Great Fictional Conversations Indicative of a Much Larger Problem, Part I

I was watching five minutes of the movie "The Day After Tomorrow," you know, that one where the Earth freezes over and everything seems really bleak but Dennis Quaid is there and it's gonna be O.K.! movie.

Well, if my synopsis is wrong, don't heckle me about it, I didn't dare watch it nor try to justify the film's existence with googling it. The five minutes I saw on basic cable gave me an insight into the largest logical fallacy of a generation: The age of the Ad Hominem. This quote is from a scene where they are trying to find books to throw on the fire to keep warm, and they are scouring a giant library with a cart. Elsa picks Nietzsche.

Jeremy: Friedrich Nietzsche? We can't burn that! He's one of the most important thinkers in 19th Century!
Elsa: Please! Nietzsche was a chauvinist pig who was in love with his sister.
Jeremy: He was not a chauvinist pig!
Elsa: But he was in love with his sister.

Besides the fact that Nietzsche would want you to burn Nietzsche, what the hell is Elsa's point? Who cares if he was a chauvinist pig who was in love with his sister, he still had a mind that influenced Western thought trememdously, to say the least. Some of the greatest minds we have ever known come from lousy people, but we should be alright with that because these people have given us something wonderful. Albert Einstein was a terrible father and husband, but this simple patent clerk gave us the Theory of Relativity. The founding fathers owned slaves, but they were still an enlightened group of men determined to preserve liberty in the best way possible (and for those who want to talk about their voting qualifications, they had good reason for that too). John Lennon, FDR, Van Gogh, Ernest Hemingway, just to name a few that pop into my head, were never good members of society, but influenced that society to the point where their names will continue to echo long after their time.

We see this everywhere in our society today. We had a president impeached not because he lied us into a war, tortured innocents in the name of national security, favored big business interests in a time of a global environmental crisis, or used the Constitution as a jizz rag, but because he lied about getting a blowjob from an intern. Let that sink in until you cry, and when you're finished send your American flag to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, I hear the Executive washroom ran out of toilet paper again.

What bothers me so much about this is that Jeremy's reaction is so typical. He plays into the game and therefore has no choice but to lose. If someone is not exactly the greatest person, there's only so much you can do to sway a moral argument in the favor of the "immoral." All he had to do was say "So what? You're no saint either, bitch. What God are you trying to please, 'cause he's sooo dead."

... Does this sound familiar?
Supposed Patriot: "Why won't you support our troops!?"
Assumed Traitor: "We DO! Really! we just don't think they..."
Supposed Patriot:"How dare you make them think their mission isn't important, this is America! They're defending America."
Assumed Traitor: "Well, maybe, but maybe they shouldn't be in Iraq, there's no proof of WMD's, Saddam Hussein has no links to Al-Qaeda and he's completely inert as a military power, and maybe we might fall into a quagmire like Cheney warned us about back in 1994."
Supposed Patriot: "Saddam is part of the Axis of Evil, he's a bad man, so says The Decider."