Unless there's moral equivalency how can it be hypocrisy? It's only hypocrisy if you assume moral equivalency. Which you are doing, of course, even though you can't bring yourself to admit it.
I won't be tied to that whipping post, WildCat. Moral equivalency typically gets the slippery slope treatment, where its zealot adherents declare that because someone is doing the same thing as someone else, that they are
on the whole basically just as bad (or just as good, though it's rarely used in good sense). Meanwhile, the zealot detractors seem to argue something along the lines of my country, right or wrong -- suggesting that when we do it, it's right, and when they do it, it's wrong. But while the absolute character of morality is debatable, hypocrisy can
still be identified.
For instance, when criticized for deficit spending, Obama suggests that Bush was doing the same thing. It's an equivalence fallacy because it doesn't really address the criticism, only suggests that he's no better or no worse than his predecessor about this. But there is no hypocrisy because he's not saying that Bush was wrong to do it. (He's basically calling out many of his detractor's
own hypocrisy for excusing it one instance and not the next, but that's a subject for another thread.)
What I hear people saying in this instance, however, is that it's OK when America does it, but
not when Iran does. Dr. Kitten partially addressed this by suggesting that we're complying with the relevant "optional" treaties and they aren't. But of course, that in itself is an equivalence fallacy because it suggests that compliance and agreement about such matters are the same for them as they are for us, and they're not.
This outrageous notion that America's **** doesn't stink has got to stop. But that's not what I was arguing. I was arguing that we're being hypocritical -- and we are.
