I absolutely have to pick up a copy of Peter Schweizer's new book Do as I Say (Not as I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy. In an interview with Kathryn Jean Lopez for the National Review Online he gives us a taste of the goodies therein:

Michael Moore is constantly trying to prove his and the Left's moral superiority, so he says things about himself that are patently not true. He's pathological about it. How else to explain that he's loudly proclaimed no less than three times that he doesn't invest in the stock market because it's morally wrong while quietly picking up shares in a whole host of companies. A portfolio that includes Halliburton, Boeing, and HMOs doesn't fit the bill so he lies about it. I think he assumed that no one would poke around and investigate. When it comes to the MSM he was correct in making that assumption. ...

Nancy Pelosi bashes everyone who doesn't allow unions to call the shots. Everyone that is except herself. It's takes an amazing amount of gall to accept the Cesar Chavez Award from the United Farmworkers Unions while using non-UFW workers on your Napa Valley Vineyard. It takes the same to praise the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union and take massive sums of money from them all the while keeping them out of your Hotel and chain of restaurants. But again, I think Pelosi correctly assumes that no one in the media will challenge her on this. ...

I didn't go through Bab's trash. All the info in the book was obtained legally and ethically. Streisand's annual water bill of $22,000 to keep her lawn green is relevant because she made it relevant: She's constantly lecturing ordinary Americans about the need to cut back on our consumerist culture. Maybe if she turns off the taps she'll have some legitimate grounds for making the claims she does. ...

Noam Chomsky thinks he's the Moses of this age and even those on the Left who don't agree with him on everything accept his moral authority. But Chomsky is a socialist who practices capitalism, and an anti-militarist who has made millions off of Pentagon contracts. Wonder what his followers would think of that? Then there is his constant lecturing about "tax gimmicks" and "tax shelters" that "the rich" use to avoid paying their "fair share." He must have forgotten about that when he set up his tax shelter. ... I give credit to Chomsky for responding to my questions. His excuses were something to behold. No wonder he teaches linguistics. It's amazing how he twists his words. By the way, he said it was okay to criticize other rich people for setting up trusts and setting one up himself. After all, he explained, he's been fighting for poor people his whole life. ...

I'm not sure that most people take Franken seriously, but the media most assuredly does. He professes to be more than a comedian. He claims to be a political analyst and apparently wants to be a U.S. senator. (His former writing partner says he really wants to be president. Yikes!) His vicious attacks against conservatives as racists are not meant to be funny. He really does think that we're bigots. So questions about his absolutely abysmal record when it comes to hiring minorities should be exposed. (For those who want a hint, less than one percent of his employees have been black. That's a worse record than Bob Jones University, which Franken claims is "racist.")

And so forth and so on. Given my own experience with leftists, I'm only surprised that the book was kept to a slim 272 pages. In response to the argument that "we're all hypocrites":

Yes, we are all hypocrites and I talk about that in the book. But liberal hypocrisy and conservative hypocrisy are quite different on two accounts. First, you hear about conservative hypocrisy all the time. A pro-family congressman caught in an extramarital affair, a minister caught in the same. This stuff is exposed by the media all the time. The leaders of the liberal-Left get a complete pass on their hypocrisy. Second, and this is even more important, the consequences of liberal hypocrisy are different than for the conservative variety. When conservatives abandon their principles and become hypocrites, they end up hurting themselves and their families. Conservative principles are like guard rails on a winding road. They are irritating but fundamentally good for you. Liberal hypocrisy is the opposite. When the liberal-left abandon their principles and become hypocrites, they actually improve their lives. Their kids end up in better schools, they have more money, and their families are more content. Their ideas are truly that bad.

Pretty much!

5 Comments

Mark said:

Hmm... a conservative bash liberals for being hypocritical... and talks at length about why conservative hypocrisy is fundamentally better than liberal hypocrisy. How boring... and how predictable. It's yet another rant about your enemy... which everyone has either heard already or doesn't care about and, as such, serves no tangible purpose.

I will say, though, that the author's examples of conservative hypocrisy are relatively minor... and he either coincidentally or deliberately ignored or failed to mention some other bigger-ticket examples of conservative hypocrisy:

- The Department of Homeland Security. It's a totally new level of government waste and inefficiency, proposed and signed into existence by members of the supposedly "conservative" of the two major parties. Instead of a truly conservative approach... of taking existing laws and agencies and making them work better, a new agency was introduced.

- The Prescription Drug Bill. For a party that likes to talk at length about personal responsibility and the negative aspects of the welfare state, the Republican party sure liked the idea of handouts with this one. They also said that Big Pharma can charge whatever it wants by not allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower prices.

- The intervention in the Terri Schiavo situation. The federal government has no business interfering in what is basically a private family dispute. That's what un-hypocritical small-government Republicans would've said, anyway.

- Tax cuts without equal or greater spending cuts. The Republican party thinks it's okay to charge the American people approximately 75 cents for every dollar the federal government spends. Nobody seems to care that Japan finances a staggering amount of our deficit spending or what it's going to do to our economy, if it continues, in the long run.

On the whole, though, it seems to me that the larger hypocrisy... in both major political parties and on both sides of the ideological spectrum... is the balance of principle and representing those who elected you to represent them. What's popular isn't always right... and what's right isn't always popular. Politicians, of either party or ideology, seem to forget that all too often.

Mark: All of your examples are flawed.

- DHS was clamored for by the Democrats who were not content with a less-than-cabinet-level bureaucracy.

- Every conservative I know thinks that prescription drug stuff is stupid. Bush may be hypocritical, but then he's never really been that conservative.

- Congress didn't intervene to save Terri Schiavo!

- And yes, cutting spending along with taxes would be ideal, but most conservatives WANT spending cuts. Maybe not most conservative politicians, but then most of them never claimed to, so they can't be hypocrites individually.

It would be nice if our politicians actually did what we wanted.

Mark said:

MW:

- DHS didn't have to be agreed to by the White House or Congressional Republicans. The White House shouldn't have flip-flopped and decided to go ahead with it.

- The Prescription Drug Bill is as much the fault of Congressional Republicans as it is the fault of Bush.

- Technically, they didn't intervene to save Terri, but they did rush back to Capitol Hill to make comments and pass a "compromise bill" (aka the Terri Schiavo Bill).

- If most conservative politicians don't really want spending cuts, are they really "conservative"?

JimC said:

I heard the author on the radio. It sounds like the book is a hoot.

Paranoid About Everybody said:

Isn't a foolish consistency still the hobgoblin of little minds?

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