Is Dick Cheney secretly Al Qaeda or does he just plain hate America? Turn on the TV and you often see our former Vice-President spouting how much he loves this country and hates Al Qaeda and terrorists. I want to believe him, but he’s a politician and in my experience, when our leaders hold extreme positions against something, that’s when they are secretly all for it. Sadly, we have plenty of data to support this paranoid view of politics. A few data points include:
- Representative Mark Foley rallied for legislation to catch perverted pedophiles while he was sending dirty text messages to teenage pages.
- Senator Larry ‘the wide-stance’ Craig voted against all legislation that protected gay people against hate crimes.
- Reverent Ted Haggard bashed gays in his sermons while getting intimately familiar with his male masseuse.
- State Rep. Bob Allen (Merritt Island) offered an undercover cop $20 for sex in a men’s room at a public park. Allen signed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting the state’s ban on gays adopting children and sponsored a failed bill that would have tightened the state’s prohibition on public sex.
- Democratic New York Governor Eliot Spitzer fought prostitution as Attorney General while simultaneously spending a small fortune on the ladies.
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- Mark Sanford ran on a strong family values platform while hiking the Appalachians in Argentina
These are unfortunately just the tip of the iceberg of the known examples of public figures touting their support or hatred of something, but privately living a very different life. In politics, the stronger you stand for something, the more likely it is that you are just trying to deflect suspicion off your involvement in the exact opposite.
So why is Dick Cheney going on TV telling us how he so vehemently hates terrorists and so loves America? Suspicious? Given politicians track record, maybe I would feel more comfortable if he was really, really for terrorism and burned the occasional American flag? It’s a tough call, these politicians have me confused, I don’t know if everyday is ‘opposite’ day like my kids use to play.
Do I really question Dick Cheney’s love and loyalty to this country, absolutely not! However, for the record, I do disagree with the vast majority of his views. I simply wrote this as a tongue and cheek story about hypocrisy by politicians in our society – from all political parties! No one is above a little hypocrisy from time to time, but most of us don’t get to turn them into laws and then go on national television to preach about our perfection.
To me hypocrisy is either a sign of self loathing or a lack of courage to show the public who you really are as a person. Either way, not what I want in a leader. Give me an openly flawed human being capable of good governance any day, rather than a dishonest, self-loathing, self aggrandizing, egomaniacal, closeted something or other fraud. There are many good people out there in politics today, but the bad apples tend to create the perception that they are all the same.
To some degree, we the public are to blame because we have a tendency to stand on our pedestals and judge politicians by standards none of us could ever measure up too. We need to be a little more open minded with our leaders, otherwise how can we ever expect them to be honest with us? This is perhaps a little naive of me since politics have remained relatively unchanged for thousands of years. Are we condemned to never rise above some instinctual method of selecting leaders not based on their intellect or ability to govern a complex society, but rather some primeval sense that they could fend off a competing tribe? |
