The Convenient Immorality of Repug Morality

Steve M explains the fundamental hypocrisy behind IOKIYAR:

For all their moralism, I'm not sure American right-wingers actually believe in enforcing behavioral "norms." American right-wingers don't really seem to believe in bad deeds -- deeds that are bad no matter who does them. American right-wingers believe in bad people -- people who deserve severe punishment. Other people don't deserve severe punishment no matter what they do.

Remember torture? I'm sure right-wingers thought it was a bad thing at the beginning of the last decade. Then the Bush administration engaged in torture -- and it turned out that that was OK, because George W. Bush was a good man. We were torturing evildoers. They were bad.

GOP senator David Vitter got into a prostitution scandal, but that was fine, because he's a good, God-fearing Christian. By contrast, Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer should be banned from public office for life, and Bill Clinton deserved impeachment.

And, of course, in the 1980s Iraq under Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Iran, and against Iraqi Kurds. That was fine, because Iraq's mortal enemy was our mortal enemy, Iran. (Iran, of course, had previously been deemed less evil when the U.S. decided that dealing with Iran was useful, in order to do harm to another of our mortal enemies, Nicaragua's Sandinista government.) Subsequently, of course, when Iraq became the U.S.'s mortal enemy, its use of chemical weapons was a pretext for an American invasion ("He gassed his own people!")

So, to the right, behavioral "norms" are, well, relative.

Yes, even when the repugs are accusing the left of "moral relativism," they're projecting.