The right stuff

I think The Journal Gazette's editorial page has discovered a new sin to pin on conservatives: hypocrisy by association. The JG doesn't think much of efforts by a local group to have Allen County Superior Court Judge Ken Scheibenberger thrown off the November ballot:

The challenge to Scheibenerger's candidacy was based on a poorly written law. The best the Scheibenberger opponents could come up with to justify removing a sitting judge from the ballot, denying voters the opportunity to vote for or against him, was that some of the words in the law were in lower case rather than upper case. These from the same type of conservatives who castigated Bill Clinton for challenging the definition of “is.”

To make a legitimate case for real hypocrisy, the JG would have to find a challenger to Scheibenberger who had actually complained about Clinton's definition of "is." But that would be hard work, and likely there is no such challenger to be found anyway. Much easier to just smear the whole lot of them, you know, that "type of conservative" capable of doing anything reprehensible the editorial writer can think of.  I don't think I ever complained about Clinton's "is" problem, but I suppose am that type who would have had I been so inclined. And I don't care much about the Scheibenberger issue much one way or the other, but if I did, I'd probably care more about the specific legal issue than the people involved, but what else would you expect from my type?

Later in the editorial, the writer has a little more fun with conservatives by deliberately (I presume) confusing the use of liberal meaning "the opposite of a narrow interpretation of the law" with liberal as the opposite of conservative politically:

“If the statute is to mean something, it has to be interpreted in a fairly liberal manner,” Arnold said, a somewhat ironic statement considering the ultraconservative views of his client.

On second thought, maybe it's not deliberate.