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From an early age, most of us are taught that hope is a good thing. When things go wrong, we’re taught to hope for better things. We’re taught not to be discouraged, not to dwell on the negative — to hope that things will be better than anticipated. Is that good advice? Or are we setting ourselves up to be hurt by cruel reality?

I’m pondering that today because a doctor handed me some hope Friday, and I had trouble deciding whether it’s a good thing or not.

As I told you Monday, I’m scheduled for surgery on Jan. 30 to remove a growth in my breast. Just nine days ago, a doctor told me that I had cancer and would have to have all the tissue of my left breast removed. On Friday, he said that new biopsies have raised some hope that the “atypical” cells in the tumor aren’t really cancer after all.

“The pathology people are saying that they just see atypical cells,” the doctor said. “They’re not seeing gross, obvious cancer. It may all be good news.”

My heart leapt upon hearing his words. What might it mean? How would it change things? And, mostly, what was the likelihood that it wasn’t really cancer?

Unfortunately, the doctor doesn’t have good answers for me yet. The initial “fine needle aspiration” biopsy had given cells that made him conclude it was cancer. Much more extensive samples taken eight days ago had failed to confirm the diagnosis. It could be that the four or five samples he dug out of me with a “core biopsy gun” didn’t happen to hit the parts of the tumor with obvious cancer cells. Maybe. We don’t know yet.

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Now that it’s looking more and more as though Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee, the truth can come out about this family relationship.

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In 1998, Newt Gingrich was the Republican Speaker of the House who guided the impeachment of Bill Clinton for lying about an affair. He talked piously at the time about family values and how Clinton wasn’t fit to be president because of his transgressions. At the same time, Gingrich was cheating on his own wife. Even now, the man doesn’t see anything hypocritical about this.

U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz is the chair of the Democratic National Committee. In 2009, she criticized GOP presidential candidates who had opposed Barack Obama’s bailout of General Motors and Chrysler by saying, “If it were up to the candidates for president on the Republican side, we would be driving foreign cars; they would have let the auto industry in America go down the tubes.”

There’s only one problem. Schultz drives a foreign car — a 2010 Infiniti FX35 with a personalized license plate bearing her initials. A spokesperson for the DNC didn’t see any hypocrisy in this, of course, but saw it as merely a Republican diversion from the issues.

We could easily cover dozens of incidents of hypocrisy — by supporters of both sides of the mainstream — but you get the point. If you do a web search for political hypocrisy or political double standards, what you’ll find is hundreds and hundreds of articles by people blasting the serious hypocrisy of the other side, but I haven’t been able to find a single word about the fact that hypocrisy is the biggest bi-partisan aspect of politics.

All day Thursday, I saw conservative Republicans blasting Marianne Gingrich and ABC News because of the charges she made in an interview with the network. To me, the woman comes across as a credible witness who testifies about her ex-husband’s deep dishonesty and lack of ability to be trusted. But I saw and heard Newt Gingrich’s supporters call her all sorts of names, most of which use language I wouldn’t repeat here. Why are they attacking her when all she is doing is pointing out the hypocrisy of her ex-husband?

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