House of Eratosthenes

When I was younger, if you defined for me a “scandal” as something that blows over if it affects a democrat but ends a career if it affects a Republican, I would have dismissed this as just so much whiny paranoid conservative right-wing garbage. But now, after so many years of seeing it work that way with so few exceptions, I’m just amazed it’s taken me so long to accept it. I find it even more amazing people can’t just look at what’s going on and just see it, like, instantly.

About the most charitable interpretation you could apply is that as a country we have an abrupt limit to our patience where hypocrisy is concerned. Republican politician says we need more “family values,” his donk opposition says no, we need people to be less judgmental — both get caught in scandal — I suppose you could have a greater desire to see the conservative bite the mat, without being prejudiced against conservatives. There you have a situation where both sides did something wrong, but only one side is a hypocrite. Maybe that’s all that is happening.

We can award forgiveness to our perverts and our white-collar criminals and our liars, just not to our hypocrites.

This is a worthwhile theory, and it can survive some scrutiny…even significant scrutiny. But not too much. Once you start to look at some other issues besides the famleeeee valyoooooz, you tend to make a rather surprising discovery about hypocrisy, and our tolerance of it. It turns out we have some. We have quite a bit.

Take tax policy as an example. if you’re serving as a “progressive” donk politician and you’re pissing and moaning about the public debt, how we need to “roll back the tax cuts of George W. Bush” so we don’t add on to the deficit too much, and to do that we need to soak the rich — I don’t think it’s the slobbering rabid right-wing Republican in me who wants to know if you’re mailing something extra to the federal treasury every year because you don’t think you’re being taxed enough. That’s not a right-wing question; it’s a neutral, and reasonable, question. Just because our print-media people aren’t inclined to ask it, doesn’t mean it isn’t the natural question to ask. Certainly not when you start bragging about how rich you are personally, and see this just proves how righteous you are because you want a tax policy that’s going to be unhelpful to you personally because you’re willing to “sacrifice.” I don’t think wanting to see your check stubs for those “extra” taxes your paying, is partisan. It’s just common sense. You think we don’t tax rich people enough, you’re rich yourself, you’re even bragging about it…show me your canceled checks for the “extra” taxes you’ve been paying. It’s perfectly legal to pay more taxes than what you owe in this country. The treasury won’t say no.

So to me, in a land that is ideologically-centered but shows glaring intolerance of hypocrisy, we wouldn’t have any politicians like this. In other words, give me twenty legislators who want to hike the marginal income tax rates and the capital gains taxes and the death tax, you should be able to show me twenty legislators who’ve been sending in “extra personal taxes” at the end of the year because they don’t think they’ve been getting taxed enough. Well, guess what. We’ve got all kinds of creeps under the dome that want to raise taxes. Rich creeps, who hire accountants you and I can’t afford to hire, to snag every single loophole that can be snagged just like any other financially savvy rich person. If that isn’t hypocrisy, why, I don’t know what is.

And there’s more than just the tax issue. There’s gun control…we have hypocrites there. Politicians using firearms, or hiring people who use firearms, to buttress and safeguard their personal safety, simultaneously working overtime to make sure it’s illegal for you and me to do the same thing. Hypocrisy. Hate crimes…as I was noticing last week, Janet Reno liked to pick-and-choose what would be prosecuted as a hate crime, apparently according to who was doing the hating and who was hated. You know, there are some powerful arguments in favor of and opposed to hate crime legislation, but it seems to me if you’re going to prosecute hate crimes in one direction, you should be willing to do it in all directions. Otherwise — that’s another example of hypocrisy.

I’m not jotting this down to pass judgment on it, that’s for the electorate to decide…or, I’ll pass judgment on it in some other essay, where that’s more in keeping with the point I want to make. In this space, I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on: Do we have a societal value or set of values, a universal moral code if you will, that bristles with hatred against hypocrisy down to the marrow of it’s bones? Erm…no. No, that’s not it. It’s silly to entertain it seriously even for a few minutes. We’re just fine with hypocrisy.

