The aristocracy is the moral standard-bearers

I was resisting blogging about this, because I blog all the time about it. I think that it's important that every two-bit hypocrite on the right get smoked out if at all possible. Gay? Adulterer? Rapist? Drug user? Hell, it's important to consistently point out to the short-skirt parade that they are being hypocrites when they pick of feminists. If you find out, you should be shouting it from the hills. D.E.D. Space and Utopian Hell both agree, albeit it to different degrees.

Hypocrisy is more than a sin. Hypocrisy undermines democracy--it is a class issue. The conservative hypocrites do what they do not because they are ordinary, everyday hypocrites like the rest of us who lie and fudge those things we've done that fall outside our moral structures because we're ashamed. In fact, their utter lack of shame is startling, as Elayne points out in my comments here. The willingness to put poor people in jail or ruin the lives of ordinary people for doing what Bush and his family pretty much flaunt in their own lives is beyond hypocrisy. It's entitlement--good, old-fashioned aristocratic entitlement. The sort that allowed popes and kings in the past to hand out moral strictures through the church to people while cheerfully and unapologetically indulging in the forbidden behaviors themselves. And it's pervasive in the Republican party. At least Clinton had the good sense to be embarrassed instead of try to claim that he was younger then.

My guess is their belief is that their station in life already makes them morally superior, so they don't actually have to work at it. Morality is for the debased, common, vulgar people who follow rules, not those who make them. They are rich; they are powerful; they are above those rules. The only reason to even try to conceal behavior is to pay lip service to equality, but one certainly doesn't have to actually go so far as live by the rules you make for others. Luckily, the press knows better than to go rooting around the trash of their social betters. They implicitly understand that it's acceptable to go over every detail of the adulteries of a hillbilly like Bill Clinton, but it's tawdry to expose the whoring around of an upper crust man like Bush.

If this were just about hypocrisy, I'd think it was enough. But this is also about democracy, about not letting a certain class of people make rules that they themselves are too powerful to follow.