Yesterday Politico posted a hit piece on Elizabeth Warren, alleging that she’s being hypocritical in her opposition to a key aspect of TPP, that’s interesting in several ways. First, it was clearly based on information supplied by someone close to or inside the Obama administration – another illustration of the poisonous effect the determination to sell TPP is having on the Obama team’s intellectual ethics. Second, the charge of hypocrisy was ludicrous nonsense – “You say you’re against allowing corporations to sue governments, yet you were a paid witness against a corporations suing the government!” Um, what?

And more generally, the whole affair is an illustration of the key role of sheer laziness in bad journalism.

Think about it: when is the charge of hypocrisy relevant? Basically, only when a public figure is preaching about individual behavior, and perhaps holding himself or herself up as a role model. So yes, it’s fair to go after someone who preaches morality but turns out to be a crook or a sexual predator. But articles alleging that someone’s personal choices are somehow hypocritical given their policy positions are almost always off point. Someone can declare that inequality is a problem while being personally rich; they’re calling for policy changes, not mass self-abnegation. Someone can declare our judicial system flawed while fighting cases as best they can within that system — until policy change happens, you have to live in the world as it is.

Oh, and it’s very definitely OK to advocate policies that would hurt one’s own financial interests — it’s just bizarre when the press suggests that there’s something insincere and suspect when high earners propose tax increases.

So why are charges of hypocrisy so popular? Mainly, I think, as a way to avoid taking on policy substance. Is Elizabeth Warren right or wrong about TPP? Never mind, let’s sneer at her for having been a prominent law professor.

The same motives drive the preoccupation with flip-flopping. You once said that deficits were bad, now you say that they’re OK. Hah! Never mind whether deficits are in fact OK right now, and whether either the situation has changed or you have learned something. (As someone pointed out, both Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton have rejected policies they used to support — but Romney has rejected policies that worked, while Clinton has rejected policies that didn’t. A bit of a difference.)

So maybe this head-scratchingly weird hit on Warren will serve as a teachable moment, a reminder that journalism about policy should be, you know, journalism about policy.