Hypocrisy has had a high profile on my blog this summer, especially as it relates to the emerging attitudes of young people.
One of the current hypocrisy poster boys is Senator John Ensign, who really drove home what is acceptable and not acceptable in the prevailing attitudes of those who claim the moral high ground.
The Senator, who roundly condemned then-President Clinton’s sexual peccadillo and subsequent lying to a grand jury, said, “I haven’t done anything legally wrong.” (My emphasis.)
Which mean that if Clinton had admitted screwing around with Monica Lewinsky it would have made it a “distraction” (Ensign’s term for what …read more

The road to hypocrisy is pave with ideologies.
This is especially obvious in the confirmation comments around Judge Sotomayor.
According to Republicans she would bring bias to the Court, but we already have that in the current Court.
The difference is that the current bias is in tune with Conservative Republicans, whereas Sotomayor’s MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) isn’t.
So the “we want to avoid bias on the Court” is more correctly stated as “we want to avoid bias on the Court unless it agrees with ours.”
Beliefs are based on and fed by passion, whether it’s religious or ecological; animal lover or tree hugger, the …read more

Last Thursday the John Ensign (US Senator) scandal triggered a post about the hypocrisy kids see these days in so-called leaders; not their lies, but their over the top do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do attitudes and actions.
In response, Dan Erwin commented that rather than standards, i.e., set rules, he preferred to teach his kids about covenants, because “Legalism, in all its forms, is really death-giving stuff. I go back to covenant…covenants get renegotiated.”
By definition, a covenant is “an agreement, usually formal, between two or more persons to do or not do something specified.”
But Ensign’s hypocrisy was pushed off the hot seat by the same …read more

(Today continues a conversation initiated last Thursday and added to yesterday.)
Everybody lies about sex. Those who aren’t getting any say they are and those who are getting it where they shouldn’t deny it.
Governor Mark Sanford followed the same path of Newt Gingrich, Bob Livingston, Rudy Giuliani, John Ensign, David Vitter, Larry Craig, Mark Foley, Helen Chenoweth (the first woman) and many more.
But you know what?
I don’t care. At least, not about the sex—or even the lies. Even the lies under oath, because I don’t believe that an oath is going to change someone’s attitude about admitting something they don’t want …read more

Thursday I wrote about today’s excessive hypocrisy using, among other examples, Senator John Ensign.
Like most bloggers, I post ahead, so that I wasn’t able to include South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford.
Today I want to offer up some quotes from him and tomorrow I’m going to address the subjects brought up by Dan Erwin and Becky Robinson in the comments on Thursday’s post.
“The bottom line, though, is I am sure there will be a lot of legalistic explanations pointing out that the president lied under oath. His [Livingston] situation was not under oath. The bottom line, though, is he still lied. …read more

Oh what great examples are presented to kids these days.
Some of the worst types of hypocrites are thriving.
The first are all the ‘leaders’ who turn out to be crooks—Dennis Kowalski, Jeffrey Skilling, Bernie Madoff and a host of other hedge fund managers—to name a very few.
Then there are those who don’t practice what they preach; worse, they preach from very high profiles and at very loud levels.
I hate using political examples, but they’re the most prevalent.
One such is former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who acknowledged having an extramarital affair even as he led the charge against President Clinton over the …read more