Nemesis Strikes Again

Victor Davis Hanson returns once again to the theme of Nemesis in this piece over at Pajamas Media.

Nemesis is always hot on the trail of hubris, across time and space, and the goddess has been particularly busy in destroying the carefully crafted images of Bono, John Edwards, Timothy Geithner, Al Gore, Eliot Spitzer, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Anthony Weiner, and a host of others. What do their tax hypocrisies, sexual indulgences, and aristocratic socialist lifestyles all have in common?

Collectively, they represent a self-appointed or elected global elite that oversees, lectures about — in sanctimonious fashion — the ethical responsibilities of the redistributive state. Bono and his ensemble may be the highest paid rock group in the world, the most eager to shake a finger at Western governments on their moral duties to help the less fortunate. He is a pop icon always ready to fault the consumerist Western lifestyle. But Bono and his pals are quite determined to avoid Irish tax laws to ensure more of their hard-won capitalist profits so necessary to support their global lifestyles, at a time when their alma mater is broke and unable to fund its once ample entitlements.

They are all part of what Angelo Codevilla called the Ruling Class. They make the rules to apply to us, but not to them.

The always astute commenter cfbleachers adds the following to VDH's piece:

If you pay homage to the leftist propaganda machine, you don’t have to worry about accountability.

You have to worry about karma.

You have to be a complete imbecile to be a leftist and get caught in a scandal. Tony Baloney lied through his teeth, blamed others, said it was a frame up by wingnuts, said he was hacked….

John Edwards lived in “two Americas”, one where honor and integrity were merely trifling things and the other where he lied about them with impunity.

Barney Frank has never been made to come clean about the prostitution ring in his basement or his close ties to Fannie’s internal collapse.

Obama and Rezco, his and Michelle’s law licenses, Ayers, ….there is a pathway from the lack of accountability that leads directly to corruption.

Republicans, being held to a higher standard by BOTH constituencies, fair far worse when exposed.

Leftists being held to NO standard by their own, and, in fact often given great cover…are the new integrity welfare state. They are dependent upon the coverup and corruption in the media and their inner circles. The conspiracy of silence destroys their need for honor.

Nothing they do, say or promote gets examined…and therefore it becomes weak, corrupt and necrotic.

They are the permanent ethical underclass, living in a ghetto of no scruples. And, worst of all…it looks like paradise to them.

Read it all.
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What Mob Rule Actually Looks Like

The latest Democrat talking point is that the large groups of TEA Party and other like-minded people showing up at town hall meetings to confront democratic politicians on the healthcare plan are resorting to "mob rule". Michelle Malkin does us the courtesy of showing us what angry mobs really look like.

Who's A Hypocrite?

The outing of Rep. David Vitter as having availed himself of the services a practitioner of the oldest profession, apparently on more than one occasion, was the big scandal of the week. Of course this was followed by the usual charges of hypocrisy (h/t Instapundit). I'd never really thought much about the definition of hypocrisy but Best of the Web Today had an interesting take from a reader on Thursday (sorry, BOTW doesn't utilize permalinks for individual items, scroll a little more than half way down) which got me thinking about it. Reader Andy Ritter had the following to say:

“Hypocrisy does not mean saying one thing and doing the opposite. It means saying something that one does not believe. Let's take the example of getting drunk. Let's say that I believe that getting drunk is immoral. Does it make me a hypocrite if I get drunk? No, it makes me weak. I could believe that it is immoral but still not be able to resist the temptation to get drunk. It doesn't make my belief any less true or my actions any
worse.

Now let's say that Larry Flynt doesn't believe that getting drunk is immoral. What are his consequences of getting drunk? Your comment on his living up to his own low moral standards hits the nail on the head. Objectively, my getting drunk is no more or less immoral than Larry Flynt's.

If Larry Flynt attacked me for getting drunk, that would be hypocrisy, because he doesn't believe that getting drunk is immoral. It's hypocrisy for him to say that it's OK for him to get drunk but not OK for me to get drunk.

We saw the mainstream media's reaction to Rush Limbaugh's addiction to pain killers and Bill Bennett's gambling problem. These men were not hypocrites. I guarantee you that neither of these men wished for their own problems, and, after having gone through what they did, they most likely feel even more strongly about them than they did before. Again, weakness, not hypocrisy.”

So really, the definition of a hypocrite is not someone who fails to live up to the standards they espouse, there is nobody that can do that all the time and by that definition everyone is a hypocrite, but rather someone who holds others to a higher standard than he does for himself. Larry Flynt is projecting.

7/14 Update: More evidence as to who the real hypocrites are (also via Instapundit).