Mark Sanford, right wing tool and disgraced South Carolina governor
I don’t believe that I intended to commit a crime ... I know I crossed the line of civil service rules ... I believe I crossed the line, but I didn’t mean to
Monica Goodling, right wing tool and disgraced Bush 43 DOJ lawyer
Other than being right-wing tools and being disgraced former Republican "public servants" (if that even legitimately applies), what do these two have in common? Clearly their morality was defined by "lines". Lines which circumscribed an absolutist morality that I have written about here, and here, and here.
Reading between the lines, as it were, we can see that these self-proclaimed paragons of moral virtue were in fact moral midgets. Sanford, for example, believed in his heart that a junket to a foreign land on the public dime gave him only a pair of lines to attend to. One was the "married man" line that we can only suppose meant behaving with women not his wife (potentially paid) in ways that his wife would assume are her prerogative. The other being the harder "ultimate" line of sticking his thing into her thing. His moral sense of self depended on not performing that second act no matter how much he performed the former.
Goodling, as the other example that proves the rule, also had two lines. The weak line was the line of obeying the civil service rules as laid out very clearly for all government employees. Why she felt these were subordinate to the second, harder line of breaking the actual law, I don't know. But she did. Ultimately she admited to crossing both lines, but since she didn't "mean to" cross the second line I guess it didn't count.
I think these examples demonstrate first of all that right wing morality is legendary in the same way that unicorn blood is legendary -- people talk about it, but it doesn't really exist. The absolutist concept of morality is wrong, but even judged by their own standards these people are amoral crackpots.
Their rule-based minds suggest there there are two thresholds: one when your behavior becomes questionable and the second when you have reached the ultimate line when you are unquestionably guilty. It doesn't mean breaking the law -- as Sanford shows -- it just means the point when your actions are indefensible. As people with a conscience one would assume that although crossing the first line might be unintentional, they would start to feel more and more uncomfortable as they got closer and closer (and even crossed, for both of them) the second line.
But they did not, as far as we can tell. What they did instead was to dance closer and closer to the ultimate line, feeling righteous in their moral certitude until they danced right on, or even slightly crossed (and then more), the second line. Most people would feel trepidation to come that close to a clear violation of obvious legal and moral prohibitions. Right wingers do not. Never mind if they felt that violating the rule was justified by some higher purpose, they simply thought that the rule was a hard line and they could play the edge and not have to be called to account.
Ask yourself, even if you accidentally crossed the "maybe wrong" line, how much would you push the "obviously wrong" line before you pulled yourself back? And if you pushed the point so far that you accidentally crossed thesecond line, how moral a person do you think you are?
- jack*
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