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While I am careful to distinguish between a person and her claims, I do tend to collect stories of inconsistencies. Not surprisingly, many of these tales involve politicians-they tend to be masters of saying one thing and doing the opposite.This is truly a bipartisan trait, but my current focus is on Newt Gingrich.
While Newt is well known for pushing traditional family values, his own behavior does not exactly match his professed values. He famously proposed to Marianne, who is now is second ex-wife, while his first wife was hospitalized for cancer treatment. Newt later divorced Marianne and is now married to his third wife.
Marianne Gingrich recently revealed some things about Newt, including providing a rather interesting quote. According to Marianne, Newt said “It doesn’t matter what I do. People need to hear what I have to say. There is no one else who can say what I say. It doesn’t matter what I live.”
While to profess a set of values and violate them does seem an act of hypocrisy, Newt is correct to point out that it does not matter what he does. This assumes, of course, that Newt is asserting that his behavior is not relevant to the truth of his claims. If so, he is quite right. To infer that a person’s claim is false because his actions are inconsistent with the claim is to commit the ad hominem tu quoque (more popularly known as the “you, too” fallacy. For example, when I was in grade school one of the teachers told us that smoking was unhealthy and showed us (before lunch) those classic pictures of healthy lungs and a smoker’s lungs. After class ended, she ran to the teacher’s room and chain smoked as many cigarettes as she could before the next class. As I recall, another kid said (in effect) that she must be wrong because she smoked. However, she was obviously right. She merely failed to act on her own very good advice.
In another sense, Newt is also right. To be specific, he seems to be quite correct that how he actually lives seems to have little impact on those who believe what he says. While Newt is not unique in this ability, it does seem rather uncommon. It is certainly an interesting phenomenon when someone can act in ways that seem to clearly violate their own professed principles and still be regarded as a moral leader. Perhaps those who believe in him simply refuse to believe that he has actually done such things. Or perhaps they agree that people need to hear what he has to say and hence it does not matter what he does. Or, the more cynical might claim, perhaps those who heed his words are also hypocritical.
Of course, Newt is also wrong. It does matter what he does. It certainly mattered to his first wife and his second wife. Also, it should matter to him. While a person can speak of what is right and still act contrary to that, it is a man’s actions and not his words that make him the man he is. While a man’s words can be true and yet contrary to his actions, a man who consistently does wrong would surely become corrupted and have his moral judgment impaired. As such, one would be justified in being suspicious of any moral judgments issued by such a person.
I totally agree, though Newt is too easy a topic, too extreme in his views, too hypocritial. A man who can’t even basically practise what he preaches.
People need leaders, they need a voice. When their leader appears to contradict what they preach then the people will ignore or deny the evidence. & a family man that is a womaniser appeals to all those men that secretly admire him for being the ‘man’ they wish they were.
Not sure about the cigarette simile. I drink alcohol even though I know it’s bad, maybe due to a chemical addiction, maybe a mental adiction to what I think it promises or in remembering great times I’ve had whilst on it. It’s a luxury in life, like a car, I’ll be safer without it but wouldn’t want to be. The teacher has to teach a set curriculum that she probably does agree with, but maybe needs nicotine or something similar to hold down such a stressful job! She teaches a subject as part of her job but not as a core belief.
Or are we into greater & lesser evils?
W
In the case of the smoking story, my point was not to make a moral criticism of the teacher. Rather, it was that a person can say something true (in this case that smoking is unhealthy) while acting in ways contrary to the claim (in this case, smoking).
While Newt is correct in that his claims are distinct from his actions, true leadership is more than just saying what is right. It also involves doing what is right. Also, there is the concern that someone who acts immorally (by his own principles) will impair his moral sense and thus cease to be able to make correct moral judgments. Of course, I am assuming that ethical judgments have more than a purely intellectual composition and that other factors enter in to such verdicts. For an argument, I will just steal from Aristotle.
ex-lovers and wives seem to be a poor source of info on their spouses or ex’s character.
Would you not agree, Mike?
There’s two sides to all of those stories.
True, there is the factual question of whether he said that or not. However, the discussion does not hinge on whether he did or not. After all, the issue I focused on was not whether he did say it or not, but whether such a view is correct or not. Even if Newt said no such thing, the issue of whether a person should act in accord with his own avowed principles or not is still a matter of philosophical interest.
“the issue of whether a person should act in accord with his own avowed principles”
But marriage is a particularly bad example, as there are two people involved who may or may not have the same principles. And you never provided a shred of evidence that Newt’s principles were somehow inconsistent with divorce.
These claims raise issues that go well beyond the Newt’s “do as I say, not as I do, and screw you all” approach to politics.
http://www.realchange.org/gingrich.htm#draft
And as for the “Taxpayer subsidies for his partisan campaign course” . . .more detail here:
http://www.congressproject.org/ethics/gingsav1.html
Oh, and supposedly he’s a draft dodger magus. . .
I don’t know, Mike. Newt has strong opinions, but has never come across to me as being especially judgmental regarding people’s personal lives.
Can you provide any evidence of this without bringing up Bill and Monica?
🙂 “. . .without bringing up Bill and Monica?”
Why? Am I missing something here? Leading impeachment proceedings based on events that grew out of Clinton’s personal infidelities seems “especially judgmental”. There’s little in Newt’s history that would convince me that, in simiilar circumstances, he would not have lied like Clinton did.
And branding someone a racist seems a tad judgmental—
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/SoniaSotomayor/story?id=7685284
But still, as in the Clinton/impeachment situtaion, the Newt stands ever at the ready to do the politically expedient thing:
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=32114
Ummm….Bill was impeached for lying under oath during sworn statements about a sexual harrassment lawsuit by Paula Jones.
