Being the hugely fair-minded person that I am, it’s important to me to praise people I otherwise criticize when they do the right thing.
Hillary Clinton, for example, has chosen to display an admirable degree of consistency. Having herself done what she could to keep the “Obama is a Muslim” smear alive (a move that The Economist correctly calls “Nixonian”), she has refrained from criticizing John McCain for his embrace of the anti-Catholic, anti-Muslim, anti-gay bigot and all-around nutcase John Hagee.
Update It might seem strange to some that HRC should confine her vicious negative campaigning to her Democratic rival rather than using it on the Republican we all want to keep out of the White House, but perhaps she doesn’t want to be rude to the person with whom she shares “a lifetime of experience.”
Footnote What should HRC have said? How about:
I have been in Christian prayer groups with Barack Obama. He’s no more a Muslim than I am. Al-Islam is a religion with a proud history, but he and I are proud to be Christians. The people circulating these false rumors are bearing false witness, which the Bible condemns, and they ought to be ashamed of themselves.
There: that wasn’t so hard, was it?