Zombie: The "Hypocrisy" Distinction Favored By The Press Makes No Sense

I've noted this before; other people have too. But Zombie puts it clearly for those who still don't get it.

The media and the left (but I repeat myself) always, always claim that the reason they cover conservative sex scandals like gangbusters -- and additionally write stories connecting the Shamed One to the party generally, something they never do with liberals', where each man's sins are his and his alone -- is that conservatives run on something called "Family Values" or "Morality."

For one thing, look, idiots: Every politician in this country, including your precious Democrats, runs on a platform of helping families. Show me the politician who doesn't. Since something like 65% of the country is part of a current family (I just made that up, shut up) it would be insane not to make promises to such a huge swathe of voters.

And if you claim otherwise, show me the Democratic politicians running expressly on an anti-family platform. Okay, that's too much; how about show me one who's running on a family-neutral platform?

This whole thing about "families" is a despicable lie. The media says "family values" to euphemize what they're really talking about: The Republican Party is, as a party, resistant to gay marriage.

Fucking period.

That's all we're talking about here. That's all that matters. The GOP is against gay marriage, in the main, and the Democratic Party is for gay marriage, in the main.

That is the only distinction. Whoops: And abortion. Forgot that one.

So tell me how any straight politician's chasing heterosexual ass is implicated by his stance on gay marriage?

And tell me-- how is Anthony Weiner, who, as far as I know, did not insist on some kind of special exemption to the usual litany of promises made in a marriage ceremony, not a hypocrite?

Did Anthony Weiner ever announce, publicly, "I believe marriage is primarily a tax-minimization arrangement, and the other elements of it are generally optional"?

No, he didn't.

The liberal media's go-to excuse for partisanship-driven sex-scandalmongering is that, apparently, liberal politicians typically sell themselves to voters as sexual libertines.

They do? Who? I can only think of one guy who did something remotely similar to that, and he was Republican -- Schwarzenegger.

Who else? Show me which married Democrats do not feature their wives and children prominently in campaign commercials and campaign literature.

You think that's just... an accident? That they're broadcasting their normalness and wholesomeness to a public that responds favorably to such things?

But whenever Republicans do it, it is, as the left has it, "using children as a prop" and of course inviting scrutiny on the marital-fidelity front.

Where are, exactly, these Democrats who don't hold up a stable family headed by loving, faithful parents as the ideal? Where are these Democrats who publicly announce "I don't think marital fidelity is a particularly important value"?

Show them to me. Show me where they've signed a petition making such a statement.

No, this is simply about naked partisanship -- get those conservatives! protect those liberals -- with a meagerest fig-leaf of distinction made to justify their partisan agenda.

And as has been pointed out before -- Mary Katharine Ham just name-checked the idea on Bill O'Reilly last night -- if you're going to use "hypocrisy" as a justification for Full Spectrum coverage of conservative sex problems, then do note the major, major hypocrisy of a dirty son-of-a-bitch like Charles Rangel who runs on a platform of Big Government and the Sanctity of High Taxation Rates who then turns around and "forgets" to report big ticket items in his income.

Or a son-of-a-bitch like Charles Schumer, Hero of the Common Working Man, taking in more money from Big Banking than almost anyone in history.

Hypocrisy there?

Or how about Obama, running on a platform of "people-powered politics," fired up, ready to go on the grassroots, anti-corporation level, who decides he needs to do curry favor with his well-heeled corporate donor buddies a little more and Bejazzles his administration with corporate bigs from key cash-money-donation industries?

Hypocrisy?

No, you know which party gets the most media coverage on this kind of scandal? Also Republicans.

I'd be completely willing to stipulate, for the record, that conservatives say they love families and morality, and therefore should get especially harsh treatment when they err in such matters.

If I secured a reciprocal agreement that Democrats love the government and "the people" more and therefore should get especially harsh treatment when they steal from their beloved government by not paying taxes or sell out their beloved "people" by sucking up to corporate interests.

But of course I won't get that.

The media will just keep insisting, at the time of scandal, that Democrats are sexually libertine and therefore are not hypocrites on these issues.

But at voting time? In campaign season? On election day?

Oddly enough, I never hear the media announce "And also running is Anthony Weiner, who, as you might know, does not particularly support families and also doesn't subscribe to conventional moral beliefs."

Funny, the media never tells me that when I'm getting ready to vote, but all of a sudden when a Democrat gets his prank caught in someone else's in-box, then I'm told "Well of course he was never a big believer in your Victorian bourgeois sexual rigidity, you know."

No, I didn't know. No one ever mentioned that. Funny, I think some voters might have been interested to hear that before the actual day of the election.

You Know... This is entirely in the media's power to prove or disprove.

They could just ask their beloved Democrats, on the record, if they consider themselves to be uninterested in conventional sexual morality.

And then, if a candidate says "Yeah, I'm sort of a sexual libertine, I don't truck much with these artificial constraints on our expressions of ourselves as sexual beings," I'd say, "Okay, well, that guy right there? He can't really be a hypocrite on these issues."

But, of course, they don't ask this. Because they just want the public to assume that the Democrat in question "shares their values" -- including on notions about sexuality -- at election time.

The "he never represented himself as anything except a pooter-hound" defense only gets trotted out when necessary.

If you want the benefits of electing yourself to a special category, you must do so in advance. You must declare yourself as being beyond such bourgeois thinking.

You cannot play-act as someone who "shares the values" of normal family-oriented Americans and then one day say you take it back.

And the media can't do this on behalf of Democrats.

Speaking of the Hypocrisy Defense: A comedian, who I never thought was funny, "joked" that he would kill Palin, should she be elected president.

The media will not cover this outrageous statement, of course.

I can only assume that's because of some other weird claim make up to justify disparate treatment, like "Oh, Sarah Palin? Yeah, she never really said she was interested in living so we don't bother covering her announced would-be assassins."

posted by Ace at 06:01 PM

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