Anthony Weiner finally resigned his seat in congress today after having disgraced both himself and his office. Fox News commentator Alan Colmes, who is a liberal, argues that he should not have. Colmes argues that character doesn't matter as long as the congressman votes the way he wants him to vote, and that lying to the American people is not sufficient reason to relinquish one's power.
This is pretty stunning, I think. Is it not the case that if someone lies to his employer in the private sector it's grounds for firing? Is it not the case that our elected representatives, whom we remunerate with six-figure salaries and handsome benefit packages, should be held to a higher standard of conduct than the average American? Any elected official of whatever party who did what Weiner did should have resigned or been thrown out of office. Why should taxpayers be compelled to continue to pay people like this?
Colmes takes a stab at rationalizing Weiner's lying by saying that he was trying to preserve his dignity and marriage, but everyone who lies has some self-serving motive for doing so. Preserving one's personal dignity hardly justifies lying to the American people and further eroding the trust we have in our political class. When one believes that the greatest good is advancing one's political agenda (Weiner and Colmes are both left-liberals) then anything which accomplishes those goals is morally acceptable. This reasoning, though, puts us on course to agreeing that if lying would have enabled Weiner to ride out the scandal then lying is no big deal, and this leads inevitably to the conclusion that lying is almost never wrong.
People criticize Rush Limbaugh for asserting that it's in the nature of liberals to lie, but Colmes, to the extent that he's representative of the left, gives us a pretty vivid confirmation of Rush's claim.
Parenthetically, Colmes seems to have momentarily forgotten that he was on Fox News when he said that if we're going to demand Weiner's resignation we should also have demanded President Clinton's resignation for lying to the nation about his tryst with Monica Lewinsky. I think most Fox viewers watching that exchange were vigorously nodding their heads in agreement with that conclusion.