Character Flaw

Yglesias responds to this facile little formula of Max Boot's in which he (Boot) has the dazzling insight that conservatives care about "character" and liberals care about "cleverness."

Boot couldn't even bring himself to phrase it properly. Even if this were true, it would go, "conservatives care about "character" and liberals care about "competence." But, it isn't and Matt explains why:

Or could it be that liberals and conservatives have different conceptions of what good character is. For some reason, some time in the past the country's right wing took a fateful turn for the worse and decide that terms like "morality" and "character" related exclusively to a person's conduct of their sex life. A good person was a person who had conducted himself way with regard to sex, and a bad person was one who did otherwise. A person who cheated on his wife and then, yes, lied about it was immoral. A person who didn't think it mattered whether other people had sex with men or women was a moral relativist. And that was that. In an even worse turn of events, this lingo -- where "x is a moral person" is true if and only if x led a traditional sex life -- got picked up by the mainstream media despite the fact that, as everyone knows, people in the press don't exhibit any sympathy for this fire and brimstone suff in their real lives.

But liberals care about character, too. We think that when a president submits budget after budget after budget based on deception, that that demonstrates poor character. We think that when the purpose of these budgets is to shift the tax burden off the wealthy of today to the poor of tomorrow that that demonstrates poor character. We think that when you promise a "Marshall Plan for Afghanistan" and don't deliver that that demonstrates poor character. We think that when you de-fund housing vouchers while spending tens of billions on subsidies for large pharmarceutical companies and agribusiness concerns that that demonstrates poor character. And we think that when you launch a war of choice and then grossly mismanage it that that demonstrates, well, poor character. It is immoral -- grossly immoral -- to pursue policies that have made the lives of billions of people around the world worse than they could have been.


The term "character" has been completely bastardized by a bunch of sick old biddies who get their jollies sneaking into other people's bedrooms and then professing shock at all the "perverted" acts they see inside. Which is to say the Republican term "character" is actually a new word for hypocrite. Like TV preachers, they always seem to have issues with the very thing that they so vociferously decry in others. And since sexual morality was the only thing they define as "character", in truth they have no definition of character at all.

As tristero put it so succinctly:

The GOP: home of public sex orgy lovers (Ryan), high-stakes gamblers (Bennett), drug addicts (Limbaugh), adulterers (Gingrich, Hyde), avowed Hitler admirers (Schwarzenegger) and racists (Lott).


(I'd have to put the Governator in the public sex orgy lovers category as well...)

It's pretty obvious that Republicans don't actually care about sexual morality or any other measure of personal character. So, what do they care about? Easy. It's power. All the rest is a sideshow.