The term “hypocrite" is derived from the ancient Greek “hypokrites,” literally “an actor” or a "stage player," and is itself a compound of two other Greek words that translate as “an interpreter from underneath." AsMerriam-Websterexplains, the term’s origins stem from the fact that Greek actors originally wore large, heavy masks, and thus “interpreted” a story from beneath those masks.
In modern parlance, “hypocrisy” is used to describe someone whose behavior stands in stark contradiction to what they claim to be their beliefs or principles. In the world of politics, for example, the confluence of a politician’s statements and his actual behavior often provides evidence of hypocrisy. Generally speaking, we look down on hypocrites because human experience shows that people who “speak out of both sides of their mouths" are regarded as untrustworthy and of inferior moral quality.
There are few sources of hypocrisy as constant and resilient as the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. While that publication’s news division is among the world’s best, its opinion and editorial pages are nearly always drawn from the darkest cesspool of the American right wing. Their function, through careful, constant repetition, is to convince the Journal’s upscale, self-regarding readership that the American left poses a serious and mortal threat to their continued, uninterrupted accumulation of wealth. They are, in reality, the high-end version of the vicious “conservative” bile that feeds their useful idiot "lower"classes on AM talk radio, and they succeed by creating an alternative universe of carefully programmed right-wing dogma that many—far too many—of this nation’s wealthiest citizens accept as “truth.”
But sometimes the weight of the Journal’s self-contradictions becomes impossible to sustain. They have reached that sorry space in their convoluted attempts to justify the continued presidency of Donald Trump. As Jonathan Chait, writing for New York Magazine observes, the Journal serves as a useful predictor or “early warning” about the right’s latest political strategy. But in its flailing efforts to cope with the mounting congressional inquiries into Donald Trump’s nefarious collusion with a foreign state—a foreign state which conservatives, incidentally, used to revile—the Journal's stable of go-to “legal apparatchiks," among them attorney David Rivkin Jr., is painfully, almost comically, tying itself into knots.
In an editorial published in the Journal last week, Rivkin and co-author, fellow “conservative legal theorist”Elizabeth Foley, essentially, and without a hint of self-reflection argue that the sheer multiplicity of criminal allegations of Trump's "pre-presidential"activities should prompt newly sworn in Attorney General William Barr to shut down congressional investigations into Trump's crimes, for the “good of the country.”
