my gripe with Amr Moussa

Many people would like to see him as Egypt’s next President. And I did like his speech at our University last year.

But I don’t like the fact that he’s getting away with the following discrepancy, with few people calling him on it so far.

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Amr Moussa on February 9 (just two days before Mubarak’s departure, after hundreds were already shot dead in the streets):

“‘I think President Mubarak should stay until his term expires,’ Moussa, who is also a former Egyptian diplomat, said in a televised interview with the local MENA news agency. He said an increasing number of people supported the idea.”

Amr Moussa on April 13:

“Presidential candidate Amr Moussa said Wednesday that the questioning of former president Hosni Mubarak and his two sons on charges of corruption and instigation against demonstrators of the January 25 Revolution ‘proves that nobody is above the law.'”

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Sorry, but I find this shameless. What exactly did Mubarak do after February 9 to change Moussa’s mind? It seems to me that the damage had certainly already been done by then. And if you wanted to make the case at that point in time that he should either stay in power or at least be removed but not prosecuted, it’s a bit late to change that stance without explanation. But it looks like he’s getting away with it, and it’s always a thought-provoking moment (in the most interesting possible sense) when someone gets away with something that most people wouldn’t. These moments are not just cause for griping. They are also windows onto the uniqueness of a human character.

As I’ve said on this blog before, one of the key facts of ethics is that we never hold everyone to the same standards on every issue. And it’s pointless to make this the grounds for a fruitless and morbid reflection on human hypocrisy; we all suffer from it in some cases and benefit from it in others. Tell me what you get away with, and I will tell you who you are. Indeed, it is perhaps the primary fact of ethics. And it’s not just that the strong get away with things and the weak don’t. That’s sometimes true as well, but the weak also get away with things. (Besides which, no one is in a position of strength all the time or a position of weakness all the time.)

The point being… Moussa seems to be the type who will get away with this, just as Bill Clinton was the type to get away with pot-smoking/womanizing issues that could and did annihilate other candidates.

One of the points that results from this is as follows. Once you think you’ve figured out what someone’s “getting away with it” points are, on which they will always slide on through without significant punishment due to certain character features that make this possible, then there’s simply no point fighting them there. It will only be a frustrating energy loss. I once worked with someone who should have been fired 15 times over, but never was, and I wish I could get back the amount of time I wasted being outraged by his getting away with the things he did. Think of how much time Republicans wasted on painting Bill Clinton as a womanizer. No one cared! They should have realized much earlier that no one would care, in Clinton’s case. If Reagan or Obama had been getting favors from an intern in the Oval Office, they’d go down in disgrace in the history books, but no one will care that Clinton did it. That’s just the way it is. Clinton will lose on other fronts in unfair ways while the rest of us skate through on those points.

No one’s untouchable, but everyone’s untouchable in two or three ways, I think. Don’t fight anyone on their untouchable points, no matter how unfair it is.