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.

A Keen Sense of Morality

The Democrats have suddenly developed a keen sense of morality. John Edwards has been banned from making a speech at the Democrat National Convention for having an affair and lying about it.

In his place, Bill Clinton will be speaking!!

Hypocrisy at the YearlyKos

In a previous Post we noted a YearlyKos panel shut down a military man's comment. Here is additional information from Melanie Morgan, with a focus on one of the panelists, Jon Soltz.

"Soltz is co-founder of the group VoteVets.org which works with MoveOn.org as part of the umbrella network known as Americans Against Escalation in Iraq.

This weekend Soltz was a panelist at the left-wing "Yearly Kos" convention where he launched into a tirade against U.S. Army Sgt. David Aguina of the 733rd maintenance company. Sgt. Aguina made the 'mistake' of noting the progress being made with "the surge" of U.S. troops in Iraq. He did not express any political opinions; he merely challenged the panel to prove him wrong that civilian casualties in Iraq had dropped."

Often when people (publicly or privately) cannot refute a comment, they drag in an irrelevant issue to sidetrack the unanswerable comment. Soltz contended, "Well look, you don't use the military uniform to talk politics…. I don’t appreciate people using military uniforms in politics." Of course this does not answer Sgt. Aguina's comment. That is significant in itself.

But Soltz is guilty of doing the very same thing he didn't like in Aguina. Ms. Morgan writes:

"One problem, Mr. Soltz – you're a hypocrite and a liar.

Here's the image I downloaded on Thursday from Mr. Soltz's VoteVets.org website – a group that spent nearly $2 million in the 2006 election cycle to defeat Republican candidates for Congress who supported the missions of our troops in Iraq.

There's Mr. Soltz using a picture of himself in his uniform right under a menu bar that shows which political candidates are "VoteVets.org Candidates" – you can view the photograph of Soltz in uniform on the VoteVets.org website until they realize he's busted and take it down."

You can access the above referenced photo by clicking here. There is Soltz's picture in military garb, using it as a platform for his anti-war message. Hypocrisy, hypocrisy, hypocrisy! How can a human being reject a person for doing the very thing that he himself has done? Of course, we all are guilty of this, but perhaps not in such a blatant fashion. Soltz's blind spot is exceedingly large. Soltz probably never even thought about his duplicity when he put down Aguina. And if he thought about it, he never thought he would get caught.

Pictures, quotes and stated positions recorded on paper betray a hypocrit. The same information on the Internet does it quicker and is vastly far more reaching. The Web is indeed a web that catches the fraudulent. It is a tool that exposes fraud to an enormous number of people, most of whom would never have known about this hypocrisy in pre-Internet days. Of course, Soltz will never admit to this duplicity. But now we know.