Hypocrisy
“Ye hypocrites, well did Esaias prophesy of you, saying, this people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me.” Matt 15:7-8
There appear to be two great sins in politics these days. The first sin is some public revelation of sexual immorality. This sin will get you in the paper, but you may be able to survive. The second is hypocrisy. That also by itself is not fatal as the current administration has proved. Commit both of these sins, however, and you are front page news and your career is over.
This isn’t anything new.
Gary Hart committed both of these sins when he challenged reporters to prove that he had been unfaithful to his wife. They did and it was the end of both his bid for the Presidency and his public life.
What really put an end to Newt Gingrich’s political career was the revelation that while he was savaging President Clinton for his affair with Monica Lewinsky he was engaged in a remarkably similar affair with a married woman.
Same thing with the conservative evangelical minister and Focus on the Family spokesperson, Ted Haggard. It was the combination of his relentless condemnation of homosexuals and an affair with a male prostitute that brought him down.
Governor Elliot Spitzer is the latest victim of this perfect storm of political bad news. He built his political career on his aggressive pursuit of white collar criminals and prostitution while spending an estimated $80K with a prostitute.
What I’m curious about is what this says about us as a country.
Why is this the untouchable third rail in US politics and not something more tangible like lying to the public, mismangement, graft, or corruption?
Infidelity doesn’t seem to bother the French. They just elected a man who was having an affair with a woman he recently married and the woman he just divorced admitted to a having an affair for two years prior to Sarkozy’s election while they still appeared in public as a married couple. The extramarital affairs of his predecessor Chirac were so well known that he often joked about them in public. But, at least in the case of Chirac, he publicly acknowledged his affairs thus avoiding the appearance of hypocrisy (with the obvious exception of his marriage vows).
Clearly all of the people involved in these incidents (men and women) displayed moral and ethical weakness, but why should this particular combination of weaknesses cause immediate and complete collapse of public trust only in this country?
Why do we immediately call with one voice for the resignation of people like Spitzer, for example, and tolerate a President who says that we don’t torture and then vetoes a bill making one particular form of torture (waterboarding) illegal?
Why do some in this country object to Senator Clinton as a candidate because of her husband’s past indiscretions, but continue to support the current President spending $12B a week in Iraq?
Why do we get all bent out of shape when the Mayor of Detroit’s affair (which he denied) is revealed through public disclosure of text messages, but support the President’s call for amnesty for the phone companies which allowed the government to illegally look at everyone’s text messages (and email, and phone conversations)?
All I can figure is that the hypocritical sex scandals seem so black and white. They appear so simple and the solutions so obvious. So we focus our attention on those rather than the real problems caused by our failure to hold our elected officials accountable for how they have been running our country.
Even in Jesus time, there were way more people willing to stone the adulteress than drive the money changers out the temple.
At the end of the day, does that make us the real hypocrites?
March 16th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
“Clearly all of the people involved in these incidents (men and women) displayed moral and ethical weakness, but why should this particular combination of weaknesses cause immediate and complete collapse of public trust only in this country?”
Answ: Perhaps we hold a higher standard than other countries, back in the day of being involved in sports, both in high school and college, we were told that we had to have a higher standard as athletes, why shouldnt this be held the same for elected officials. We didnt elect them to be doing monkey biz, just govt. biz.
“Why do some in this country object to Senator Clinton as a candidate because of her husband’s past indiscretions, but continue to support the current President spending $12B a week in Iraq?”
Answ: I object to the senator, not because of the former president’s indiscretions, but because she didnt have the moral courage to leave him back in his days as the Gov. of Arkansas. She used his coattails to ride into office, the whole time he was “sitting behind a desk”. I object to her qualifications, having not served a full term in the Senate, and having resided only in the White House. I object to her as a represenative of the people of NY, when she had never lived there prior, except to sneak in the minimum time needed to run for office. But hey, they elected her.
“Why do we get all bent out of shape when the Mayor of Detroit’s affair (which he denied) is revealed through public disclosure of text messages, but support the President’s call for amnesty for the phone companies which allowed the government to illegally look at everyone’s text messages (and email, and phone conversations)?”
Answ: I get “bent ouf of shape” because the man lied under oath. He didnt just deny the accusations, he swore in court that they were not true. I got bent out of shape several years ago when Bubba did the same thing. I got bent out of shape as a child when Nixon did the same thing. I had hoped for better from Newt. If you lied in court, or I for that matter, you wouldnt be running around saying a lynch mob was after you, you would be sitting in jail.
These people are elected to represent those who take the time to make decisions and vote them in. Their behavior should not be an issue in preventing them in doing the job that they were sent to do. They do not represent me, and they do nothing but bring shame on themselves, their families, their city, their state and their country.
There should not be scorn when one is idealistic, but there should be when elected officials do not live up to the same ideals they profess.
France….hmmm ok, where to start………….
March 22nd, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Mason,
Good to hear from you.
I didn’t mean to suggest that we shouldn’t hold elected officials to a higher standard.
What I find curious is that we only hold them to a higher standard with regard to hypocrisy in their personal life.
We seem perfectly willing to forgive Dick Cheney for lying about the relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam. We also forgave him for his vindictive reaction to Joe Wilson’s editorial in the NY Times and his relationship to Haliburton.
We’ve forgiven President Bush for ignoring al Qaeda before 9/11, starting a war in Iraq on false pretenses, losing track of bin Laden, gutting FEMA, and creating the largest gap between the rich and poor since the great deptression. We’ve also given him a pass on his past opposition to every scientific study coming out of his adminstration which supported global warming, and his promise to rebuild the gulf coast. We also don’t seem to care that we have the weakest dollar and the largest federal debt in history.
We’ve forgiven Alan Greenspan for both the dot com bubble and the current sub-prime meltdown.
This is what I, and I suspect the rest of world, don’t get.
Jeff