Over at The Daily Beast, Lee Siegel writes this: “Creepy as Anthony Wiener’s photos are, the level of outrage aimed at him is wildly unfair. We’d have no heroes left if we held everyone to this ridiculous standard.”
Just when you think that discourse in our nation has gotten to the bottom of the barrel, you discover that the barrel is much bigger than we heretofore thought.
This original defense puts a photo of Weiner alongside a photo of Martin Luther King, Jr., and goes on to argue that King was a compulsive liar and shameless womanizer, which is true enough, and goes on to argue that our need for particular political results trumps any requirement to have our heroes be more than two-dimensional props in the campaign to solemnize said political results. This is the “Dear Leader” concept of heroes.
Say that somebody is a skuzzbucket. Say further that he promotes and whoops for right-minded and progressive legislation in all its manifestations. The fact that he is a skuzzbucket will be excused and overlooked to whatever extent possible. As soon as it becomes impossible, since the goal is power over others, the hapless tool will be dropped, and another one picked up. But if a conservative skuzzbucket tweets something his mother would rather he hadn’t, the calls for a resignation will be strident, continued, insistent, and loud.
Jonah Goldberg of National Review has mentioned that the lowest form of punditry is “what if Bush had done that?” but the reason it comes up over and over is that if Bush, or one of his aides, or a congressman he liked, had done this thing, the resposne of our public establishment would have been completely different than it is now.
But this double standard does not exist for its own sake. The progressives are in the game to win it, and they don’t mind cheating — because their sole point is to win the game and take the trophy. In an honest game of football, an honest player does not mind if the other team passes the ball. To be expected. He doesn’t mind if the other team runs the ball. He expects that as well. But a cheating player does mind if the other team cheats. Now why is that? Because the whole point of cheating is to gain an unfair advantage, and a cheater objects to other cheating because he does not want his newly acquired advantage to be taken away.
So whenever you see liberals excusing for themselves what they loudly condemn in the other team, remind yourself of this. The point for them is not personal consistency (obviously). The point for them is to get what they want.