The older I get, the more my opinions of people are shaped by perceptions of their character rather than by their politics, a compensating blessing for the various indignities that replace the vanities of youth. Hypocrisy, especially when accompanied (as it usually is) by a lack of humility, is the character flaw I despise most.

Were I to nominate one columnist as a spiritual godfather to the ranks of the hypocritical in punditry, Frank Rich would be an easy choice. For Mr. Rich, opinions need not be consistent, except in their intolerance and unfairness.

He recently disparaged Sen. John McCain, as well as Sens. Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, for their temerity in arguing — as President Obama and Frank Rich have as recently as this summer — that Afghanistan remains a war of necessity. Rather than offer a serious argument for why that is no longer the case (and his assertion that the war of necessity has quite suddenly and exclusively relocated to Pakistan does not count as serious), Rich did all he has the character and talent for: project his own unattractive attribute onto his targets.

He selectively used old McCain quotes to question the soundness and sincerity of the senator’s arguments today. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, McCain expressed confidence in President Bush’s war cabinet, mentioning by name secretaries Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney. That wasn’t a particularly controversial view at the time. All three were experienced statesmen, well respected by senior members of both parties and by many in the media. When their leadership began to reveal serious errors in judgment — for example, Secretary Rumsfeld’s insistence on a light footprint in Iraq as the insurgency got underway, or Vice President Cheney’s views on the treatment of detainees — McCain wasn’t just a sharp and vocal critic but also an earlier one than were many Democrats.

In the autumn of 2003, McCain didn’t merely inveigh against the failures of, as Rich put it, an “understaffed war”; he recommended the change in strategy and force levels that would, four years later, save the United States from devastating defeat: an adequately resourced counterinsurgency that Rich sneered at.

Rich derided as “chutzpah” McCain’s reference in a recent interview to candidate Obama’s declaration that we can’t just “muddle through” in Afghanistan — which itelf was a reference to McCain’s November 2003 use of that phrase. The senator intended the remark as a gracious if implicit acknowledgment that the president had not just been right when he made that argument, but had effectively scored against McCain’s impolitic use of the phrase.

Moreover, when candidate McCain said we could “muddle through” in Afghanistan, he meant only to recognize that as we committed more troops to Iraq, we wouldn’t have the forces to use in Afghanistan. He frequently argued that to succeed in Afghanistan we would need additional forces to fight a counterinsurgency. He was simply acknowledging the practical impossibility of doing so at that time.

For Rich, the prospect of failure in Afghanistan was just a club with which to beat the Bush administration and candidate McCain, and, having done its job, is now not worth our attention. Were Rich an honest columnist, he would care more for the integrity of his argument than for its success in scoring points off his opponents’. He might acknowledge that, even if you think him more often wrong than right, McCain has been right on occasions when Rich was wrong, and has often put what he believed to be the interests of his country before his personal and partisan considerations. He would debate the issue without maligning the record of an opponent who has risked more for his beliefs and his country than Mr. Rich has or will ever be expected to, and has earned not blind deference to his views but surely the presumption of sincerity.

Such humility might not make his columns more popular, but it would make them worth reading and Rich worth knowing. As it is, Rich isn’t just a foolish man, but a hypocrite whose intolerance of opposing views is never tempered by recognition of his own inconsistency and mistakes. At my age, I’ve already known too many people like that.

– Mark Salter is a longtime speechwriter for Sen. John McCain and the co-author of Hard Call.