By comparison, politics is difficult, not only because it isn't just a brutish game that people play for money – although, more than often, it can be that too – but because, no matter which team you decide to support, someone will end up calling you a hypocrite in the end.
If you're a lefty and you don't give change to the homeless guy in the street, for instance, your lefty friends will ask you where your social conscience has gone. And if you're a conservative and you do give change to the homeless guy in the street, your conservative friends will say hurry up and stop being such bleeding heart, you're just feeding his drug habit and someone else is going to get our dinner reservation. And of course, both sets of friends are right.
But then again, more often than not an accusation of hypocrisy is false. It's a convenient rhetorical device that relies on an apparent double standard, rather than a real one.
