kind of paradoxical inversion of the wisdom of Socrates: when questions cease to be a route to truth, speechifying can be. Maybe the rough treatment–and I really hope it is rough–will teach Miller to change his tune. Maybe it won’t. Either way, the result would be preferable to the charade we’ve so far seen. 

Go to it, press corps. I’m an ethicist: you have my permission. Don’t hesitate. Don’t apologize. Shout him down and drown him out. We pay Matthew Miller to tell us the truth about US foreign policy. If he’s not going to do his job, we may as well either shut his fucking mouth, or forcefully point it in the direction of truth. It’s not as though he’s going to do either thing without outside assistance.