I don't consider this a vicious attack, nor does it make them devils. My evidence is a large amount of anecdotal observation, close up and personal, of various

I don't consider this a vicious attack, nor does it make them devils. My evidence is a large amount of anecdotal observation, close up and personal, of various people I've met, and correlating their levels of success in their chosen professions with my perception of how their minds work. I then apply some pattern matching to relate what I've seen with my own two eyes to the patterns of speech and behavior I see in public figures. I can't prove my hypothesis but I find that it is a very good working theory, ie it has strong predictive value. I think everyone is like this to some extent -- we all have some level of double-think going on in our lives. But for some of us, that fact is deeply troubling, and we expend a lot of effort to stamp out whatever we see as hypocrisy in our own thinking and actions. My premise is simply that that urge is pretty much mutually exclusive with regard to certain levels of achievement in various walks of life, including (at a minimum) politics and business. Art and entertainment are a bit trickier, because to some degree they demand a level of sincerity to be successful -- though there are plenty of obvious cases of hypocrisy there as well. [edit: two examples of politicians who do not work this way are Ralph Nader and Ron Paul. These are clearly people who walk and talk their ideals without regard to more pragmatic political calculations. Compare their level of success with, say, Mitt Romney, who in my opinion is willing to send any neural impulses to his body that he thinks increase his chances of being President some day. I just don't believe in our political environment, there is any possible way to get to the top if you are a pure idealist.]