Day By Day© by Chris Muir.

Friday, October 28, 2005

Hypocrits who live in glass houses

Jonah Goldberg has written a delightful column about the hypocrisy inherent in the Left's obsession with the Right's hypocrisy. Although I think you should give yourself the pleasure of the whole column, I was particularly charmed with this paragraph, and can't resist passing it on to you immediately:

Now, I've written thousands of words on why I don't think hypocrisy is the worst sin imaginable. There's not a good parent in the world who hasn't felt like a hypocrite at one point or another with their kids. Telling your kids not to do certain bad or unwise things you did when you were a kid may feel hypocritical, but telling your children it's O.K. to do wrong out of some craving to be hip or to assuage your own conscience is the most asinine form of vanity I can imagine. Similarly, it's certainly wrong to do drugs, but does giving in to your addiction mean you should also advocate doing drugs for everybody? During the run-up to the Iraq war, how many times did we hear that it was hypocritical for the United States to topple Saddam since we'd worked with him in the 1980s? The upshot seemed to be that it is better to do wrong consistently than do right inconsistently. [Emphasis mine.]