Victor Davis Hanson adapts Plutarch to a review of notable stories of the past year in his column on the parallel lives of Democrats and Republicans. After his comparisons of Richard Fuld with Robert Rubin, Ted Stevens with Charles Rangel, Alberto Gonzales with Eric Holder, and Christopher Dodd with Trent Lott, Hanson concludes:I could go on and on with these Plutarachean examples of Parallel Lives but you get the picture. Here, the contrast is not the respective virtues of Greece and Rome. Nor is there any regret whatsoever that liberals of good faith thankfully scrutinize the bad judgment and even criminal activity of wayward conservatives. The problem instead is why we continuously consider liberal transgressions as misdemeanors and their conservative counterparts as felonies.
I was reminded of this when I contrast the manner in which Sarah Palin was covered versus Joe Biden. Biden is a gaff machine, one who has all the traits of a poser but none of the saving graces. Even his hair is fake.
During the campaign Biden told us that FDR got on TV after the stock market crashed in 1929, apparently not aware that FDR was not president and that TV had not been invented.
He showed his sensitivity to race and ethnicity with: "you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent." Or when he called Obama "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." Trent Lott’s career ended over less.
In Ohio Biden said he was against clean coal technology when Obama was busy telling everyone that he was for it.
He gets in the face of a person who questions him at a campaign event to launch into a tirade on how smart he is.
He tells us he spends time in Katie’s restaurant, a place that closed 20 years ago.
These may be chalked up to typical bluster by a bloviating politician, but what other major politician says and does things like this?
There are more substantial issues:
The man who is presumed to be this administration’s foreign policy heavyweight said that the US drove Hezbollah out of Lebanon when that was totally false, and no one cared.
On October 9th I posted a column entitled “Have you noticed that there’s not a lot of fact checking of Biden?”
Christopher Beam at Slate explains the reasons for Biden's Gaffe Immunity The subhead is:
He misspeaks so often, it's hardly news—and hardly damaging.
So if we have a major political figure, one who has just been elected Vice President, who misspeaks so often why is it not damaging? Beam tell us that
Informational gaffes don't hurt Biden because, whatever his imperfections, he's generally seen as worldly and knowledgeable. Message gaffes don't matter because, even if it's a headache for the campaign, they make him sound authentic. (If he thinks the ad is "terrible," that's just his honest opinion!) And political gaffes don't damage Biden because, well, he's so darned congenial.
Tell the part about congeniality to people who have appeared before his committee and the guy who dared to question him.
So that's the MSM's take. the man can be wrong so often and in so many ways BUT "he's generally seen as worldly and knowledgeable." By whom? Ah, that's the clue: by the press. He can claim that the sun rises in the West, but the press, secure in the innate wisdom and charm of Joe Biden, will mention it and pass on and he will still be seen as smart, and well informed. If you are a Democrat, it seems that there is nothing you can say or do to change the template: you are smart, handsome, knowledgeable and your mother dresses you well.
Jonah Goldberg is exactly right when he says Biden’s “gravitas” is derived almost entirely from the fact that he can lie with absolute passion and conviction
Speaking about the VP debate:
What struck me the most about the debate – and it probably helped having quintessential Obamaphiles in the room – was how Biden’s “gravitas” is derived almost entirely from the fact that he can lie with absolute passion and conviction. He just plain made stuff up tonight. I read a long list tonight in my debate with Beinart here at Wash U, we can visit the details tomorrow.
Just a few: Flatly asserting that Obama never said he’d meet with Achmenijad; that absolute nonsense about spending more in a month in Iraq than we’ve spent in Afghanistan (“let me say it again,” he said as if he was hammering home a real fact); the bit about McCain voting with Obama on raising taxes; his vote in favor of the war etc.
From Hanson:
I remember why most Republicans, other than Colin Powell, abandoned the soon-to-be convicted Ted Stevens. And the names of Mark Foley and Larry Craig are now understandably infamous. It is altogether fine and proper that Republicans turned on their own miscreants, who needed to be turned on for their various misdeeds.
But why in the world is Rep. Charles Rangel still the Chairman of the House Ways and Means committee which oversees U.S. tax policy — especially at this critical juncture in our nation’s financial history?
I say “Why?” not out of sarcasm, but out of real bewilderment: Rangel’s record of financial and ethical improprieties is no longer a matter of hypocrisy, but rather one of probable criminality.
