As a competitive collegiate debater, here’s how I find hypocrisy and inconsistency to play out, FWIW:
Hypocrisy is only important in the context of, say, an election–that is, the choice between two individuals. If one candidate outlines expectations that he has for another, knowing full well that he falls short of them himself, then he is a hypocrite, and, what’s more, at least equally bad (if not worse) than the other. What hypocrisy indicates in this sense is a weakness of character on the part of the debater, which is only a flaw when it is the debater that we are debating. If I say that overall, people should not treat each other badly, but do it myself sometimes–or even on a regular basis–there is nothing to indicate that we should take the statement as false.
Inconsistency, on the other hand, is, at its root, holding two mutually exclusive ideas at once. Very often, people are accused of being inconsistent when they don’t have to be, because a faulty parallelism is established. As an example, one could compare North Korea and Iraq and accuse the Bush Administration of inconsistency for not attacking North Korea while attacking Iraq (if, of course, it does), citing the similarities between the two countries. But this accusation holds very little water, because other circumstances (North Korea’s massive conventional and possibly–probably–nuclear deterrent, for instance) break the parallelism in a relevant way.
Further, even if a debater has been inconsistent, actually a rare event for most semi-decent ones, this doesn’t mean that his entire argument is destroyed. Quite often in varsity debating a novice (or even a veteran) will find something he can present as inconsistent and think that by doing so, he has automatically won. An inconsistent argument, while flawed, is often still superior overall, and often still has validity in one or the other of the clashing statements.
-Ulterior
