Republican Delegates

Mr. Walz’s LTE in the Post Review is a rich mine, so let’s dig in again.

He wrote:

The real tragedy, of course, is that McCain did not address the real issues in his acceptance speech: the recession, racism, health care or the environment. Of course he was speaking to mostly white millionaires (more than half of the delegates earned $500,000 or more and there were almost no people of color, far fewer than previous years).

Walz opines, "Of course he was speaking to mostly white millionaires. . ." Those Republican delegates are just filthy rich people! How awful! He explains parenthetically, ". . . more than half of the delegates earned $500,000 or more. . ." I guess this is bad too. Walz did not state a time period during which more than half of the delegates earned $500,000.

So where did Walz get his facts? He couldn’t bother to tell us.

By doing a simple Google search, I think I found the data which Walz is referencing. It is data attained from a poll of Republican delegates to the national convention.

The article states the results of the poll:

Thirty-four percent say their net worth is over $1 million. . . .Seventeen percent say their net worth is between $500,000 and $1 million, while 32 percent estimate their net worth under $500,000.

Adding 34% and 17% gives 51% of Republican delegates who say their net worth is more than $500,000. So Mr. Walz is half right. He said, ". . . more than half of the delegates earned $500,000 or more. . ." That half is wrong. In order to have a net worth of more than $500K, one must earn much more than that. So Mr. Walz didn’t paint the terrible Republicans as bad as he should have. Why those GOP folks had earned more than a million to have a net worth of $500K!

Now Mr. Walz, think about this for a couple of seconds. It’s great that these Republicans have earned so much because they have paid bushels of taxes to support your poor Democrat friends. Without these rich millionaires, you poor Dems couldn’t feed, clothe and shelter your own folks. So you should be happy we make so much money.

Secondly, what’s wrong with you Donkeys that you can’t make as much as Elephants?

Or is it that you make as much as us but don’t know how to conserve what you make because you aren’t conservatives? That must be it. You don’t conserve the money; you liberally give it away to charity so you don’t have much left. Cough. Cough. The polls don’t show that either.

In reality, a net worth of $500K isn’t all that much nowadays. Back in the ’50s a millionaire had some substance to himself. A millionaire today is worth about a tenth of that. A $100,000 might buy half a house these days. By the time a person adds together his $200,000 house, its furnishings, a couple of cars, a boat, snowmobile, some other trinkets, his 401k plan, etc., average people in their fifties and sixties have half a million.

I wouldn’t hesitate to conjecture that Mr. Walz has his half a million net worth. And if he does, that makes him a hypocrite (tongue in cheek!).

Oh, and while Walz was castigating Republican delegates for having so much, he forgot to tell us something. Thirty-four percent of Republican delegates have a net worth of more than a million. And the same article says, "Twenty-two percent of the Democratic delegation has a net worth that high (1 million)." For every hundred delegates, the Democrats are just 12 people behind the Republicans.

Apparently these are unenlightened Dems who have not yet seen the light to give away their money. Walz doesn’t want you to know about them.

Now the Democrats and Republicans have the same opportunities in life. Why does the donkey party have less millionaires than the elephant party? The same article probably has the answer: ". . . 24 percent [of the GOP delegates] say they considered themselves Democrats at one point."

One out of every four Republican delegates once was a Democrat. It must be that as these erstwhile Democrats accumulated their net worth they began to see the Dems keep taking more and more of their hard-earned dollars away from them. They, being greedy Democrats, devised a plan. They switched to the Republican party and promoted less taxation and less spending so they could get richer. That’s why there are less millionaire donkeys. Without this catastrophic shift, the two parties would have about the same number of millionaires.

And there goes Mr. Walz point about Senator McCain "speaking to mostly white millionaires."

Hypocrisy: Part 2

In a letter to the editor of the Post Review, Robert Walz, wrote:

It is a bit strange that the party that promotes "family values," doesn’t walk its talk. Neither McCain nor his running mate, Sara [sic] Palin are good examples. McCain cheated on his first wife, obtained a marriage license for his second before his divorce was final, and then used her family wealth and connections to win a "safe" Republican seat in a state he had never lived in. Sara [sic] Palin, a former Catholic, like her daughter, was pregnant before she married (her first son was born less than nine months after she eloped).

Do they represent wholesome family values? Is the "shotgun" wedding for her 17-year old daughter in anyone’s best interest? How about the DUI her husband got?