Then there is the strange case of Sen. Chris Dodd. Future economic historians may trace the origins of the September financial collapse back to the deregulation of the federally affiliated Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae lending agencies, and the banking industry’s shenanigans in allowing the unqualified to receive improper loans — all under political pressure from Congressional leaders.
Somehow Dodd seems to have had an uncanny ability to have been at Ground Zero of both implosions. Here are the facts: Chris Dodd is currently chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. As such, he refinanced his own mortgage property through (the now bankrupt) Countrywide’s “V.I.P.” program. That is, Dodd was given an unusually favorable loan discount that over the life of his mortgage in theory would have saved him several thousand dollars. Yet Senate rules make it illegal for members to knowingly receive gifts worth $100 or more a year from private businesses like Countrywide that makes use of lobbyists. What’s more, Countrywide had also contributed $21,000 to Dodd’s senate campaigns since 1997. Worse still, Dodd received about $70,000 in campaign gifts from Bank of America — which bought out the bankrupt Countrywide.
Remember, as well, that Sen. Dodd serially asserted that both Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were fundamentally strong — even as both were on the verge of bankruptcy. Dodd was strangely confident in the insolvent entities perhaps because he had received more campaign contributions from the two failed agencies than did any other legislator in Congress.
I think all our grandfathers at one time in this country might have thought it morally wrong for a congressional banking overseer to take money from banks — and in particular when they were in the process of being looted and run into the ground. If the Senate Banking Committee Chairman is improperly receiving mortgage preferences and outright cash from banking concerns, then who will police the police?
If Plutarch once believed that action, not intention matters (otherwise, as Aristotle noted, we could all be moral in our sleep), we moderns believe the reverse — that proper thinking can often excuse improper acts.
Why so? Perhaps we suspect that a Rubin or Dodd want to do more good things for the poor than do a Fuld or Lott, and so we should interpret their transgressions as atypical lapses rather than characteristic behavior.
Perhaps we think an Attorney-General designate Holder is properly cognizant of our long liberal efforts to force the system to change and therefore deserves some exemption for ethical blindness on the job. Again in contrast, Attorney-General emeritus Gonzales is unduly cynical in not appreciating that progressive thinking is responsible for his job, and therefore he must be held accountable immediately and for the rest of his professional life for supposed character flaws.
Perhaps we think a life-long crusading African-American like Rangel merely fudges a bit here and there in the twilight of a long exemplary career seeking to ensure racial harmony and parity for his nation, and therefore is absent-minded rather than felonious and hypocritical. Yet the sordid behavior of his white male conservative counterparts provides valuable elucidation about their depravity and bigotry -- and is proper grounds for their eventual departures not merely from posts of influence, but from the Congress altogether.
Perhaps -- as we saw from the asymmetrical media treatment of the two candidates during the recent campaign -- in matters of power and politics today, intention, symbolism, and rhetoric are everything; facts essentially nothing.
Or maybe less cynically -- in the minds of self-appointed liberal moralists concerned about the greater good -- exalted ends at times necessarily entail regrettable means.
UPDATE: Parallel lives of the Democrats and Republicans, part 2
In his weekly Washington Times column, Andrew Breitbart adapts Professor Hanson's Plutarchean method to a similar end. Breitbart considers the photo featuring President-elect Obama's chief speechwriter Jon Favreau and his colleague that turned up in the media and on the Internet last week. The photo depicted Favreau groping the breast of a cardboard cutout of Hillary Clinton while Favreau's unidentified colleague shared his beer with her.
Breitbart observes that "[t]he aggressive iconography of two young drunk men taking advantage of a life-size cutout of a woman - especially a powerful one - would bring an elite college campus to a standstill, force a housecleaning of a Fortune 500 company, ground the Air Force Academy and would, in most cases, ruin the career of a Republican staffer or elected official." He juxtaposes the jocular reaction to Favreau's photograph with that of any comparable Republican....
In the case of Favreau, however, "the Democratic double standard on political correctness kicked in immediately as the feminist establishment, the media and even Mrs. Clinton herself came forth to save the fast-rising Obama wordsmith." Whatever moral one draws from this particular episode, it is a striking illustration of the phenomenon that was the subject of Professor Hanson's column.
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