In this partisan, acrimonious, political environment in which we currently live, and at this point in time in our nation’s evolution, any elected official needs as much support from his constituency which he or she can gather. After the offense, that support base will undoubtedly diminish, and render their service less effective.

As for resignation, you might check out this.

Identity Politics thrives on dysfunction. It sets the agenda and perversion…light or deep…. becomes the perfect diversion as the edifice is gutted and cleaned down to a gleaming carcass bleaching on the banks of the Potomac.

If we had a government that governed appropriately, there would be no place for identity politics because all that very human state of affairs that inhabits identity politics would be occurring, as it always has, within the society but not distracting our government from its chaste rounds.

Actually, if Begalla were more careful, he would not bandy about the word “hypocrisy” and “Government” in the same breath because to refer to what we now have in this Mob-surrendered landscape as “Government” is the very definition of “hypocrisy”.

The Skinner Box loves an orgy. In fact, a good old fashioned nervous orgy is the Skinner Box’s Utopia.

I do not know which particular pale some of my remarks are beyond. But I do know our society has gone beyond the pale as the early English settlers of Ireland thought they understood. We live in an age of highly organized barbarism. When Eliot wrote that modern westerners were “destroying our ancient edificies to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp their mechanised caravans,” he was anticipating our own age. My wife confirmed this the other day, when she pointed out a mall parking lot which had flattened and blackened over the birth place of an American Revolutionary general. In such an unpretty pass, the best I can do is remind the nomads what vices they paint over with the language of rights, “preference,” and other unfortunate euphemisms.

Nathan, “Midwest,” and “Weasley”: thanks for the kind words, and I’m glad my essay could be of some interest. BN, thanks for reading; I’m quite aware no one in the world needs more things to read, and so I’m grateful to all those who stop by the Porch to take a look.

“You know, when I was a young man, hypocrisy was deemed the worst of vices,” Finkle-McGraw said. “It was all because of moral relativism. You see, in that sort of a climate, you are not allowed to criticize others-after all, if there is no absolute right and wrong, then what grounds is there for criticism? … Now, this led to a good deal of general frustration, for people are naturally censorious and love nothing better than to criticize others’ shortcomings. And so it was that they seized on hypocrisy and elevated it from a ubiquitous peccadillo into the monarch of all vices. For, you see, even if there is no right and wrong, you can find grounds to criticize another person by contrasting what he has espoused with what he has actually done. In this case, you are not making any judgement whatsoever as to the correctness of his views or the morality of his behaviour-you are merely pointing out that he has said one thing and done another. Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy.

Later:

We take a somewhat different view of hypocrisy,” Finkle-McGraw continued. “In the late-twentieth-century Weltanschauung, a hypocrite was someone who espoused high moral views as part of a planned campaign of deception-he never held these beliefs sincerely and routinely violated them in privacy. Of course, most hypocrites are not like that. Most of the time it’s a spirit-is-willing, flesh-is-weak sort of thing.”

“That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code,” Major Napier said, working it through, “does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code.”

“Of course not,” Finkle-McGraw said. “It’s perfectly obvious, really. No one ever said that it was easy to hew to a strict code of conduct. Really, the difficulties involved-the missteps we make along the way-are what make it interesting. The internal, and external struggle, between our base impulses and the rigorous demands of our own moral system is quintessentially human. It is how we conduct ourselves in that struggle that determines how we may in time be judged by a higher power.”

I get no sense of schadenfreude from Sanford’s misdeeds. We all have “feet of clay” and there is a difference between understanding and condoning. That seems to be lacking in the piece.

James Matthew Wilson answers the questions I posed yesterday. Yikes! This is powerful rhetoric, especially the section “Ah, the Hypocrites: American Utilitarian Relativism at Its Finest”. That’s an acid pen I really wouldn’t …

Apparently dissenting from traditional morality and such harsh criticisms of a fallen man constitute trying, eh?