The Hypocrisy Fallacy: If You Don’t Do What’s Right, I Don’t
Have To Either!  L is for 'Lots of armed body guards.'  L is for
‘Lots of armed body guards.’  We continue our delightful series1
of mistakes in logic, this time highlighting the hypocrisy
fallacy. It also has an official Latin name: ad hominem tu
quoque, which loosely translated is, “You canting, sanctimonious
fraud!”  Suppose an opinionator—intellectual, journalist,
television news reader, academic, celebrity, blogger, etc.—were
to issue the following prototypical statement:  I think we can
all agree that the notorious ax murderer Joe Blogs, who used his
last words to state that killing is wrong, is a hypocrite.
Therefore, hacking people to pieces with dull axes is okay.  We
would be right to wrest from the grip of this man the bottle of
which he is obviously too fond. But what if he said this
instead?  The Catholic Church acknowledged covering up the
crimes of a bunch of misordained molesting male priests who were
‘oriented’ mainly towards post-p