The Philadelphia Inquirer reviewed it already and I can't wait to get my hands on this thing. Here's some excerpts:
Barack Obama mocked Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy expertise until he didn’t.
Hillary Clinton savaged Obama’s ability until she praised it.
John McCain vaunted Sarah Palin as the best person in the country (after him) to be president until he lost, whereupon he declined to back her in 2012.
And Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich? Well, he told lots of kids, when he visited their schools, that it’s important to talk nice …
Hypocrisy, according to [author David] Runciman, is “inevitable” and “ubiquitous” in liberal, democratic societies. It’s also, he argues more surprisingly, “something we have to learn to live with” rather than eliminate. A greater risk, he believes, is not recognizing that “too great a reliance” on public sincerity - too much sanctimony - is a mistake, because “liberal democratic politics are only sustainable if mixed with a certain amount of dissimulation and pretence.”
What we need, Runciman asserts, are sharp antennae that distinguish appropriate political hypocrisies from “intolerable” ones. There is, he contends, “no way of breaking out from the hypocrisy of political life, and all attempts to find such an escape are a delusion.”
Sometimes it feels like there's no way of breaking out from the hypocrisy of life in general. I try my hardest everyday to be as honest and true as I can be. I truly do try to never judge a book by its cover, etc. But if my boss does something that makes me mad and then asks me to go on a starbucks run, I will put a smile on, yes sir'ing on my way out and skip my way to starbucks. My loyalty is on the person whose hand signs my checks.
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