He's actually not "my boy"--I voted for Dole and would again (Bob that is).
I don't know about Clinton's sense of shame; I assume he has none. You're missing my point. You can't anoint yourself as a moral guardian, and live a life at odds with this without creating an ugly spectacle. I mean, don't you get a little queasy remembering Newt and Dan Burton's calls for the Ten Commandments to be posted in schools while Newt was actively violating at least two of them, and Burton was covering up an adulterous affair that resulted in a child?
I think we undermine morality when we excuse any improper conduct by pointing to other improper conduct we deem worse. Since Clinton sickens me, your attempt to undermine my criticisms of the adulterous Republicans on the ground of hypocrisy makes no sense. Now, if I said Clinton was a great moral leader and criticized the "private" actions of Gingrich while Speaker, then you could say that I had no right to call Gingrich despicable. But that's all you would establish--you wouldn't be proving that Gingrich leads a moral life, or is not himself a hypocrite.
Your arguments are what are referred to in logic as "sophisms." In other words, you don't answer the point; you just attack the speaker. An extreme example illustrates the point: let us say that Charles Manson in an interview declares: "Murder is wrong!" He's correct in what he says, and the fact the he himself is a murderer doesn't undermine the truth of his statement. Likewise, if James Carville were to state: "Gingrich is a sickening adulterer", Carville's staunch support of Clinton is, in logic, unrelated to whether his statement about Gingrich is true. Your fuzzy logic confuses the issue of whether a speaker is a hypocrite, with whether what that speaker has said is accurate. And confusing those two things is sloppy thinking. |
