Syllogistic Hypocrisy #16: Tom DeLay’s Travel, and Theirs
As I’ve said before, one particular form of hypocrisy that really bothers me is the type where some person or group claims to favor or oppose X because of self-evident principle Y – but they don’t apply principle Y to everything else, and in severe cases they don’t apply principle Y to anything but issue X. I call this “Syllogistic Hypocrisy.”
The case of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is a great example. Democrats, especially House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, have been calling for DeLay to resign (or as Howard Dean more plainy put it “serve his jail sentence” — through he doesn’t have one) because he was allegedly late in reporting some trips he or his staff took at the expense of some Washington think tanks. The trips were legal; DeLay is accused of not reporting them within one month of the trip. It now turns out that 43 other House members have failed to report 198 trips — including Nancy Pelosi herself (11 trips), House Minority Whip (i.e., the #2 House Democrat) (12 trips). By comparison, DeLay’s staff had only 4 such trips.
Pejman Yousefzadeh reprints the entire article until the beautiful headline:
