Legal Commentary

In all the political back and forth of the last few days, I've noticed a pronounced tendency of the blogosphere to focus on hypocrisy.  Hypocrisy is the biggest sin.  Although there are all sorts of interesting facts flying around out there, the substantive debate on these issues is thinner than it appears.  Instead, most of the debate is about who is a hypocrite.  The move is to show that your opponents have said two different things, in two different contexts, that are inconsistent -- that cannot both be true.  Thus, your opponent must be lying about one of those statements, proving hypocrisy and perhaps even deception.

One example is the issue of Sarah Palin's experience.  Although there is some substantive discussion about her credentials, the conversation is evolving into whether McCain should have chosen her based on those credentials.  As Michael Kinsley wrote over at Slate:

That's why the important point about Palin's lack of experience isn't about Palin. It's about McCain. And the question is not how his choice of Palin might complicate his ability to use the "experience" issue, or whether he will have to drop experience as an issue. It's not even about the proper role of experience as an issue. In fact, it's not about experience at all. It's about honesty. The question should be whether McCain?and all the other Republicans who have been going on for months about Obama's dangerous lack of foreign-policy experience?ever meant a word of it. And the answer is apparently not.

Of course, the Republican response is to charge Democrats with hypocrisy.  If Democrats are so upset with Palin's credentials, how could they support the inexperienced Obama?  It is the Democrats, Republicans argue, that are being hypocritical here.

The Palin family values debate is similarly fraught with arguments of hypocrisy.  There is a vague substantive charge that Palin's role as the mother of an infant is in some way relevant to her campaign for VP.  However, very little is actually said about this substantive issue.  Instead, Palin supporters charge hypocrisy -- no Democrat would bring up this issue if it were a Democratic man or woman.  Palin opponents, for their part, counter-charge with hypocrisy -- Republicans, they say, are ignoring their family values because Palin is on their team.  And so it goes with every issue -- like some sort of Escher drawing.  You're a hypocrite!  No -- you're a hypocrite for calling me a hypocrite!

Why all this focus on hypocrisy?  My thought is that hypocrisy is a charge that is (a) straightforward to prove and (b) applies almost universally across value systems.  So while we may disagree on the substantive issues, we can all agree that logical consistency is a good thing.  Conversely, a willingness to change positions in pursuit of political ends shows a lack of core principles.  There are no clear or logically-provable "winners" in substantive debates -- at least not in the short time-frame of the blogosphere.  But it's easy to use links to show that someone has contradicted themselves and therefore shouldn't be trusted.

I worry that all this focus  on hypocrisy is distracting us from a more reasoned, extensive discussion of the substantive issues.  At times, it seems like scoring debate points is more important than moving forward toward consensus on complicated issues.  Is this a blogospheric phenomenon, or is it endemic to political debate?