Even if it has to do with our leaders telling us not to do something, and then going off and doing that very same thing themselves. We will find a way to deal.

Now, nobody ever reads this blog, as I keep saying…but if you were to pore over the hundreds and hundreds of postings, you would see an ongoing theme where we catch “us,” as in the big “we,” pretending to be independent thinkers and making up our own minds on things…but in reality, getting told what to do, carrying it out, and looking back toward whoever told us to do it, so we can do what they want us to do next. In early 21st-century western civilization, this is the great tragedy of the human race. We like to think we arrive at conclusions independently — this is good, that is bad, we should stop doing such-and-such, so-and-so’s gotta step down — but…we don’t. We are pilot whales. We are lemmings. We think what we’re told to think.

We have to do this. How can we not?

After all, we’ve been sold on the idea that if two guys live next door to each other, one believes in Creationism and the other one believes in Evolution, they can’t be friends. Certain individuals, of course, have friendships they truly treasure, and with those ideologically-opposed friends, they become exceptions to the rule. But overall, the pattern holds firm. And it is truly sad. You think Atlantis existed, and your friend doesn’t…you think Jack The Ripper was a woman, your friend says otherwise…you think O.J. Simpson got away with murder, your friend says he was framed…you must stop being friends now. You’re not supposed to have anything to say to each other, except for periodic attempts to show each other how wrong you are.

So…to stay friends with people, we have to agree with them about things. We’ve lost the ability to maintain camaraderie with acquaintances who’ve looked at the same facts and formed different conclusions. If not lost it, we’ve allowed much of it to erode away.

And we’re a gregarious species. To our credit, we want to get along with each other.

So you see, logically, there’s no place else we can take that. We have to make sure we all think the same thing about a given situation. If everybody “knows” something is true and in our hearts, as thinking individuals, we know the opposite…we have to give that up for the sake of getting along with others. It’s got to be that way.

And in the right line of work, you get to tell people what they should be thinking, all day, every day. It’s really become rather useless and redundant to argue whether these kinds of professionals are slanted toward progressive political candidates and solutions. Everybody knows by now that they are; nobody’s saying otherwise, except the progressive candidates who are being handed sweetheart free-publicity deals and softball questions, and just a few of the journalists who are inclined to vote for them. To the rest of us, it’s become abundantly clear. Editors, columnists, people who are in the business of telling the rest of us what to think — they just like democrats.

Except the talk-radio heads. For a number of reasons, that’s different. I’ll get to that some other time.

But our print and electronic opinion-maker people, they really do love those democrats. Nowhere is this more plainly obvious, than in America’s newest tradition: The scandal. Conservative Republicans don’t survive them; liberal donks do. One scandal turns out that way, then another, then another…nobody questions it anymore. The questions are now reserved for milestones. How long till the conservative guy resigns? Is the liberal guy all done riding this thing out yet, or is there more to come? As far as how it’s going to turn out — there isn’t even any mystery to it anymore. Newspaper people want the Republicans to bite dust and for the liberal donks to hang tough…the rest of us obediently comply. And so this is the way things turn out. What was done, what we know about what was done — what, you thought those things had something to do with it? They don’t.

Yesterday morning, I tripped across Panda’s Thumb’s comment that scandals seem to afflict “Creationist” types disproportionately. I said the Thumb was correct, but not in the way the Thumb thought — the scandal has become an instrument in the surgical procedure that is the periodic removal of those who are religion-inclined.

…Panda’s Thumb is right: Scandals disproportionately afflict those failing to demonstrate an inimicable attitude toward religion, failing to embrace secularism. Scandals will continue to be pointed in that direction, toward those targets. The theory is correct, just not for the reasons thought.

That was yesterday. Today is today.

Effort to oust Doolittle grows
Embattled by scandal, he faces a possible fight to keep his seat.
By David Whitney – Bee Washington Bureau

One by one, Republicans are lining up to elbow John Doolittle out of the way.

Conservative Air Force reservist Eric Egland, who appeared in an ad for Doolittle last year, says he will run against the congressman in the June primary, and he’s already raised $100,000.

