July 8, 2011 - 9:40 am
It was once considered better to live up to your ideal standards inconsistently, than to consistently live down to your lack of them. The logical upshot of liberalism’s hatred of hypocrisy is that it is better for the liar to champion lying, the glutton to advocate gluttony, the adulterer to celebrate adultery, than for someone to preach the right thing if he himself occasionally does the wrong thing.
–Jonah Goldberg
This one has several other candidates for QotD. It’s in the free-subscription Goldberg File, so it you want to read it you’ll need to subscribe.
I have to disagree with the quote as phrased. Preaching the right thing while doing the wrong thing is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is doing the wrong thing while claiming to be doing the right thing.
Actually, the worst kind of hypocrisy is to claim that the wrong thing is the right thing: people who claim that, are hypocrites even if they actually do the right thing (which they claimed was the wrong thing).
This is completely wrong. Liberal means telling someone with a Honda Civic to ride the bus from your Lincoln Navigator. And yes, this really happened. Liberals are hypocritical, because they denounce hypocrisy while practicing it. On Broadway at high noon. Completely self-righteously.