This is the question I raised earlier: does it make sense to lump all of these together and call them “integrity and loyalty?” If a person does cheat on his wife, is it more reasonable to think that he would cheat on a business partner or country (whatever that means)? Does it make sense to assume that if he doesn’t cheat on one, he won’t cheat on another? This assumption is going unexamined.
I was not aware you could incite an abortion. It’s not a riot. Anyway this kind of attitude just encourages lying about it (already common among politicians).
I am sure you are aware that this logic doesn’t hold water.
Can we demonstrate a correlation between cheating on your spouse and infidelity in other areas? Anyone have some statistics to work with? Because here’s a hint: cheating on your spouse doesn’t just have to do with infidelity. There are a whole mess of things that could affect it.
We’re rooting for you, Qin. This Board needs an intelligent right-winger and you may be our best hope. But this comment is astounding.
To begin with, it is more-or-less inconceivable that Bush would have vetoed that Voting Rights Act even if he wanted to. Recall that the renewal passed the House by a vote of 390-33. To pretend that this gives Bush civil rights credentials is to admit that you have … nothing.
And, however much you hate the sinful, Communistic JFK (or however you characterize him when you choose to hate him) to pretend he had no role in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is to admit to gross ignorance. That Act was passed, with bipartisan support, only because a mourning nation sought expiation for the killing of JFK.
No, he wants to trample on citizens rights by treating gays as second class or even persecuting them, and by taking away the rights of those whose religion doesn’t align with his sectarian faith.
Consies = short for Conservatives.
Fischer = Joschka Fischer, Foreign Minister of Germany during the Red-Green coalition
Schröder = chancellor of Germany during the Red-Green coalition.
Please read a better history book then.
In what weird way does "treating your wife well " require loyalty to the country?
And being a good politican doesn’t require loyalty to the country, but loyalty to the interests of the citizens. A lot of American politicans are gung-ho patriotic, while acting against the interests of a large part of the population.
Given that very very few politicans in the US are women, that’s not very hard. And how do you know that a man “incited” an abortion?
Oh here we go again. Do you realize the difference between one individual case, and a general group? That’s why I talked about “rates” - applying to a group.
The solution is Candidate A is Franklin D. Roosevelt
Candidate B is Winston Churchill
Candidate C is Adolph Hitler
(And yes, I know that the question is slightly slanted, since [spoiler]It has some good points, namely that by selectively choosing which facts to report, you can make just about anyone look good or bad. It also (perhaps unintentionally) provides an example demonstrating that facts offered out of context can be more misleading than no facts at all: Hitler’s diet was primarily vegetarian throughout the latter part of his life; however, he didn’t adopt a vegetarian diet for moral reasons, but because he suffered from gastric problems.
Still, some of the semantic trickery used here makes this a rather poor example. Hitler had affairs with several women (some of whom died under mysterious circumstances), but they weren’t technically “extramarital” affairs because he wasn’t married. Playing games with language might also be part of the lesson here, but we suspect that whoever crafted this piece included some misinformation by mistake, not by design. [/spoiler]
Sexual fidelity constitutes the “most basic of personal morality that 90% percent of the population expects on a day-to-day basis”? Really? When sexual infidelity is perhaps the most common personal moral trespass in the human experience? That really only goes to show one thing, that people are hypocrites.
Yes, people are hypocrites, sexual infidelity is a common failing and yet, most of us (dare I say 90% ?) think that people should be faithful to their spouses once they have gone to the trouble of holding a big ceremony where they promise to be faithful. I am gobsmacked that some people believe cheating on one’s spouse says absolutely nothing about a person. You can twist and turn all you want about whether a man who cheats on his wife will cheat on anyone else. Who cares? The question is what that man will do when his own self interest conflicts with the promises he has made and, I believe, a serial cheater has made that choice perfectly clear.
Boo Hoo Hoo for the poor presidential candidate who is just now finding out that people can be hypocrites.
Nobody’s said that in this thread. What a couple of people have said is that one kind of “cheating” may not say much of anything about another. That’s what the thread is about. (We all know waht it means to cheat on your spouse; what some of these other types of cheating are is not being specified.) Many people have managed to be sleazy in a bunch of these areas at once. Then again I’ve never heard Bill Gates accused of cheating on his wife, but lots of people have made serious accusations about dishonest or illegal business dealings on his part. Does that mean his wife should be concerned?
I’ve heard the saying “A man who cheats on his wife will cheat on his country” attributed to Thomas Jefferson, although I suspect he never said that. And for that matter it seems like there have been people who “cheated on the country” without committing marital infidelity.
The obvious solution would be for future politicans in the US just to stay unmarried - because if you are single, it’s not cheating. (And any serious politican doesn’t have time for a real relationship anyway - rent a woman would be a much better idea).
So what? There’s a difference in what people “think” other people should do in their personal lives and then there’s choosing political leaders. It takes a special kind of short-sightedness, self-deception, and lack of sense to conflate the two.
When I look at what kind of political leaders have been known to have personal failings of various kinds, I see little reason to take them into account when making political decisions.
You can take this kind of melodramatic stance or you can look at the actual evidence. I see no reason to believe that sexual infidelity, or other kinds of minor personal failings say anything reliable about a person’s fitness for office. Conversely, I also see no reason to believe that sexual fidelity and other kinds of minor personal virtues say anything reliable about a person’s fitness for office.
It’s not the presidential candidates I have sympathy for in this scenario. It’s the public that I worry about, making decisions based on irrelevant, indeed misleading, trivia about candidates’ personal lives. By subjecting candidates to this kind of idiotic scrutiny, we are depriving ourselves of the probability of the best leadership.