Several weeks ago Viewpoint suggested that the array of individuals supporting John Kerry should give others leaning in his direction pause. We wrote that:
Now we can add to this list of disreputable characters the names of Joe Wilson, a Kerry advisor, and arrant slanderer, Whoopi Goldberg, whose sleazy put downs of the president were so offensive and vile that her corporate sponsor, Slim-Fast, dropped her from its celebrity endorser list, and most recently Sandy Berger, former National Security Advisor under President Clinton and, until last night, current advisor to Senator Kerry, who purloined documents dealing with matters of national security by concealing them in his pants and socks.
Berger calls his behavior an honest mistake. He inadvertently left the archives, he claims, with documents stuffed in his socks and down his drawers. The Dems want to laugh all this off, but they would be howling in outrage had it been a Bush administration official who stole the papers. Not only does their reaction to this incident, or rather their lack of reaction, evince a deep hypocrisy in the Democrat party, it also suggests that we may infer that this sort of behavior falls within the bounds of the Democrat standards for honesty. Berger is like a shoplifter with merchandise stuffed in his socks, trying to convince the police that he inadvertently left the store with the items, that he certainly didn't intend to steal them, and the Democrats seem to be okay with that.
Rather than expressing dismay that so many of their friends and political allies seem grossly deficient in either taste or integrity, they respond to this last incident by fretting instead about the "timing" of the revelation about Berger's conduct, as if that somehow is more nefarious than the conduct itself. It's no wonder the Democrats insist that character doesn't matter for public servants. If it did, a sizable number of them would be rendered ineligible.
George Bush can take comfort that people like these hate and oppose him, because people have always despised those who are morally superior to themselves. He can take comfort that so many feel impelled to lie about him, to utter the most mean-spirited and vile slanders about him. People do this because they know that they can't merely tell the truth about the man since the truth is not going to alienate voters from him.
People often feel indicted by another man's strength of character, by his integrity. His virtue is a mirror that constantly reminds them of their own inferiority, and they detest not themselves for being less, but they detest him for being better. Their jealousy doesn't motivate them to rise to his level, but rather it motivates them to drag him down, to discredit him, ruin him.
Destroying a man is one way to exert power over him and the exercise of power is the only way some people know to compensate for the character they themselves lack. If a man is better than they, they wish to destroy him. They can't tolerate a man whose very existence condemns them. They will project their own pathologies onto him in an attempt to prove that he's not really as virtuous as he seems. Thus they accuse Bush of lying to the world about Iraq when, in fact, the only evidence that people have lied points back to them. This is a sickness, a depravity which seems to reside deep in the human heart, and it's the root of so many of our social and political ills.