“We need to believe that both the dignity of our opponents, and the character we aim to model for our kids, require some basic rules for public debate. We should stop holding the candidates on ‘our side’ to lower standards than we expect from our opponents. This shouldn’t be hard. Lying matters, and truth matters. We should stop lazily absolving bad actors on our side by just shrugging and saying, ‘Well, they all lie.’ Be skeptical of any politician whose statements frame our primary struggle in terms of one group of Americans versus another. Accountability starts at home, and ‘what-about-ism’ is an intellectually vacuous way to live a life — not to mention being a morally bankrupt way to raise our kids.”
Ben Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other — and How to Heal. New York: St. Martins Press, 2018, page 243.
Gary Chorpenning's Notebooks 