No less an orator than president George W Bush of them great misunderestimated United States, trotted out this line in an address to the Economic Club of New York just now. He promised to strongly promote his free trade proposals, and spoke eloquently against isolationism and protectionism — sentiments that I, as a foreigner, cheer.

This raised a laugh:

It makes no sense to deny capital, including sovereign wealth funds, from access to the US markets. It’s our money to begin with. It seems like we ought to let it back.

Proof that seven years of regular practice can make a moderately competent speaker out of anyone.

Every time another public-office sex scandal breaks, it’s the same tired old political fight. If it’s a Democrat, the Republicans demand that the sinner’s head rolls, and the Democrats call the Republicans partisan hypocrites. If it’s a Republican, the Democrats demand that the hypocrite’s head rolls, and the Republicans call the Democrats partisan opportunists.

So, who’s right in this political pickle and moral morass?

First, a warning. This post may contain generalisations. Generalisations are statements about groups that are often, but not always, true for individuals. Not all Republicans are moral conservatives, and not all moral conservatives are Republican. Likewise, not all Democrats are liberals, and not all liberals are Democrats. In my own case, as a classical liberal I largely share the modern liberal’s principles on morality. I believe in individual liberty. Within the boundaries of laws that protect such liberty, I think private behaviour is no business of the state, nor of or the public. There are exceptions, such as in cases of public officials breaking laws they swore to uphold, or exposing their offices to risks such as blackmail, but in general, what Paul does with his Peter is none of my concern.

Now, what about the liberal charge of conservative hypocrisy over morality?

The liberal left claims to be, well, liberal. It claims to tolerate just about anything in terms of private behaviour. Rightly, in my view, liberals say it’s none of the government’s or public’s business what goes on behind closed doors.

On the other side is the self-styled “moral majority”, who define morality in rather more narrow terms. They claim moral behaviour in private defines a person’s character, and therefore it is a prerequisite for public office.

Now when someone gets caught with his pants down the moral conservative simply says, “resign”. This is perfectly consistent with the conservative’s political position. With the liberal left it’s different, however. Their reaction depends not on their own objective principles, but on the subjective principles of the culprit. When a Democrat (like Bill Clinton) gets caught with his Peter where it doesn’t belong, they say it’s just a bit of hanky-panky and it’s not that serious. But when a Republican gets caught with his pants down, they’re all over it like a rash, if you’ll excuse the image. That’s when they accuse Republicans of hypocrisy.

But the Republicans aren’t being hypocritical at all. If you call something a sin, that doesn’t make you a hypocrite if you sin. It makes you a sinner. Declaring that you expect moral behaviour in yourself and others doesn’t make you an infallible saint. Frowning on moral failings doesn’t make you immune from those failings. Moral conservatives would be hypocrites if they didn’t apply their own standards of behaviour to their own politicians. But they do. They’re being perfectly consistent: they expect morality, and punish immorality.

By contrast, the supposedly liberal left are being hypocritical by applying different standards to different people. They would like everyone to apply their own liberal standards to their own people, but then apply standards they don’t even agree with to others. Why was Larry Craig, the Congressman with the suspiciously wide stance, excoriated by Democrats? Because Republicans consider what he did wrong, the Democrats hold his behaviour up as evidence of hypocrisy. Cue shrill schadenfreude. But those Democrats would be wrong. Craig’s actions were not evidence of conservative hypocrisy. He wasn’t above the standards he espouses. The moral conservatives didn’t let him get away with it because he’s Republican. He resigned, and that’s perfectly consistent with the morals he claims to uphold. It was their own reaction that was hypocritical. Shouldn’t liberals be defending his moral right to have anonymous sex with uniformed fellows in toilet stalls? Shouldn’t they apply their own standards of privacy and moral choice to everyone? Instead, he got mobbed for reasons of partisan hypocrisy.

