Baseless, trite, hypocrisy from Frum

Last night I posted something (No principle trumps tribalism) wherein I decried the hypocrisy or double-standards of those who claim that the rightness and wrongness of an act is determined by who does it, not the nature of the act -- the doer, not the deed. Tonight my kindred spirit, Glenn Greenwald writes about yet another example of IOKIARDI. This time David Frum (oh, what a shame that Barbara's son turned out this way) is the hypocrite-de-jour.

This petulant, adolescent, self-victimizing cry of persecution -- Republicans are treated so unfairly, and people always complain when we do something that they let the Democrats do -- has become virtually automatic in the parlance of Bush followers and neoconservatives. It's almost reflexively inserted into any political argument they make. And it's virtually always as baseless as it is trite. Frum's argument here provides an excellent illustration of why that is so.

If Frum tries hard enough, he may be able to find a difference between these two eavesdropping stories beyond the fact that one involves a (D) and the other involves an (R). How about . . . . . what the Clinton administration did is perfectly legal, while what the Bush administration did (and is doing) is a criminal offense under American law? Might that explain the acceptance of the former and the objections to the latter?

[...]

What is so very odd about Frum's complete disregard for the distinction between "legal" and "illegal" behavior is that he previously not only understood the distinction but was one of our nation's most intrepid defenders of the rule of law.

[...]

Frum's original argument was that those who object to Bush's eavesdropping without also objecting to Clinton's eavesdropping are revealing themselves to be unprincipled hypocrites driven by partisan considerations. But given the self-evident principle underlying that position -- namely, that such individuals object to the illegality of Bush's eavesdropping, while nobody claims that Clinton's was illegal -- Frum's accusation of partisan-based hypocrisy was frivolous from the start.

The only partisan hypocrisy one finds here is from those who paraded around piously as Advocates of the Rule of the Law throughout the 1990s, but who then spent the last six years justifying systematic lawbreaking as something noble -- as nothing more than "act[ing] overzealously in defense of the nation."

Once again, Frum is exposed as a shameless hack.