Hot Air's Ed Morrissey informs us that Judicial Watch has finally been able to obtain from the FBI unredacted files on the late Senator Ted Kennedy. They're not pretty. Add to what's in these files the Senator's chronic cheating while in college, his deplorable conduct at Chappaquiddick, and what he's widely believed to have done with former senator Chris Dodd and a waitress at the La Brassierie restaurant in D.C., and one can only be deeply disappointed that so many liberals consider this man to be something of a political hero.
The irony is that Kennedy is an icon in the liberal pantheon while Richard Nixon, whose offenses were no worse, and perhaps much less so, is a villain.
What is the standard by which we judge the quality and character of our leaders? Is it simply their ideological allegiance? We ought to be much more fair-minded, more objective, more honest than that. Otherwise, how credible is our opinion?
Perhaps we should ask ourselves, when we read about how any particular leader on our side of the political spectrum has acted, what we would think if we read the same thing about someone on the other side. Would we give that person a pass? If not, we shouldn't extend one to the guy on our own side either.
I find myself wondering about this with respect to my fellow conservatives almost anytime I hear Sean Hannity's radio show. What would his conservative admirers think if some liberal talk show host was as rude, arrogant and just plain dumb as Hannity often is (I'd add pompous, but compared to Bill O'Reilly, Hannity's pomposity fades almost to zero)? I think they'd be outraged, as they often are by Chris Matthews and other hosts at MSNBC, but Matthews is just a liberal mirror image of Sean Hannity.
To paraphrase Martin Luther King let's measure people by the content of their character and not by the color of their ideology or the political party to which they belong. Let's judge them by the same standard by which we judge the people on our own side and vice versa.