Nasty Nancy
It’s once again clear — the Speaker of the House is a hideous, hypocritical harpy.
by Scott McKay
September 4, 2020, 12:05 AM
It was said a long time ago, in a different era, that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.
I would like to think that’s still true, but today’s media and political culture certainly doesn’t operate that way. Today, and really since the 1990s when Bill Clinton couldn’t be defended any other way, it appears the worst thing a public figure can be is a hypocrite.
An example of this I carry with me is Louisiana’s 2015 gubernatorial election, when David Vitter went from a fairly popular U.S. Senator to a blowout loser against a fringe Democrat state legislator not solely because of his past dalliances with ladies of the evening, but probably mostly because of them.
Democrats have burned down the salon’s Yelp page with bad reviews, and for all intents and purposes its owner is finished in business.
But Vitter, who it’s been long rumored had recreational tastes which given our current cultural norms (or lack thereof) come off as relatively tame, really paid the price for his indiscretions because he had built his political brand as a “family-values†conservative. For voters to know he didn’t practice what he preached was too much for Louisiana’s electorate to stand; this in a state which had four times elected the blindingly corrupt satyr Edwin Edwards four times as governor and twice delivered its electoral votes for Clinton, who had been a governor next door and whose rapey sexual pursuits were well known even prior to 1992.
But Edwards and Clinton had something on Vitter. Namely, they “weren’t hypocrites.†They freely admitted they were sleazeballs without moral standards, and in so doing somehow immunized themselves from criticism of their sleazeballery.
It’s OK not to have moral standards, and in fact it’s preferable in politics, because once you profess those you had better meet them on the regular. Values, it turns out, cannot be aspirational.
more
https://spectator.org/nasty-nancy/
