John Dickerson at Slate has decided to squander some of his credibility as a political commentator on castigating other commentators for piling on poor Mark Sanford, the certainly-soon-to-be-ex governor of South Carolina and latest in a long line of Christianist social conservative moralizers to become victims of their own hypocrisy.

Dickerson is offended that the wicked courtiers are snickering and saying vicious scornful things about the governor:

The minute Sanford started speaking, the reviews poured in via e-mail and Twitter. He was rambling, confused. He didn't tear up enough when talking about his wife. He favored his mistress. He answered the questions too thoroughly. All these judgments seemed absurd. A man standing in front of a bank of cameras in the middle of a complete collapse is going to say a lot of things poorly.

...And when he does, people are going to snicker via twitter and say vicious scornful things in their blogs or broadsheets or on the TV chat shoes.  Those, dear Dickerson, are the rules of the game.  Sanford has played it long enough himself to know.  So your pity is probably wasted on him.

But Dickerson feels sorry for him anyway.  It's what he takes for this liar's sincerity that seems to be the sticking point for him.  Dickerson says Sanford "seemed to know and feel [the severity of his crime against his family] more profoundly than other politicians we've seen go through this familiar apology exercise before."  Dickerson apparently doesn't know that, as Rochefoucault once archly observed, "the name and pretense of virtue is as serviceable to self-interest as are real vices."



Dickerson wonders why no one lamented the human cost to Sanford, as if that were the big story here.

I'm not offering Sanford's humanity as an excuse. I'm just marveling at how few people stopped for a moment to even nod to it. Maybe people expressed these views in private conversations. But in the e-mails and Twitter entries and blog posts I read in the aftermath, Sanford's human ruin was greeted with what felt like antiseptic glee. The pain he's caused, the hypocrisies he's engaged in, seemed like license to deny him any humanity at all.

Well, of course they did.  They don't know the man.  But they do know a little about him. For instance, that he made political hay of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair (of which he said, gallantly: "The bottom line is... he lied under a different oath, and that is the oath to his wife. So it’s got to be taken very, very seriously.”)  He earned conservative street cred by playing the family values card and bashing gays, but where was he this Father's Day?  With his four kids and faithful wife?  Um, no.  With his Argentine Mistress, whom he visited on the taxpayer's dime at least three times.  

Here's the bottom line, bitch: he was an elected official who abused his office and willfully misled the people who elected him to it, and deceived his family for years while preaching family values for political gain. 

So when Dickerson mewls...

What Mark Sanford seemed to be trying to say is that he screwed up, in the biggest possible way, because he lost his bearings. He lost his self-control. He was indulgent. He forgot that there were other humans in the world. Yet in the constant flow of abuse, joke-making, and grand conclusions about his failings, it seemed everyone having a good time pointing at his self-indulgence was also engaging in a form of it.

...what he doesn't seem to get is that that's OK.  We aren't being hypocritical when we indulge in "pointing at his self-indulgence."  And we aren't obligated to treat the hypocrite with the same degree of respect once he has been exposed.  There are actually elaborate, age-old (maybe even hardwired) rites for the ridicule of hypocrites.  And that's precisely what hypocrites deserve: ridicule.  They have earned it, and it's some compensation for those they contemn.

As for Republicans.  It's not unusual for them to demand leniency from those who, when the shoe's on the other foot, would never get an ounce of sympathy from them.  And, further, to call their enemies hypocrites for not hewing to a higher standard than they themselves do.  The argument goes something like: "Of course, we're intolerant, vicious and vindictive, but that's our brand!  You guys are supposed to be the goody-goodies!"  But the rules of ridicule are long-established and cut across all party lines.

If reports that the governor is going to fight to stay in office are true, he obviously hasn't been ridiculed enough.  He deserves to be ridiculed all the more and then impeached.