I'm not the kind of person who sits around watching B-listers compete in dance. Even less am I the kind of person who takes moral adevice from said people. That having been said, you don't know what a hypocrite is.
It is often the case that a person who has made a particular moral failing in their life is - in some ways - a very good source of advice about avoiding that particular failing. For example, it's not hypocritical at all for alcoholics to run AA meetings and tell people not to drink to excess. The same can be said for Bristol Palin. She's perfectly capable of making a non-hypocritical presentation of why people shouldn't engage in the same behavior she did. It's like a cautionary tale, in some respects. (That being said, fom what little I know of Miss Palin and her former boy friend/fiance the baby seems to be the only good thing to come out of that relationship. But then, babies are always good news.)
Hypocrisy isn't the same as telling someone not to do what you did. It's telling people not to do something because it's wrong and then doing it yourself and acting as if it's OK for you to do it. There's a difference between hypocrisy and simple moral failing. We all fail to live up to our standards but that doesn't make us all hypocrits (that depends on our interior disposition, not on our objective behavior).
Personally, I'm rather tired of people flinging around the "hypocrit/hypocrisy" label as a simple excuse to ignore other's people advice. If you want to sleep with your boyfriend or girlfriend go ahead, but don't say someone else who did and has had regrets about it is automatically a hypocrit.
Pax,
Chris
