One of the things that Andrew had mentioned in his Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Revolutionaries is to put everything out in the open. In fact, that is his third rule
3.) Be open about your secrets: If you're going to go out in public, be absolutely open about what you've done in the past. Take a page from Barack Obama, who revealed in his probably Ayers-ghostwritten autobiography that he had done a lot of blow, and hung out with commies and assorted lowlifes. Once it was out there, there wasn't much that the right could do with it - he'd already admitted it.
By way of contrast, take a look at Mark Foley. If he'd admitted he was gay right off the bat, the left wouldn't have had much to pillory him with. The left never gets cited for hypocrisy (see Clinton, Bill), but the right is cited with it all the time because we actually have standards. That means we have to out ourselves before the left does it for us. In this book, I've already admitted to libertine sensibilities that were taken to absurd heights during my collegiate stint in New Orleans. I am not a puritan. Frankly, John Waters's movies and Johnny Knoxville's Jackass series are more up my alley than Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. The days of the left forcing us into a small, monolithic, and monochromatic box are over, and we have to fight their caricature of us.
Actually, George W. Bush did the same thing during the 2000 election. "When I was young and stupid, I was young and stupid," he said. Once he had come clean, the Left was stuck - they couldn't do anything.
Hypocrisy is such a powerful argument for the left because it appeals directly to the emotional heart of politics: one standard for you, another for me. It's no wonder Alinsky relied heavily on his rule 4: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. We have more rules than they do with regard for morality, which means we have to live up to them more often. But mistakes in the past don't need to be skeletons waiting to come out of the closet. If you've made mistakes, reveal them at the first available opportunity. Embrace those mistakes. Don't talk about how you regret them - talk about how you lived through them and how they made you who you are today. Embracing your mistakes makes you invulnerable to their slings.
Just don't screw up badly now.
One thing to remember is that we are all human and we all make mistakes. What we do not do is embrace and move on from them. The liberals have concealed their mistakes and moved on from them, though if it were a conservative or a Republican that committed those same mistakes, they would be strung up by their shorthairs over it. THAT is the main difference between them and us. What they do is lie about it and cover it up then when they do come up a year or a decade later they always deny it OR they pull a Hillary and say “What difference does it make NOW?” What we should do is embrace the mistakes and put them out there in the open and say “yes I did this. However, I learned from it and grew into a better person because of it.” Liberals are kind of like the bully who picks on others in school because they are insecure in themselves OR they feel that if they cannot be happy then none else can be happy. Conservatives are kind of like that child who got straight A’s but if there is one blemish on their record they admit it and then move on from it. The slings and the barbs from the bully liberals will be rendered useless once we embrace our blemishes and move on to better ourselves.
