Can someone please explain...

[heidi]

(I admit - I will be generalizing in the next few paragraphs. You are forewarned.)

Why is it that Republicans think voting for Mike Ditka (who has no foreign policy experience, or domestic for that matter) into the Senate is a Good Thing, but that Edwards, who has at least served on the Senate Intelligence Committee, is unqualified to be Vice President?

Yes, I know there are 100 senators, and only one vice-president. And yes, I know that the vice-president has to be qualified to *be* president. And yes, I know that comparing Edwards to Bush's experience level on foreign policy pre-his own assumption of the office of the president is kind of icky.

But we're not talking about actualities. We're talking about the same group of people who on one hand say Yay Ditka and on the other hand say Unqualified Edwards.

Is there any linear thinking in that?

Comments

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

Wow, an anonymouse in my lj.

Look, mousie, there's reasons for people to change their minds. You learn that the cia's fed you false info, you change your take on whether we should've attacked iraq. You realise that stem cell research holds promises of miracles, you decide that research on those derived from blastocysts is reasonable.

That's not hypocracy, hon. Hypocracy is talking out of both sides of your mouth at once.

[(Anonymous)]

I would sign except I don't have an account.

So does this mean we think Kerry is the golden-boy? Won't say or do anything just to get into office? Any politician, and I mean any from either party, will say and do anything to get (re)elected. It's just a part of politics. Both parties do it. And I suppose the post I originally replied to didn't specify which party they were talking about, so in making my assumption that is was the Republicans was wrong. But I still say that Democrats are as guilty of being hypocrits as anyone else.

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

HI anonymouse! Do you have a name? If you do, it's considered polite to use it. And given that LJ accounts are free for the taking, the fact that you're not using one leads me to believe that you are too embarrassed by your positions to associate them wiht a name.

I had a conversation similar to this yesterday at a birthday party - the person I was speaking with was under the misguided belief that back in the 30s and 40s, campaigns for office were financed the way they are now (silly and uninformed person, he was) and believed that Kerry had accepted the endorsement of Hamas, where, in fact, he'd publicly called for Israel to continue deathstrikes against terrorists.

I actually don't think Bush is a hypocrite when it comes to the big issues. I think he really and truly believes that he is chosen by God to rescue the Iraquis from a Satanic dictator. I think he really and truly believes that it's better to discard blastocysts, because they held the potential for life, rather than potentially save the lives of living, breathing people. I think he really and truly believes that it is tratorious to criticize the executive branch of government, and blessed to criticize the legislative and the judiciary.

Of course, I also think, to quote an article in Salon Magazine about the frontline documentary, "The Jesus Factor", that he's trying to turn the US into a theocracy, and that is where his hypocracy manifests:

you cannot take a pledge to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States and then make a statement that our rights are derived from God. You cannot, as Wallis notes, misquote lines from the Gospel of John, as Bush did, to make the light of Christ into the light of America.
But, conversely, you cannot claim to be a Christian and hear, as Bush apparently does, the Gospel's instruction to "succor the poor" as "sucker the poor." You cannot claim to be a Christian and strip away environmental protection from the land that, surely any Christian believes, is God's handiwork.
But when Bush sponsors a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, when he opposes stem-cell research (which, as even Nancy Reagan has pointed out, could very well have benefited her husband, a hero to conservative Christians), when in the face of AIDS in Africa or teen pregnancy in America, he ties sex education funding to abstinence programs, he is using private reasoning for ends that may please a portion of the community but do not serve a majority.