I have to come back to this because, well, it pisses me off so much.
It's the whole idea that in order to promote a particular public policy agenda, you have to set a perfect personal example. This idea leads to things like going after Al Gore for eating Chilean sea bass. Forget for a moment that the assholes who gleefully damned Al Gore as a hypocrite because he ate an endangered species for dinner WERE WRONG because the damned sea bass was sustainably harvested. The point is, can they marginalize his powerful advocacy by showing some sort of personal flaw related to his area of advocacy? The right loves to personalize, to demonize, so the debate becomes not whether poverty is a real issue in this country, but whether John Edwards has expensive haircuts. To the extent that we fight the "gotcha" debates, we allow them to personalize the debate rather than confront real issues.
The list of attacks on Gore as hypocrite is a long one. Just google "Al Gore Hypocrite" to document the full orgasmic glee of right wingers anxious to take Gore down.
He uses too much energy in his house, supposedly. That nonsense was debunked by Newshounds and this terrific diary at Daily Kos. Bottom line, Gore practices what he preaches.
But even if Al Gore did use more energy than the average family, it still wouldn't diminish what he's saying about global warming. Individual choice is important, sure, but public policy is what matters. Until we have laws that encourage green energy, mandate higher fuel efficiency, support r & d, and so on, all the recycling and hybrid vehicles and carpooling are not going to completely solve the problem. I don't care if Al Gore goes whale hunting in a gas guzzling yacht trimmed out with Brazilian rain forest mahogany while he sprays deodorant on his hairy pits with an aerosol can: it still doesn't change the facts about global warming.
So then we have Michael Moore and Chris Matthews. It's not whether the health care system is broken, it's about whether Michael Moore is fat. From the Daily Howler (ht Digby):
MATTHEWS (7/23/07): You have earned yourself an enemy. This is Huckabee, the former governor—Mike Huckabee. He’s running for president.
MOORE: He’s the guy that lost all that weight.
MATTHEWS: He’s decided to come after you. OK, here’s what he said: "Frankly"—don`t you love it when politicians say that? Like other times they`re not being frank, right?—"Frankly, Michael Moore is an example of why the health care system costs so much in this country. He clearly is one of the reasons that we have a very expensive system. I know that from my own personal experience”—he’s identifying with you—“said Huckabee, who lost more than 110 pounds and became an avid runner after he was diagnosed with diabetes.” Your response, sir?
This is really just "gotcha" on a different plane. It's an attempt to deflect the arguement about public policy by focusing on personal behavior. Look the GOP has been doing that for years. People are poor? Get off your asses and work! They never want to talk about public policy and how it works in people's lives, they want to talk about how people are wrong to live their lives the way they do. At the risk of being redundant, I don't care if Michael Moore snorts coke, drives without his seatbelt while playing Russian roulette and smokes fifteen cigarettes at a time while injecting himself with pigfat: it doesn't change anything about whether the health care system is broken in this country.
Then came the Anderson Cooper nonsense at the debate the other night: raise your hand if you flew a private jet here (a question which, I assure you, won't be asked at the Republican debate). As I said earlier, it doesn't matter. Who friggin cares? It's a phoney standard to suggest that the Dem candidates should travel with the hordes of people that follow them on coach, or a bus, or whatever. Gravel can take a train because no one goes with him. A candidates job is to promote public policy that will solve the nation's problems. Period. And the debate should be about whose vision of policy is the best, not who uses cruelty free shampoo. We're not looking for a perfect person, we're looking for someone with solutions to the problems all of us face.
Jennifer Pozner gets it:
Unfortunately, it was just as telling that when CNN's Anderson Cooper bumped the question to the candidates, he watered down Macklay's very clear emphasis on policy by rephrasing her question to the candidates as follows: "How do you get Americans to conserve?" Then, when Sen. Dodd talked about corporate accountability standards such as a corporate carbon tax on environmental polluters, demanding highly energy efficient standards for automobiles, moving away from fossil fuels as steps to deal with global warming, Cooper interrupted him, saying, "The question was about personal sacrifice." [No, actually, it wasn't -- her question, which we all heard clear as day, was about whether Democrats will enact political policies that will go beyond personal steps like using energy efficient bulbs, to decrease our national energy consumption.] Then, as a flashy "gotcha" moment, Cooper asked for a show-of-hands to find out how many of the candidates flew to the debate in a private jet. (One hand after another popped up, some sheepishly; only Sen. Gravel said, "I took the train!") But as symbolic as that sad lineup was, the larger issue of collective, societal responsibility -- and, of course, the public policy question -- got lost, and this time it wasn't the politicians burying political policy and corporate responsibility under the sheen of personal choices and superficial band-aids, it was CNN's silver-haired golden boy who did that for them. How pathetic.
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