As I listen to the Hollywood Elite fall all over themselves defending Roman Polanski, saying how awful it is that he's been apprehended for the 30-year-old crime of rape of a 13 year old (perhaps not involving physical force, but certainly involving drugs and coercion), I'm reminded of a term I use, "Other Peoples' Liberals". This is related to the term "Limousine Liberal" (or even, at times, "Marin County Liberal" if you happen to live in the right place, although that's too broad a brush).

These are the folks who drive SUVs because they have a "legitimate" reason, but decry the fact that so many people drive cars with low gas mileage and destroy the environment. This is Dianne Feinstein, a staunch gun control advocate but who had a concealed carry permit; when confronted, she said she needed it for her protection. This is parents of a friend of mine who was one of the most out gay people I knew. He said that they were all for gay rights in the abstract, but were not happy to find out their son was gay. This was the father of a women I knew in high school, who was all for racial equality, but who expressed some objections when she was dating a black man.

These are people who are all for tolerance and environmentalism, as long as it doesn't require them to disturb their own back yard.

In a word, hypocrites.

To be sure, it's not at all an exclusively liberal thing. It seems that a few months can't go by without our finding out about the extreme illicit sexual adventures of an extreme outspoken conservative "family values" politician. Rush Limbaugh was all no-tolerance on drugs, until all of a sudden he's up on drug charges. Excessively wealthy executives are for the unregulated free market and treat "socialism" as the dirtiest word ever, until all of a sudden their bank is failing and they need government bailouts to survive.

High standards of behavior that everybody else must be held to, but which are clearly too strict when applied to you.

Hypocrisy is universal. As is the ability for people to be able to overcome cognitive dissonance and justify their own bad behavior, and to come to the defense of the people they have chosen to celebrate, even when they themselves or those they celebrate have violated things they would otherwise speak out against vociferously.

We just need to recognize it for what it is, even when the subject is somebody who's produced challenging art and that has been celebrated for that art.

Or rather, he's with me, since I ditched the Republican Party something like 6-7 years ago.  He's been a Republican in the Senate forever... and now he's a Democrat.  What's more, the article has this choice quote from Olympia Snow:

But Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), a fellow moderate, didn't seem surprised. On the national level, she says, "you haven't certainly heard warm encouraging words of how [the GOP] views moderates. Either you are with us or against us."

As I observed back when Bush took off his "compassionate conservative moderate" mask shortly after the 2000 election, the Republican Party has increasingly become the party of homophobia and creationism.  (And, yes, also of rationalizing incompetence and of torture.  We knew in 2004 that Bush was the Torture President, and yet somehow we re-eledcted him.)  There are a lot of Republicans-- you know, people like Olympia Snow and Arlen Specter-- who have evidently been rationalizing that their party hasn't been taken over by certain extreme cultural elements.  I know people who remained Republicans even though they are fully rational, because they aren't comfortable with a lot of what the Democrats are doing-- but they had to justify, somehow, that their party was more than the face that it has been presenting to the country and the world for the last decade.  That facade may be falling apart.  Anecdotally I know of Republicans who've fled the party because it has gone from being the fiscally conservative party to being the socially oppressive and scientifically ignorant party.  And now we see at least one, and perhaps more to follow, senators who don't want to toe their party's line leaving the party.

It's very sad to me, because by and large people who aren't creationists or who don't hate homosexuals are left with effectively a one-party system.  I don't by any means agree with everything that the Democratic party does.  But the Republican party has too strongly celebrated and mainstreamed parts of it that I simply can't agree with.  It will be interesting to see if Arlen Specter's switch is a wake-up call-- or if Snow will be next, and the Republican party will become increasingly marginalized as a result of having let itself be taken over by its religious extremists.  But we do need more than one rational party in this country; if the Republicans aren't it, I would hope that, somehow, all rational people won't end up at the mercy of the power structure of the Democratic party.

Congress defeated the $700×10^9 bailout bill championed by George Bush. The media are portraying this as a disaster, quoting financial advisors saying that this is a "financial 9/11" and that boy oh boy are we screwed.

On the other hand, I have to admit on some levels I'm happy to see this. Why?

First of all, this isn't the financial 9/11. The financial 9/11 was when all the major banks said, "Guys? We're dead. Please bail us out so our execs can enjoy their golden parachutes without the guilt of a destroyed economy all around us." What did Congress do after 9/11? Well, too quickly they passed the PATRIOT bill, overwhelmingly voting "yes" because the American people were demanding that we Do Something... even though many (most?) of those voting "yes" on it hadn't had a chance to know what was in it, never mind think about the implications of it. And the PATRIOT bill was a huge step in dismantling a lot of the basic protections we have against living in a surveillance state.

When there is a crisis, there's always a push to pass legislation, to Do Something, right away. Sometimes we're lucky and what is done makes sense. More often, it's thrashing about in a "ZOMG" reaction. Sometimes, if they are prepared, those with an agenda can push across legislation that would never have been pushed across when calmer heads were able to prevail. This is what happened with the PATRIOT act. According to reports, there's an oppressive cyberregulation bill waiting in the wings for the "Internet 9/11" to provide the public sentiment that will allow that to push across.

Probably we need to do something fast to prevent our economy from very quickly imploding. But I'm very nervous about the fast response. I'd like to see us do something right. I'd like to see us recognize that just a bailout without a philosophical shift in the attitudes that led us to this mess would be a huge mistake. I'd like to see us recognize that we've done an experiment with deregulation of huge, gigantic companies, and for those who were in favor of such things (which included, at least at times, me) to recognize that, yeah, those ideas have now been shown to be wrong, and sticking to them in spite of the evidence is not rational.

We need more than a band-aid. Yeah, quick action may be needed to keep ourselves out of a horrible depression for the next few years. But we need to think about the next several years, the next few decades, or, heaven forbid, even the next century or two. What we really don't need is a knee-jerk reaction.. and I fear that that is exactly what the $700B bailout is.