Exactly. If you tell someone they must abide by your rules, there is an implicit assumption that you will abide by your own rules. If you don’t, you are demonstrating that your rules don’t mean much to you, and therefore they won’t mean much to other people. Practice what you preach, and all that.
Tobias wasn’t simply spreading a message. A smoker who simply says “You shouldn’t smoke, it’s bad for you” may get a raised eyebrow, but otherwise it’s perfectly possible to separate the message from the messenger. Instead, he said “Don’t condone prostitution, or else you won’t get this aid,” which is imposing a rule. He broke his own rule, which undermines it. It’s not hard for someone else to say, “Well, why should I have to follow this rule to get the aid I need? The guy who set the rule clearly doesn’t think it’s important.” Thus Tobias’s hypocrisy rates a higher level of ridicule than otherwise.
I have half a mind to bring up other public figures for further illustration, but the potential for hijack is high. So I’ll let it sit there.
It’s important to expose the hypocrisy of all of the leaders who are hoisting their religious moralism on the rest of us, against our will, because exposing the hypocrisy may get them to stop.
The case is a little more complicated than that: Bennet did found and manage several organizations that lobbied against gambling, and he never voiced any particular opposition to these parts of their mission: for all we know he was involved in setting that policy (though he isn’t saying). His habit was a secret until exposed, and when that happened he admitted that he hadn’t “set a good example.”
That’s definitely not full-out hypocrisy, but it’s hardly a case of living up to the moral rectitude he has preached to others, and even if there is no quote directly talking about gambling as a vice in particular, he’s condemned all sorts of other addictive habits in general (without being specific) in the Book of Virtues and elsewhere. Unless there is some magical exemption for being so deep into it that you lose several million dollars in high stakes bets, then it at least begs SOME explanation why his vice is okay even though it falls into all the same moral categories he uses to condemn, say, the supposed selfish self-destructiveness of homosexuality and so on.
I think as Kevin Drum pointed out, it’s not wise for people to get too excited about drawing conclusions about Republicans from this (aside from the direct hypocrisy angle in this particular case), because there is nothing quite as bipartisan as powerful men wanting their dicks sucked by some floozy.
Is it useful to note the distinction between someone like Tobias, who holds governmental policy-making authority that might have the effect of coercing changes in public and private behaviour, and an ordinary priest or minister who has no governmental authority to enforce his recommendations for personal behaviour on the public?
I do not agree that you may impute positions held by organizations that a man founded but did not autocratically control to the man himself. These organizations had boards of directors and employees who were all responsible for setting the goals of the organization. Bennett is not a hypocrite merely because others in the organization disliked gambling.
Bennett’s gambling did not fall into destructiveness, either. Yes, he spent large amounts of money – but he was earning even larger sums of money, and not leaving his family lacking anything in the way of necessities or creature comforts. Your second point appears to boil down to, “Well, Bennett condemned vices, and gambling is a vice!” I don’t agree that gambling, as Bennett practiced it, is a vice, and I don’t agree that you’ve shown hypocrisy here. The word has a specific meaning. Bennett’s behavior does not reach it.
Tobias needed a massage. So he called a hooker. What could possibly be wrong with that. Completely logical.
He gets haircuts at the dentist and will hire a lawyer to do his accounting.
You can be as tired as you like of a valid and sensible criterion for preventing people from advocating unrealistic standards, but that doesn’t reduce the validity and sense of them one whit.
If finding out that it’s administered by the former makes it easier to undermine through public ridicule, then bring it on.
If some guy attacks me, and I happen to know that he had an appendectomy the day before yesterday, the fact that there is no logical connection between his bad morals and his bad appendix isn’t going to restrain my impulse to plant a fist right in his gut where it will be the most effective.
Sorry; that argument doesn’t work for Bennett, given that he clearly rejected corresponding distinctions between destructive and non-destructive versions of other vices (e.g. smoking the occasional joint versus turning into a skid-row crackhead).
Perhaps he believed, as I do, that there are principled distinctions to be made between gambling and the other behaviors you mentioned.
For example, marijuana is illegal 'most everywhere, even an occasional single joint. That’s a reason to advise against its use wholly apart from its medical and social ill effects. Gambling, in contrast, is legal where he did it.
Puh-leeze; that is an utterly fatuous argument when the original issue is one of morality (not legality, not prudence, not anything else). An argument from authority (in this case, the authority of statutory law) is by definition not “principled”, as it relies on specific arbitrary fact situations rather than general principles.
They didn’t just “dislike” it: lobbying against it was part of their mission: i.e. working to prevent other people from gambling. I’m not sure even you would really buy the logic of founding and being a key member in an organization that, say, funded abortions, and not have anything to explain to people opposed to abortion. If you were then found to have quietly performed abortions, you’d still have nothing to explain to anyone?
Not from gambling: he pretty clearly gambled away millions and did not get it back.
Bennet certainly seemed to think it was something to apologize for: if there was nothing wrong with it, why did he pledge to stop? I’d say that his admission is more telling than some posters declaration of the day on what is or isn’t a vice.
And the fact remains that Bennet makes and made no special exceptions for other such behaviors. I’m not allowed to argue that there is nothing destructive about homosexuality, but he is about gambling? Smacks of special rules for special people.
My point was that there are plenty of principled reasons to distinguish approbation directed at all marijuana use from acceptance of gambling.
Nor can you conflate issues like this and sustain a charge of hypocrisy. “He inveghed against all pot use, even occasional; therefore, he’s a hypocrite because he gambles!” PUH-LEEZE, yourself. Hypocrisy is a very simple concept: condeming behavior in which you yourself engage. It does you no good to show he condemned abortion, marijuana, casual sex, or failing to recognize Mom on Mother’s Day if your goal is to prove hypocrisy via his gambling. The only way you can show him a hypocrite for gambling is by showing he condemned gambling.
The issue is hypocrisy. Immorality doesn’t enter into it, unless you can show some sort of commutative association (He claimed X was immoral, and condemned all immorality, and then did X.) That, I grant you, would prove hypocrisy. But that’s not the case here.
I don’t know why, specfically, Bennett condemned all marijuana use. (Or even if he did). But assuming arguendo that he did, there are plenty of distinctions between marijuana use and gambling. Condeming marijuana use and accepting gambling does not a hypocrite make.