Ouch! Obama Camp Hits Team Romney: ‘The Hypocrisy Is Breathtaking’

[Marr]

12. I swear, it's almost funny to hear left-leaning people talk about hypocrisy.

Authoritarians can't RECOGNIZE hypocrisy. They're simply blind to it.

Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians does a great job of parsing years of social science data on authoritarians, and one of the personality traits that stands out most for that type is that they are, as a group, very unprincipled. They'll always define things in the way that serves them most in that particular situation, and completely disregard that standard when it does not serve them.

Oddly enough, when they rate *themselves*, they say they are not only highly principled, but the *most* principled. So it's sort of like they begin with the assumption that they are the good guy, and then filter all information around that assumption.