Randolph Fritz makes an excellent point in D-Square Digest’s comments:
It’s a common practice of the manipulative to insist that people who they want to shame into inaction follow rules to the letter, and all the while those same manipulative people ignore the rules. William Bennett being a fine example; I believe he was so publicly moral in some areas of his life because he was deeply ashamed of his compulsive gambling.
What I noticed in the discussions about Rachel Corrie (the activist who was run over by an Israeli bulldozer) is exactly that. For many people who didn’t share her politics, it seemed that her burning of an US flag was morally equivalent with her being killed: because she wasn’t a saint she deserved what she got. That way of course, you don’t need to think about her as a human being, but just as an “idiot” (and you put your opponents on the defence). A common but strangely unacknowledged reflex.