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Saturday 1 December 2007

Actually, Hyde’s great historical role was as one of the most important figures in transforming the Republican party into officially making hypocrisy as the central cornerstone of the party and even in trying to have it defined solely as a virtue, the only means by which people could unself-consciously proclaim their belief in the supreme importance of homilies that they themselves chose not to observe in their own lives, even as they demanded to be judged morally superior to people who were no worse than them in the conduct of their daily affairs but who failed to lie about it with as much congratulatory self-righteousness. Hyde was famously outed as an adulterer in response to the impeachment hearings but seemed genuinely appalled that anyone could not recognize that a Democratic’s transgressions were by definition beyond the pale whereas his own were understandable, forgivable, and totally unrelated to his conduct of his public office. He thus became one of the people—and you could probably count the full number of them on one of Django Reinhardt’s hands—who actually outdid Newt Gingrich in hypocrisy. (At the time, Gingrich was conducting his own adulterous affair with the women for whom he would eventually dump his second wife, and he was sufficiently lacking in Hyde-esque levels of chutzpah that he chose to keep a low profile during the impeachment hearings because of it.) Part of Hyde’s strategy during I.Y.-‘98 was to drag a bunch of people who’d been convicted of perjury before the Congress to tell their sad stories so as to demonstrate to any doubters that perjury was a real serious business. But of course, during his previous serious fling with the TV cameras, when he was part of the panel during the Iran-Contra hearings, Hyde had made his mark defending and even applauding Oliver North and others who had lied to Congress while under oath; he wound up claiming to believe that (incompetently) running a secret foreign policy that violated the law and went against the expressed purposes of the voters was no big deal, and was even admirable, but that the president getting his knob polished was cause enough to tear the government down. Mr. Hyde

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