The NYT's resident harpy, who Hitchens once referred to mockingly as "The Great Philosopher Maureen Dowd," fails to notice a quote she incorrectly attributes to Oscar Wilde in her latest pointless screed against Republicans who she tries to slime as hyporcites over gays in the military issue.

Dowd:

Be honest. Who would you rather share a foxhole with: a gay soldier or Mitt Romney?

A gay soldier, of course. In a dicey situation like that, you need someone steadfast who knows who he is and what he believes, even if he’s not allowed to say it out loud.

Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue, as the gloriously gay Oscar Wilde said. And gays are the sacrifice that hypocritical Republican candidates offer to placate “values” voters — even though some candidates are not so finicky about morals regarding their own affairs and divorces.

As Berkowitz notes, however, that wasn't Oscar Wilde's line at all. "Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue" (which, by the way, is a brilliant observation) belongs to La Rochefoucauld, as even an elementary Google search would have disclosed, to say nothing of actually cracking open a dictionary of quotations.

But that would have distracted from Dowd's narrative, which is that a line from a gay author showed that Romney is a hypocrite on gays in the military, as are all the other Republican presidential candidates. (She, on the other hand, thinks the war in Iraq is a crime, but it's a scandal that gays aren't allowed to die in it.)

ht: Ace

Posted by: Good Lt. at 10:53 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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