Your Character Matters, Not Mine

After reading this week’s Michael Tomasky piece in The Daily Beast titled “The Media’s Foolish Elizabeth Warren Witch Hunt”, I couldn’t help but take note in the hypocrisy he has displayed.  By now, everyone knows about Elizabeth Warren’s embarrassing claims of Chrokee relations and, to Tomasky’s credit, few consider it as a real issue.  Michael has gone so far as to tell us that we shouldn’t care; mostly because …nobody cares.

Mr. Tomasky goes on to compare the “witch hunt” to that of President Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal.  The comparison is simple again – nobody should have cared because nobody cared.  It seems that the media guidelines for “story worthy” come down to whether or not people care.  Of course, I care and (by his own numbers) at least 30% of the voters do care about Cherokeegate and did care about Lewinskygate.  So at what point is it okay to publish?  When 50% of the people care?

This entire piece is nothing but an attempt to exempt liberals from character issue.  Of course, that issue is met head on by Mr. Tomasky.

 It’s a “character” issue? Oh please. Elizabeth Warren’s character is pretty well established. She was the daughter of an Oklahoma janitor, for God’s sakes, who started working as a pre-teenager when her father had a heart attack. She has children and grandchildren and has taught Sunday school. She’s served on a number of prestigious boards. She got her law degree from Rutgers—a very good school, but the outpost of someone cratching her way up the mountain on her own, without legacy or connections…She chaired congressional oversight of TARP.

He goes on to point out that she became a professor of law at Harvard too.  Is this how the left defines character?  Having children who have children?  Having your father die (who was a janitor no less!)?  Starting work as a pre-teen (I thought the left hated child labor)?  Did he really just bring up TARP oversight?  Serving on prestigious boards and getting a law degree from Rutgers (a very good school)?

That basically defines most members of Congress – so apparently she’s well equipped for the job, but Congressional members aren’t the model of good character.  Having big degrees from big universities is hardly evidence of character.  Ted Kaczynski graduated from Harvard and taught at Berkeley.  Even the evil George W. Bush earned degrees from Yale and Harvard.

Of course, no such fancy language can be found in Mr. Tomasky’s pieces on Christine O’Donnell – one of which he mockingly refers to her as American’s “first witch”.  He didn’t give Herman Cain the praise for working hard the same way he did Mrs. Warren (“All those burgers hawked, all those manly pizzas peddled, all those millions banked; and yet, at the one moment in his life when he needed discipline the most, the CEO of Self crumpled”).  It seems character mattered quite a bit when he wrote “Newt Gingrich, moral leader” for the Guardian.

I actually tend to agree with Tomasky on one point – character does matter with Gingrich, O’Donnell, and Cain.  If they had character issues and displayed immoral patterns, then that is fair game.  However, you cannot take the stones from one sinner and throw them at another.  This is exactly what Mr. Tomasky was accusing Gingrich of doing with Clinton, and yet finds himself doing the same here.  Hypocrisy at its finest.