Random Thought Number One on The Hoosier Hypocrite

People stink and they are stupid.

Longstanding philosophy of mine.

Doesn’t matter how smart you think you are, doesn’t matter how decent, well-behaved, and angelically good you’ve been up till now.

Everybody will do something rotten or dumb or rotten and dumb some time, probably five minutes after the last time someone else told them how smart and angelically good they are.

It follows from this that it’s probably a good idea to plan your life around the idea that you will spend a lot of time having to forgive other people, including and especially people you love and depend on, for having done something rotten or dumb or rotten and dumb and that you’re going to have to ask them to do the same for you.

That last part is key. 

You---and I mean me, but you too---stink and are stupid and will prove it more times than you’ll care to count.

This is why it’s such a bad idea to build your life and career around the idea that you are smarter and more angelically good than most everybody else, which is what you are doing when you set yourself up as a public scold and self-appointed guardian of public morality.

Which Mark Souder, the now former Congressman from Fort Wayne, Indiana did.  The Family Values Republican turns out to have valued everybody else’s family more than his own.

Our old pal Nancy Nall is relishing this.  Before she and her family moved to the bluer regions of Michigan, Souder was her representative in the U.S. House of Representatives and pretty much misrepresented her and any resident of his district sociallly to the left of Savanarola while helping to perpetrate the now-classic Reaganite Republican big con of voting for tax cuts for the rich and policies that screwed over the working class residents of his district whose interests, he swore, he was protecting by selling them out.

I wouldn’t call what Nance is expressing in her post Schadenfreude, unless you call what you feel when Robin runs Sir Guy of Gisbourne through or when you learned Robspierre went to the guillotine or when Rick plugs Major Strasser or when Alex Rodriguez strikes out with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth Schadenfreude.

No, what Nance is expressing is pure stand up and cheer because the villain’s getting his at last glee.

He was a right-wing, family-values Chris­t­ian elected dur­ing the 1994 GOP sweep, back in the Newt Gingrich/Contract With Amer­ica days. He said from the begin­ning he believed in term lim­its (the whole Class of ‘94 did, remem­ber?) and wouldn’t run for more than three. When it came time to walk the talk, he reneged, say­ing the cen­sus had redrawn his dis­trict, so the pledge was nul­li­fied. He lost some sup­port­ers then, but not enough.

And even if I weren’t inclined to despise him for his pol­i­tics, there were his cam­paign ads. In years when he wasn’t being seri­ously chal­lenged (most of them), he bought up chunks of talk-radio ad space in the fall, and he’d deliver these 30-second corn­ball ser­mon­ettes, in his unat­trac­tive, Porky Pig­gish voice, about the lessons he learned as a boy grow­ing up in Gra­bill — hard work, faith, fam­ily, etc. In what should have been an early hypocrisy alert, it should be noted that when Souder grew up and could live any­where, he chose not to live in Gra­bill…

As his time in Con­gress length­ened and his senior­ity gave him more power, he used it for some frankly awful ends. He’s in favor of the end­less drug war, and is author of the Drug-Free Stu­dent Loan Amend­ment, which bars fed­eral finan­cial aid for any stu­dent con­victed of a drug charge, down to sim­ple pos­ses­sion of mar­i­juana. (He claims it was mis­in­ter­preted by the evil Clin­ton admin­is­tra­tion, and was only sup­posed to apply to stu­dents so con­victed while in col­lege. Oh.) He’s one of those northern-state con­gress­men who likes to chas­tise Tex­ans who don’t want to build a giant fence with an accom­pa­ny­ing army on their south­ern bor­der. He’s pro-intelligent design, anti-gay mar­riage — you know the drill. I see via his web­site that he’s also opposed to online video poker. Hal­lelu­jah, there’s some­thing we can agree on.

So Souder’s awfulness goes beyond sexual hypocrisy.  In fact, his hypocrisy goes beyond sexual hypocrisy.  Forget the term limits weaseling.  Souder is another Right Wing chickenhawk, but with a twist---he didn’t dodge the draft during the Vietnam War the usual way, with dubious deferments or by using his family connections to get into the National Guard.  He was a conscientious objector!

Of course, once in Congress he was all for bombing the hell out of Iraq and sending his constituents’ kids off to fight and die and kill other people’s kids.  Pacifism for me but not for thee, chumps.

What this adds up to is that while we all stink and are stupid, Souder stinks worse and is stupider than than average.

But that doesn’t let me off the hook.  I stink and I’m stupid and that’s the subject of my next random thought on the Hoosier Hypocrite.

Meanwhile, be sure to read Nance’s entire post, You won’t be missed.

Comments

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Peter "Wait, Wait!" Sagal referred to the infamous and ubiquitous video of Souder being interviewed by That Staffer on abstinence and fidelity as "the Zapruder film of sexual hypocrisy." Heh.