Moderate Mike Holmes, the Auburn city councilman who received 33 percent of the primary vote against Doolittle last year, says he will try again.

Last week, Roseville Assemblyman Ted Gaines, another Republican politically aligned with Doolittle, all but announced his candidacy, saying the congressman has lost his “moral ability to lead.”

Their collective message is that a federal investigation of Doolittle and his wife has become an insurmountable political obstacle.

If Doolittle doesn’t make plans to retire, they say he will have to be defeated in a primary to prevent Democrat Charlie Brown from capturing the 4th Congressional District.

Republican consultant Jeff Flint said it’s time for party leaders to take action to prevent Doolittle from seeking a 10th term next year.

“Eventually, the party leadership is going to have a serious conversation with him,” Flint said. “Those things tend to work better sooner than later. If you wait too long, it just taints the whole district. You end up losing the district even if the troubled incumbent is not the nominee anymore.”

What’s the story missing? It’s missing an event that made it imperative to do a write-up about the situation. Other than the elections next year, there isn’t one…there’s a scandal, with an associated hubbub that’s been waxing and waning for many years now. Nothing has happened with the scandal lately, nothing at all. It’s just kind of hanging out there. It was supposed to create a desired result, it has not done so yet — and so it’s time to write up a story about the “troubled” and “embattled” congressman Doolittle.

You see, our newspaper editors don’t get to decide how we vote. But they do get to decide what we talk about.

And if Doolittle was a liberal donk, this would not be happening. The layman doesn’t understand what Doolittle did wrong, and the scandal is over two years old. Granted, those are very dismal reasons for overlooking, or dismissing, a scandal. But let’s face it: For a liberal donk, either one of those would be more than adequate. Liberal donk does something wrong, nobody really understands what it was…well, that’s okay. Or…scandal grows around the liberal donk, two years into it the donk is still there — well, just forget it then. The public is “tired” of the scandal. You’ve “shot your wad.” “Move on.”

Both of those factors together? The scandal has crossed the two year mark, and nobody understood what it was all about in the first place? Hah! Forget it. A liberal donk, in that situation, would have nothing to worry about. He’d live to bury us all.

But Doolittle is a conservative Republican, with short fine slick black hair parted on one side.

Look at the week just gone past that this Sunday edition of the newspaper “bookended”: Yes, Sen. Larry Craig got taken down. In record time. Which further helps to support my theory…but something else happened. Hillary Clinton learned one of her most energetic fund-raisers was a fugitive on the run from the law.

That is a scandal. Hillary will survive it, relatively unscathed. Larry Craig did not survive his…Doolittle will not survive his either. Deep down, anybody who’s paid more than a passing glance worth of attention to this kind of issue, knows this is exactly how things will turn out. Why things are this way, nobody can explain. Not according to an innocent viewpoint about how our political society judges people, they can’t. By being cynical, and suspecting the worst, I think I’ve cobbled together a serviceable explanation above.

It is the only one…the ONLY one…that works. We just aren’t into right-and-wrong that much. We just don’t care. We’re into making sure donks live to fight another day, and elephants bite the dust. Our newspaper editors, you see, want things to be that way. And we all want to get along with each other. Therefore, we comply.

And we’re worried about “civil liberties” because some murderous creep down in Gitmo doesn’t understand air conditioning, and thinks he’s tortured when a machine blows cold air into his cell? I dunno, y’all…seems a better sense of perspective is overdue.

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[…] Scandals and Leftists Fred’s The One Everywhere Like Such As Things That Make Me Barf Imitation is the SincerestForm XX Idiots and Segways This Is Good XLIII Jackasses Ride It Out, Pachyderms Fall And Stay Down On Thompson Creationist Scandals I’m Fifty-Four Percent Addicted… Repeal the Seventeenth I’m a Slithering Reptile […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 09/06/2007 @ 09:15

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Jackasses Ride It Out, Pachyderms Fall And Stay DownSunday, September 2nd, 2007

Jackasses Ride It Out, Pachyderms Fall And Stay Down
Sunday, September 2nd, 2007