On Eliot Spitzer, for example, a real liberal — whether classical or leftwing — would say what he does with his Peter is his own business, but he did break the law in the state of which he was governor, and he did lay his office wide open to blackmail. So he should resign on those grounds, as opposed to moral grounds. A moral conservative would be perfectly consistent by saying the filthy sinner must burn. That some moral conservatives don’t live up to their own standards does not make this position hypocritical.

Liberals would have a lot more credibility if they didn’t yell “hypocrisy” every time a moral conservative gets caught in an immoral position. Because by doing so, they betray their own hypocrisy instead.

I’ll admit, I’m one of those people who are thrilled to see the back of Eliot Spitzer, New York’s law unto himself. I’m just disappointed that his fall was prompted by a petty sex scandal.

Spitzer made a career out of screwing people he shouldn’t have screwed. But since he went around destroying the careers of high-profile people, often with no basis in fact, and with little more moral justification than the puerile principle that every Goliath must be wrong and every David right, I really would have preferred him being taken down by one of his victims, such as Hank Greenberg or Dick Grasso. I wish the victims of Spitzer the judge, Spitzer the jury and Spitzer the executioner, had been able to defend themselves against their inquisitor.

Problem is, he didn’t often bring those victims before a court, where his self-aggrandizing crusades might have faced rational, independent scrutiny. He preferred extortion and public humiliation as his weapons of choice. He preferred to denounce the heretics from his bully pulpit, and club them with the extraordinary legal powers he wielded.

Take Dick Grasso, for example, who got publicly humiliated with disclosures and insinuations that were none of Spitzer’s business. By all accounts, Grasso did a great job keeping the New York Stock Exchange competitive against both upstart competition and foreign stock exchanges. The NYSE’s board thought fit to pay him handsomely for those services. Yet for some reason, Spitzer thought he had a right to second-guess the NYSE’s own shareholders. He thought he had the moral justification to publicly challenge Grasso over his remuneration, using absurd arguments about the stock exchange’s culpability for the behaviour of listed companies, or worse, that the performance of a stock exchange should be judged on whether share prices rise or fall. If that’s what Spitzer really wanted, he should have nationalised stock markets and got it over with, rather than singling out apparently innocent executives to strong-arm.

Speaking of innocent, the case of Maurice “Hank” Greenberg is even more blatant. Spitzer forced this long-serving head of an insurance company into a hasty resignation not by charging him in court, but by calling his actions illegal on television and threatening the company that employed him with indictment. If Greenberg had indeed broken the law, Spitzer’s duty was to charge and convict him in an independent court. It would have behooved him to do so without creating a media circus around it. But though he had been entrusted with the power to prosecute, Spitzer declined, preferring public insinuation as his billy-club. Last time I checked, falsely accusing someone of a crime on television constitutes defamation, not justice. As for the threat of indicting Greenberg’s employer, AIG, we know what such action can do to a company: Arthur Andersen was indicted, but was exonerated on appeal. By then, however, there was no company left to save. Justice delayed is justice denied, in such a case: indictment can be a death sentence for a company. It is an extraordinarily powerful, extraordinarily blunt instrument. Use it judiciously, or not at all. Spitzer abused it to ruin the careers of people he had no intention of giving their day in court. If he wasn’t entirely false, but had made good on that threat, he would have robbed shareholders, destroyed jobs, reduced competition and punished policy-holders, just to feed his monumental ego and burnish his political stature as a supposed corruption buster. In his crusade against what he saw as corporate corruption, Spitzer came to epitomise the corruption of state power.

If he wants to screw around and hurt his family, that’s between him and his family. It’s reprehensible, but a man’s private moral failings are his own business. Granted, he was breaking New York law, and no person given a position of public trust should get away with doing so. Granted also that he exposed an office of public trust to the risk of blackmail and extortion, which is a grave offence. But still, it is an unsatisfying end to his career. He should have crashed and burned in one of the dogfights he picked with innocent high-fliers. That would have been justice served.