Disagreement on your part does not constitute hypocrisy on my part.

Sarah Palin isn't perfect.

Mostly because nobody is.

The GOP thinks she's perfect, at least insofar as a VP candidate goes, and that may be true, more or less.

But I would like to examine one version of one of the most popular arguments against her, as presented by the concerned DFL soccer moms of America.

Okay they're not an official group (at least not that I know of), but they do seem to have a loose confederation, and they're all over the comment boards of every news post about Sarah Palin with empty-headed offerings like this one:

Certainly one must be concerned with the radical firing of state employees, the ridiculous book banning and the daughters pregnancy. Not to mention the committee to 49 state the USA. I am much more concerned with the delightful birth of her beloved Downs syndrome son. I run a special needs program and have for 25 years and I truly love the DS children. Their potential is remarkable. But one child with this disability is a life long job in itself. My concern is as mother how she could subject her family to such scrutiny and leave so little time for working personally with her sons development. She has a lot on her plate...too much for my taste if she were to have to run the country as President. My plea would be to step down for her child's sake. Not to mention her teenage daughters recent exposure to millions...quite unfair to willingly have the family laundry dried out so publicly...

-Tracy somebody-or-other

"Certainly," we must be concerned about the daughter's pregnancy(?) (and oh yeah, a couple of things that have actual political implications), but what should we REALLY care about?

Why she's not at home where she belongs: in her housecoat, rattling pots & pans, and hovering over her baby.

This has got to be some kind of fucking joke. I don't even want to begin on what kind of fire and brimstone would rain down upon any conservative who said something so completely and utterly sexist about a liberal candidate. I don't even want to begin on what kind of fire and brimstone I'd rain down on a fellow conservative for saying such a thing, let alone a liberal. The truth is that no one would say this to my, or any other modern, intelligent woman's face (conservative or liberal), because they would have their head, immediately and unceremoniously, ripped right from their body.

And rightfully so.

Why people think the result would be any different online, I cannot begin to know. The hypocrisy is staggering.

I won't bother about "exposing" her teenage daughter to scrutiny. It wasn't Sarah who dragged her daughter into this. Someone ask the bloggers (those that insisted Trig was Bristol's child) who they think dragged Bristol into this. Every single letter of the above comment is nothing more than desperate, sanctimonious, moralizing bullshit. I though that was our turf, Tracy, you dumb box.

(That, friends, is how you do sexism right. I mean, if you're going to go for it, go for it. Throw a vagina reference in there.)

Anyway. I just had to get that out. The good news is that, aside from these apparently closeted social conservatives, most liberals (and especially women) are as repelled and disgusted by these kinds of arguments as conservatives are.

There may be hope for this country yet. At least women are willing to cross party lines to stick up for each other.

It's an interesting thing, hypocrisy. We all do it, yet we have no problem trying to elevate it to the status of a moral sin. In politics, some would have you believe that it is the single most atrocious sin. The implication being that anyone who is hypocritical cannot or should not run for office, be elected, or ever be trusted about anything.

Naturally, this is ridiculous. This rules out the entire population of planet earth. But there is a sort of method to the madness.

I suppose if you can successfully argue that hypocrisy is the most vile of all sins, and anyone who ever does (or has done) anything that contradicts their own moral standards is a hypocrite, then not only will people want to avoid hypocrisy, but the only way for a person to do so is to hold no moral standard to begin with.

Unadulterated, untempered relativism.

Of course, the truth of the matter is that this theory is hopelessly flawed. Because even the (expressed, if not always practiced) liberal values of compassion, tolerance, equality, humaneness, and the like are presented as moral values. So we'd have to abandon those, too.

What to do, what to do? I suppose we'll just have to accept that all of us, including our political candidates, are hypocrites by the strictest definition. This doesn't mean we don't have to strive to avoid hypocrisy, and it still means that habitual hypocrisy is something to be concerned about, but it doesn't mean that every incident of hypocrisy is grounds for disqualification and proof of the worthlessness or untrustworthiness of a person.

So, even Tracy up there, hypocritical (presuming she believes sexism is bad), oblivious, and, frankly, stupid as she may be in this case, may still be a worthwhile person of an essentially decent and trustworthy nature. Of course, if the hypocrisy of her position is pointed out to her and she refuses to acknowledge it, refuses to amend her course, makes no attempt to reconcile the contradiction, or otherwise maintains that this position is somehow compatible with its antithesis, then she is not only a habitual hypocrite, but someone who is in a partisan pissing-contest-induced state of utter and risible denial.

Of course, hypocrisy is largely dependent on one's interpretation of a moral holding. Some argue that if someone says they are "pro-life," they are hypocritical to support a war. Of course, to those that are pro-life, one has very little to do with the other. The hypocrisy lies in one interpretation of a tag-line--a nickname for a position on abortion. An actual act of hypocrisy in this case would be if someone who is pro-life has an abortion or encourages someone else to have one. One has to redefine "pro-life" to include situations that its proponents do not claim it applies to in order to make it about war or the death penalty, or anything else.

Of course, from a logical standpoint, you can't be a hypocrite if the moral value you are offending is not one you hold or claim to hold. Someone else assigning a value to you, then claiming you violate it, is their doing, not yours. The comparison is negated on a technicality: A fetus is generally not taking up arms against or otherwise directly threatening the national security of the USA.

Of course I am pro-choice, however disgusted I may be that the world is such that I have to be, and although the irony of pro-life, pro-war does not escape me, I realize that is all it is. Irony. Of course, the reverse is also true--there is some irony in being anti-war and pro-choice, even if the pro-abortion moniker (pro-choice) is not quite so primed for the comparison as the anti-abortion one is.

Again, the difference lies in a technicality: The belief that a fetus isn't a life.

It is this holding that saves THIS camp from hypocrisy. They, like pro-lifers, do not actually hold the belief necessary for them to be hypocrites. It must be ascribed to them. One has to say, "Well, I believe a fetus is a life, therefore, you are a hypocrite."

Uh uh. Nope.

That's not how it works.

These types of arguments look good on a picket sign, and they sound good in the middle of a heated debate or amidst the rhetoric of a political speech, but if any person making such claims is ever really confronted and asked to describe how the opposition's stance on war is hypocritical because of their stance on abortion, they are going to run into this problem.

Most people will be so confounded that they will run up against their "final vocabulary" and be forced to end it there. Either that, or they will be forced to admit that their opponent is not, technically, hypocritical.

A "final vocabulary" is the point to which most (if not all) of us will arrive in any extended argument. It is the place at which we can no longer explain ourselves logically and resort to statements like, "Well, it's just what I believe," or "Well, that's just wrong." It may be comprised of statements of belief, positive or negative, statements of ideology, accusations against the opponent...whatever it is, it is characterized by the speaker's inability or unwillingness to offer further rational proof of his or her claims. Each person will have a set of ready-made final vocabularies that come up again and again, no matter what specific argument he or she is in. Final vocabularies, in effect, are used to slam shut the door of a debate to protect one's ideological or intellectual holdings against a potentially unpleasant realization or an embarrassing revelation.

So there you have it, I guess. An example of the kind of logic running (or attempting to run) behind the rhetoric.

I offer it as an alternative to my last blog, which was too long and way too technical. But I maintain that it is good for people to be aware of these mechanisms as they watch the political discourse, and besides that, it's just fun to watch it all go down when you know exactly what kind of crap everybody's trying to pull and see how easily most of the population will simply eat it up.