David McElroy

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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It appears that Matt Drudge might be responsible for forcing executives at ABC News to let their reporters do their jobs. If the facts are what they appear to be, the empty suits at the network don’t understand the news media’s role.

Late Wednesday afternoon, the Drudge Report flashed a report that ABC News had an explosive interview with Newt Gingrich’s second wife, but that network executives were debating the “ethics” of running the story before the South Carolina primary:

“NEWT EX UNLOADS ON CAMERA; NET DEBATES ‘ETHICS’ OF AIRING BEFORE PRIMARY: Marianne Gingrich has said she could end her ex-husband’s career with a single interview. Earlier this week, she sat before ABC NEWS cameras, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned… MORE… Developing…”

Drudge reported that Marianne Gingrich had sat for a two-hour interview with ABC reporter Brian Ross and that her revelations about her ex-husband were explosive. But Drudge also reported that network executives didn’t want to air the interview until after the South Carolina primary:

“ABC NEWS suits determined it would be ‘unethical’ to run the Marianne Gingrich interview so close to the South Carolina Primary, a curious decision, one insider argued, since the network has aggressively been reporting on other candidates.”

What I’d like to know is when it became “unethical” for a news organization to do its job of disseminating relevant information to the public as quickly as possible.

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About eight or nine years ago, I dated a woman for a few months who was a model. As you might expect, she was beautiful. She had a lovely face and a perfectly proportioned and perfectly sized body. The odd part? This physically perfect woman was a “plus-size model.”

Since I don’t pay attention to fashion or to modeling, I hadn’t consciously realized until then just how insane the world of modeling had become. I didn’t realize just how hideous most models are. And I didn’t realize just how warped most women’s images of their own bodies have become.

I’m thinking about this today because of publicity from a story in Plus Model magazine about the difference in size between mainstream models and plus-size models. The magazine argues that models small enough to work in mainstream modeling meet the definition of anorexic. I don’t know about that, but I do know that I almost never find those waifs attractive.

What I’ve become sure of is that women have very distorted images of their body size today. Is it from the anorexic girls they see presented to them as the examples of what women should look like? I have no idea. I’m just sure that the truth has become distorted beyond hope in many of them. I’m going to mention three examples of women I’ve known.

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