Not walking one’s own talk makes one a hypocrite. That is true. However, in his LTE, Walz leads us to believe that hypocrisy is worse than the act that violates walking the talk.

Follow what he says. His paragraph is framed by its first sentence that speaks of not walking the talk. He illustrates this with examples from McCain’s and Palin’s life, who are framed as hypocrites. Their misdeeds make them hypocrites, which is worse than their misdeeds.

Walz isn’t really concerned about the Palins’s fornication or drunkenness or McCain’s cheating on his wife (which countless Democrats do). Those misdeeds are important to identify them as not walking the talk and therefore being hypocrites. In other words, if the Palins and McCain didn’t have the talk, they would not be dastardly hypocrites.

This reasoning makes hypocrisy the significant fault and downplays the misdeeds as insignificant. Walz knows Palin’s husband’s DUI, her daughter’s fornication and her own supposed fornication do not disqualify Sarah Palin from being VP. But hypocrisy assuredly disqualifies her, he thinks.

Walz’s insistence that others must walk their talk implies that a person should never talk about pursuing a virtuous walk in order never to be identified as a hypocrite. Walz’s approach honors those who sin without hypocrisy and dishonors those who preach the pursuit of virtue and end up sinning. How despicable!

In contrast, we should preach what is worth practicing precisely because we do not always practice what is worth practicing. None of us has ever met a person who fully practices what he preaches. And many repent of it when they fail.

Furthermore, if someone can truly and fully practice what he preaches, he isn't practicing anything worth preaching.

One who sins non-hypocritically will never inspire moral excellence in others, but a hypocrite who repents, will. Walz doesn’t allow for Sarah Palin’s repentance; she must forever be a hypocrite.

Hypocrisy

In a letter to the editor of the Post Review, Robert Walz, wrote:

It is a bit strange that the party that promotes "family values," doesn’t walk its talk. Neither McCain nor his running mate, Sara [sic] Palin are good examples. McCain cheated on his first wife, obtained a marriage license for his second before his divorce was final, and then used her family wealth and connections to win a "safe" Republican seat in a state he had never lived in. Sara [sic] Palin, a former Catholic, like her daughter, was pregnant before she married (her first son was born less than nine months after she eloped).

Do they represent wholesome family values? Is the "shotgun" wedding for her 17-year old daughter in anyone’s best interest? How about the DUI her husband got?

This is typical Democrat rant about the Republican Party of family values being full of hypocrites who should not be in political office because they don’t practice family values which they preach. Let’s start to analyze Robert Walz’s reasoning.

Walz wants us to conclude that McCain and Palin are hypocrites because they talk about family values but don’t walk that talk. However, he doesn’t actually say that. Rather he says, "It is a bit strange that the party that promotes 'family values,' doesn’t walk its talk" (my emphasis). He implicates McCain and Palin by implicating the party—the political party is a hypocrite. This is the old "guilt by association" argument—a person is guilty because the party is guilty.

While McCain and Palin are guilty because the party is guilty, Walz knows the party is guilty because his two examples, McCain and Palin, are guilty. This is circular reasoning.

By his standard of guilt by association, Mr. Walz would be self-condemned. Consider, if Walz is a member of an organization that avows a certain standard of behavior and Walz does not act accordingly, then, by his own measuring stick, he too would be a hypocrite. I doubt he would like to be implicated personally on the basis of that organization’s failure to abide by its own standard.

Second, a person’s own stated standards are a measure by which a person should be judged. A person may be a hypocrite if she violates her own standards. Walz assumes Sarah Palin was pregnant prior to eloping (which he himself cannot prove). And he assumes that as a young person, she held the standard that premarital pregnancy is wrong. Only then can she be regarded as a hypocrite. Walz is claiming to know two pieces of information that he actually cannot know to be fact.

We do not need to excuse McCain’s or Palin’s behavior. However, we should identify Walz’s behavior for what it is. It is actually hypocritical of Walz to apply his two standards to others which he would hate to be applied to himself. By his own measure of guilt by association, he would certainly be a self-condemned hypocrite many times over.

And by his own measure of assumed personal standards, anyone could insist that Walz holds to a standard of personal behavior without proof and all departures from that assumed standard would be regarded as hypocritical.

None of us ever wants to be judged by the measures which Walz has condemned McCain and Palin and her daughter. Indeed, he would not either.