Okay, so you’re Senator Lindsey Graham, and you are doing precisely the opposite of what you passionately declared was your principled position four years ago. You are seemingly hoisted on your own petard. “I want you to use my words against me. If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said, ‘Let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination.’ And you could use my words against me and you’d be absolutely right.”
Case closed. Egregious, in-your-face, Beltway hypocrisy, right? Wrong. Lindsey is far too clever to be held accountable for the things that he said that people might have been foolish enough to believe were honest and sincere. What many conservatives don’t realize is that rather than address one’s own dishonesty and bad faith when caught in such an ethical snag, one can simply insist that your political opponents would do the same thing that you are doing in some hypothetical reality that you make up out of thin air. You don’t even need any evidence to back up your accusation!
Referring to his 180 degree reversal on voting on Supreme Court nominees in an election year, the Judiciary Committee Chairman told his Democratic colleagues, “I am certain if the shoe were on the other foot, you would do the same.” You tell them, Lindsey!
Never mind that the Republicans’ refusal to hold hearings for President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland in 2016 was unprecedented and that no Democratic-controlled Senate had ever refused to hold hearings for a Republican president’s nominee in American history. Nor had a Democratic held Senate turned around four years later and rushed through a candidate with six weeks before an election. But that doesn’t matter, because it’s your hypothetical reality!
And don’t worry about being accused of “moral relativism,” a charge we gleefully fling at liberals as freely as Trump officials violate the Hatch Act. As conservatives we own the moral relativism charge in the same way that we own family values, patriotism and Christianity. As owners of these sacred beliefs, we can never technically be in violation of them, no matter how far we might diverge from them in actual practice. Sure, some might accuse us of hypocrisy on that count, but they would certainly do the same thing if the shoe were on the other foot!