Another Tu quoque

As you can see from the blog, I have been encountering a fair number of tu quoque fallacies recently. To remind you once again, the tu quoque is best described as an appeal to hypocrisy that intends to discredit an opponent's position by asserting that the opponent is failing to act consistently with that position. 

"She will develop policies. In Iowa, she’d already delivered her top four, one of which is to take unaccountable big money out of politics. This is rather precious, considering that her supporters intend to raise $2.5 billion for 2016 alone and that the Clinton Foundation is one of the most formidable machines ever devised for extracting money from the rich, the powerful and the unsavory."

So the claim is that because Hilary is planning on raising tons of money for her campaign that it is hypocritical for her to want to take big money out of politics. How can she both want to take money out of politics and at the same time raise large amounts of money? Isn't she a hypocrite.

The reason we call the "tu quoque" a fallacy is that we think a person's argument deserves to be considered even if their actions are inconsistent with their position. But in this case, we do not even have a real incidence of hypocrisy. For the simple fact is that Hilary needs to raise money in order to get elected to institute the policy. It is not inconsistent for a country to call for nuclear disarmament while at the same time retaining its nuclear arsenal, since it would endanger its existence by unilaterally disarming itself. The same thing holds true for political candidates. Unless Hilary gets elected, she has no chance of pushing for a policy to get money out of politics. It is not hypocrisy; it is reality. And Krauthammer knows the difference