Speaking of crafted and amplified rhetoric, let's get back to Barry Crist's justification for allowing Chef to continue to due business with ICE.
He invokes principle to seem high-minded, but his guiding principle is not patriotism but profit. He is merely hiding behind patriotism.
All I am doing is drawing upon literature (I am using the term loosely, but I suspect it is probable that more HN members have read The Fountainhead than the Iliad) to show that being able to live with yourself and the uses to which your work is put is more important than seeming "professional" or "reasonable".
Sometimes you reach a point where the doublethink necessary to seem reasonable and professional leaves you despising yourself.
Sometimes it isn't enough to ask, "What would John Galt do?"
In times like these, sometimes the only reasonable question is, "What would Howard Roark do?"
His answer, when his work was misused in a manner he could no longer bear to tolerate, was to break out the dynamite.