So I can expect your condemnation of "the republicans did it" when the next bad policy is pushed through using less than ethical maneuvers and especially without the proper context?
First, I don't always live up to the ideal (ideals tend to work like that), but I never celebrate my or anybody else's inability to not live up to the ideal. If I fail, it isn't something I am proud of, though I will own it if forced to.
Second, partisanship colors the debate over what a bad policy or what ethical politics are to the point actual badness or ethics is very hard to determine. I'm trying to stay in the realm of the obvious, where a
strongly worded belief based on a
significant amount of feeling fostered during a
short period of time and suffering being
undermined by its own originator is unmanly.
Again, you would have a point if this were a question of the good doctor's morality or his manliness (where the **** did that whole line of illogic come from, anyway?) or if there were some sympathy for his expression of his right to free speech. I don't really think anyone has thought he needed sympathy for such a bold act.
'Boldness' is a generous way of putting it. It would have been more bold if he hadn't hastened to ensure his action couldn't be construed as breaking state law by refusing service to supporters of health care reform. As it is, he undermined the force of his own message by claiming he wasn't taking it that far; he stood up for his ideals to the point of expressing an inflammatory emotional response, but not to the point of actually putting his job at risk. But even if he had put his job at risk, it would have been unmanly because he hasn't actually suffered materially under the reform. The unmanliness inherent to complaining can only be mitigated by suffering.
A stoical person would not be capable of such an act (it would embarrass and demean him in his own eyes), and stoicism, a philosophy of self-reliance, determination, and dutifulness, is in practice a realization of manliness. Thus, his masculinity comes into question (not in a biological sense, but a moral one).
Stoical people can make bold movements, but bold movements require personal risk and require a lot of build up. The doctor would have to endure a lot for years before an action like this could be considered a morally legitimate complaint rather than a tantrum. That's what we intuitively expect, since toddlers are sensitive to the point that every deviance from their specifications is a cause for them to voice a huge complaint; they don't need to suffer over a long period of time.
No excuses means no excuses. If protesters are being called less than manly for things that are screwing them then the POTUS has zero excuse to bitch when not getting his way. No excuses remember?
If moral behavior is contingent on the behavior of your enemies, then moral behavior is impossible. I'm not saying the actions of politicians are praiseworthy. I don't think that even of politicians whose policies and behaviors I like; politics is distasteful to me. But they act so out of a necessity which emerges from a superstructure none of them can control. Individual citizens in the private sector, however, have no part in any such necessity. Indeed, the immorality that emerges out of political necessity makes moral behavior much easier for them.