DADvocate

Byron Williams wrote an excellent column on how both parties need to take a long, serious look in the mirror.

The Republican Party as we know it today is a reckless, hypocritical, self-serving entity that gives lip service to morality so that it can, in the most Machiavellian sense, hold a base just large enough to ensure victory.

Pretty harsh.

Without moral clarity and a sense of their own political raison d'etre, roughly half of the Democrats in the Senate voted in support of authorizing the president to use force in Iraq. It is an insult to the American people to listen to Democrats, who now have buyer's remorse, stating, "If I knew then what I know now, I would not have voted the way I did."

Listening to the Democrats is certainly an insult to one's intelligence. Democrats love to play self-righteous games. Why do you bring up Studds/Clinton/whomever in comparison to Foley? Maybe because the comparison is a valid one.

Democrats have shown their lack of moral clarity time and again over the last three decades. Yet, they get very self-righteous over a woman's "right" to kill her unborn child or homosexual marriage. If those are the only issues in which you can claim the moral "high" ground, you're in sad shape.

Since neither party owns "the" truth, both risk being permanently lost in their own delusions of grandeur. Those who allow themselves to be engaged in the public conversation need the contrarian's perspective lest they fall into the trap of believing that only their thought is normative. Such arrogance blinds us to our own imperfections, and no good can be realized from it.