Hypocrisy in Politics

I got in a pissing contest with someone who I thought at one time was a friend. I no longer consider them as such, and am sure they likewise do not consider me as one.

What bothers me most about many on the right is not their principles, though I often may disagree with those. I am bothered by their hypocrisy. There is a verse in the Christian Bible about straining at a gnat but swallowing a camel. They strain at the gnats of those on the left, but swallow the camels of those on the right. They easily accept lying, cheating, sexual misconduct, and drug use by their right wing icons. At the same time they rail against peccadilloes of left wing leaders. They have two standards – a much harsher one for people on the left, but a very forgiving one for those on the right.

To me there should be one set of standards, not two. Yet we have people excoriating Bill Clinton for his affairs, yet quite unconcerned about the affairs of Newt Gingrich, Donald Trump, Rudolph Giuliani, Dennis Hastert, and so many more. I will very freely say that Clinton was wrong to have affairs and to use his office to seduce young women. He is far from alone in that. As I recall, the historian Theodore White, who followed many presidential campaigns, said there were only two nominees for president who did not have affairs during their campaigns – one was Jimmy Carter, and for obvious reasons he refused to name the other. We know Roosevelt, Kennedy, Eisenhower, and Johnson had affairs, and one knowledgeable biographer says Nixon did as well. No less than Henry Kissinger, who was hardly an attractive man, said there was no aphrodisiac like power.

The right wing has been obsessed with Benghazi, which indeed was a tragedy. Yet there was never any outcry when the US embassy in Lebanon was attacked and 63 people killed under Reagan, or the follow up attack the next year killing another 24 people, or the Marine barracks bombing that killed 241 American and 58 French soldiers. That amounts to nearly 400 people killed in one country under Reagan, with no blame attached to the president. But Benghazi with 4 deaths has become a major scandal?

Now I take issue with Obama on some of his actions – his expansion of drone warfare with extra-judicial killings, for one thing – his expansion and increase of deportations of undocumented immigrants, for another.

I think Hillary was phenomenally stupid to use a private email server and effectively try to cover that up. On the other hand they only found a very small number of classified documents among those emails, none of which were properly marked as classified, and many of which were only classified at a later date. We’ve since found that Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush, and Dick Cheney all used non-governmental email servers. Furthermore Bush and Cheney “lost” some 22 million emails, contrasted to the 33 thousand missing from Clinton’s server. There was some stir about that, but nothing like the accusations against Clinton.

I could go on and on, but I find that the right is very forgiving of the sins of its leaders, while very unforgiving of the sins of its opponents. The left often does not seem especially concerned with the sins of either side, but appears to me to be more balanced in its denunciations.