And in case your selective memory fails you yet again, he also lost his license to practice law. Was the State of Arkansas just out to get him, too?
I’ll give you that one, magus, though I never said Newtie was out to get Clinton. I was more interested in the fact that he was involved in an extramarital activity at the same time he was leading impeachment proceedings against Clinton.
So TJ wanted examples of Newtie’s judgmental side? In our silence are you agreeing that the link I provided proves he’s judgmental?
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/SoniaSotomayor/story?id=7685284
And frankly, I find it just a wee bit judgmental to argue against a mosque near ground zero based on generalizations about a religion.
Sideways on the subject of Newt’s ethics: What do you think of Newt’s fresh and truly unique application of American Exceptionalism? We shouldn’t let them build a mosque near ground zero “so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia.” Echoes of the ethics of a second grader in that statement. Are we better than them or do we want to be the same as them ?
It seems clear that Newt’s point is that even the official non-extremist version of Islam is not tolerant of other religions.
Lexington in the Economist 8/7 10 doesn’t see Newt’s quite as clearly as you do. . .apparently:.
“No such plea of mitigation can be enered on behalf of Mr Gingrich. The former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives may or may not have presidential pretensions, but he certainly has intellectual ones. That makes it impossible to excuse the mean spirited and scrambled logic of his assertion that ‘there should be no mosque near ground zero so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia.’ Come again? Why hold the rights of Americans who happen to be Muslim [freddiek note: religious freedom is a right they are given by the First Amendment of our Constitution, right?] hostage to the policy of a foreign country that happens also to be Muslim. To Mr Gingrich, it seems, an American Muslim is a Muslim first and and American second. Al-Queda would doubtless concur.”
I wonder how Newt feels about this:
http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_othe3.htm
All I know is that I can’t put a swingset in my backyard with out the approval of the Homeowner’s Association. If they don’t like it, it can’t go up.
Do you think the swingset should be rejected if it was built in the US by American Muslims?
I am just pointing out that build/no-build has nothing to do with the constitution and everything to do with the consent of the community. At least for us non-Muslims.
” . . . nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” What exactly would the LEGAL basis be to take this property away from its current owners? There are more than one hundred mosques already in the Naked City. So how can prohibition of the construction of one more be logically based on community consent?
Indeed, why could not ‘those who are so inclined’ widen the geographic scope of what is currently labeled the “hallowed ground” of Ground Zero? Say, out to any point where some dust settled? Say within a two block radius of any FDNY fire house or NYPD precinct whose members lost their lives in the attack’s aftermath? At what point do we begin tearing down mosques that fall within an ever-expanding radius? Probably when anti-Muslim animosity reaches another new level of frenzy.
Again, from Lexington:” Why hold the rights of Americans who happen to be Muslim hostage to the policy of a foreign country that happens also to be Muslim.” What ‘rational’ reasoning does Newt provide other than that we can’t build Christian churches in Saudi Arabia?
Michael Cromartie, noted Christian scholar, also finds severe fault with Gingrich’s argument:
http://www.christianpost.com/article/20100727/no-leverage-in-newt-gingrichs-ground-zero-mosque-argument/index.html
Newt can say this isn’t about religion, but I just don’t believe him.
Here’s a bit about the project from a Dec./09 NYT article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/09/nyregion/09mosque.html?_r=1
In it “Imam Feisul Abdul Rauf, the cleric leading the project” says a location so close to “where a piece of the wreckage fell,sends the opposite statement to what happened on 9/11….We want to push back against the extremists.” Of course, we KNOW he must be lying, right. Because he is, after all, MUSLIM, right? 🙂 And we have it on good authority that NO Muslims can be trusted, right. Because no one knows what EVIL lurks in the hearts of men like the NEWT . . .
He “come(s) across to me as being “especially judgmental regarding people’s personal lives” (your 8/13 4:50pm post). Religious choice is a very important part of “people’s personal lives” . It’s something that’s regularly f**ked with in Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc. , but it shouldn’t be f**ked with here.
(Aug 15) NationalReviewOnline (of all sources !!!) article by Josh Barro:
http://www.nationalreview.com/agenda/243752/very-long-post-cordoba-house-josh-barro
What Lexington wrote, what I wrote, and more. It’s worth a read.
It is interesting that Sam Harris has come out against the GZM:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-08-13/ground-zero-mosque/
Harris:
There is no such thing as Islamophobia. Bigotry and racism exist, of course—and they are evils that all well-intentioned people must oppose. And prejudice against Muslims or Arabs, purely because of the accident of their birth, is despicable. But like all religions, Islam is a system of ideas and practices. And it is not a form of bigotry or racism to observe that the specific tenets of the faith pose a special threat to civil society. Nor is it a sign of intolerance to notice when people are simply not being honest about what they and their co-religionists believe.
Chalk that up as two atheists against Islam. Quel surprise. Dawkins hasn’t jumped in with both feet yet, but the following should give us a good idea where he’ll land when he does:
http://www.islamophobia-watch.com/islamophobia-watch/2010/6/6/richard-dawkins-reproduces-pat-condells-ground-zero-mosque-r.html
Harris and Dawkins have both written at length condemning the violence associated with just about every religion. What would be truly surprising from these two would be if they would put aside their anti-religious views and delve into issues like, oh, say, “property rights, rule of law, and federalism” (Barro, above). And, yes, religious freedom. The freedom that, ironically, confers upon men like Harris and Dawkins the right to disbelieve. . .
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/8/17/893912/-Why-I-am-against-the-Burlington-Coat-Factory-Mosque