The Hypocrite Fallacy

One of the tools used on both sides of the aisle these days in order to dominate a political dialog is to expose your opponent/s as hypocritical in some way. For example, if a Democrat in congress wants to curtail lending companies like Freddy and Fanny, he'd better not have had his hands in those companies' coffers at some point. There is a reasonable side to this: when we are looking for representation, it is important that we see a candidates words and deeds match up, lest we take their rhetoric as false and misleading. Their actions are usually a better indicator of how they will behave in office then their speeches (that is why when McCain claimed to be more interested in diplomacy than Bush, we can be skeptical considering he's always been for sending in troops whenever there's an opportunity.)

However, this "gotcha" style personal attacking, when it spills into the pundit arena, only reduces the conversation to pettiness and finger pointing. More importantly, it allows both liberals and conservatives to side step the points of their opponents when those points are far more important than the person voicing them. We can see this attack dog mentality seep in when we look at some of the things Ann Coulter has said about 9/11 families. Here is some of the transcript from her interview with Tucker Carlson:

If people are going to use personal a tragedy in their lives to inject themselves into a national debate, I‘m sorry. You can‘t just say, “We‘re off limits. Oh, now we‘re going to invoke the fact that our husbands died and you can‘t criticize us.”

They were specifically using their husband‘s death and there were hundreds in fact thousands of widows.... [We have] people going out and citing some family tragedy so that they can give us what Howard Dean could have given us, what Hillary Clinton could have given to us. But then saying, “Oh, but you can‘t respond.”

You can read the entire interview here.

Notice that her predictable inclination is to assault personally the people making these opinions. She makes a good point--people on both sides try to find politically invincible people to voice opinions for them. It is believed that these people are so tragic, so morally upright, or so beloved that no one would dare attack them personally (though, sadly, this is the basis of Coulter's career.)


But here's the thing. No matter your background, if you say something that doesn't make sense, or offer an opinion that falls apart upon examination, then opponents are free to your wrong and here's why. Why does it matter to Coulter whether these opinions are being voiced by Howard Dean of a mother of a 9/11 victim? All this political shielding only protects the speaker, not what's said.

But that's what Coulter means when she says this shuts down debate. Because the debate, to her, is always a personal attack. Show hypocrisy in the speaker and you discredit what they say. The political environment that Coulter hates so much is a product of her style of debate. So I will say this one time:

a) Everyone is a hypocrite (to some degree).
b) Smart people with good opinions exist
c) Therefore, smart people with good opinions are also hypocrites

How much energy have you used up yourself, Ann, defending your own life, when the conversation should really have been about what you said and just that. If Hitler came up with a way to save this economy, would it matter who it came from? Or that what was said was right and actually worked. People aren't all perfect or all bad. In differing degrees they mess up and they get it right. How much better would we all be served if you stopped writing these books that are basically smear campaigns against people who disagree with you and started writing books which were smear campaigns against their ideas?