Parallel Lives by Victor Davis Hanson on National Review Online
This blog has covered this topic many times, but Hanson does a great job with a few current examples; Fuld/Rubin, Rangle / Stevens, Gonzales/Holder, Dodd/Lott.
The punchline of the comparisons is this:
I suspect that Anderson is being a bit tounge in cheek here, basically the real answer is that we as a culture have largely stopped thinking with any rigor at all, and the whole idea of "comparative lives" is well beyond our current culture. We as a society have decided it is OK to give a pass to those that we agree with and to treat those that we don't agree with as pariahs no matter what they do.
The left does the most of it for two reasons; first, because they can. They are the dominant culture, so the media will break their way, secondly, anything they have approaching a moral is only relative anyway. Having a consistent outlook would cause way too much soul searching for them, so they simply apply the thought they like when they like it and forgo it the rest of the time.
This blog has covered this topic many times, but Hanson does a great job with a few current examples; Fuld/Rubin, Rangle / Stevens, Gonzales/Holder, Dodd/Lott.
The punchline of the comparisons is this:
I could go on and on with these Plutarachean examples of Parallel Lives but you get the picture. Here, the contrast is not the respective virtues of Greece and Rome. Nor is there any regret whatsoever that liberals of good faith thankfully scrutinize the bad judgment and even criminal activity of wayward conservatives. The problem instead is why we continuously consider liberal transgressions as misdemeanors and their conservative counterparts as felonies.
If Plutarch once believed that action, not intention matters (otherwise, as Aristotle noted, we could all be moral in our sleep), we moderns believe the reverse — that proper thinking can often excuse improper acts.
Why so? Perhaps we suspect that a Rubin or Dodd want to do more good things for the poor than do a Fuld or Lott, and so we should interpret their transgressions as atypical lapses rather than characteristic behavior.
I suspect that Anderson is being a bit tounge in cheek here, basically the real answer is that we as a culture have largely stopped thinking with any rigor at all, and the whole idea of "comparative lives" is well beyond our current culture. We as a society have decided it is OK to give a pass to those that we agree with and to treat those that we don't agree with as pariahs no matter what they do.
The left does the most of it for two reasons; first, because they can. They are the dominant culture, so the media will break their way, secondly, anything they have approaching a moral is only relative anyway. Having a consistent outlook would cause way too much soul searching for them, so they simply apply the thought they like when they like it and forgo it the rest of the time.
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