Larry Craig and Hypocrisy

Larry Craig resigned today and the lefties are throwing around the term hypocrite from one coast to the other while forgetting a few of their very own hypocrites: (via Wizbang)

John Edwards claims to be sympathetic for the poor while collecting five-figure fees for lecturing about them and building a mansion off his career as a trial lawyer; Al Gore zipping around the world in private jets to lecture about global warming; Hillary Clinton collecting scads of money from the rich while espousing socialism; Barack Obama insisting that he will give "the fatcats" no breaks, while back in Chicago one of his biggest donors has called in numerous favors from the Junior Senator; Ted Kennedy championing the raising of the inheritance tax while he had his mother declared a resident of a state she hadn’t visited in well over a decade purely for tax purposes.

I’m sure alot of you can come up with a few more hypocrites from the other side of the aisle.  Bookworm:

I can easily think of a politician who is truly a hypocrite. He’s a man who pushes one set of behaviors on the American masses, while openly and proudly living a life that is a completely betrayal of those same demands. That is, there’s no anguish here, nor sense of deep moral failing because he can’t live up to the standards he espouses. Instead, he flaunts in our faces a lifestyle he would deny to the rest of us.

I speak, of course, of John Edwards. John Edwards is the one who only recently demanded that we give up our big cars, a demand he made despite the fact that he owns a house with two garages, garages that, I’m sure, could easily house the two SUVs he owns (and I bet those aren’t his only cars). Hypocrite.

~~~

This is the John Edwards who demands socialized medicine built on the back of taxpayers, even though it was precisely his type of misbegotten faux scientific lawsuit that helped drive up insurance rates, thereby helped driving up medical costs, thereby helping drive millions of people right out of the medical system altogether. Funnily enough, I don’t see John Edwards either apologizing for the damage he wrought, or giving any of his tens of millions of dollars contingency fees back on that one. Hypocrite.

This is the John Edwards who has a strong environmental score card, much of it aimed at getting us into small cars or better yet, out of cars altogether; that would have us be cold in the winter and hot in the summer; and that would affect America’s manufacturing abilities. All fine, if you believe being green is a good thing either because of global warming (something I, along with more than half of the world’s published scientists, haven’t bought into) or because you’d love to bankrupt the tyrannous, anti-American theocracies of the Middle East (as I very much would). The problem with Edwards, however, in terms of his votes on the environment is that they haven’t stopped him from building himself an ostentatious hog of a house, which comes in at almost 30,000 square feet, or from zipping around in gas hog cars. That is, he talks the environmental talk, at our cost, but ostentatiously does not walk the environmental walk in his own life. Hypocrite.

How about lefties like Michael Moore who made a living trying to portray himself as the working mans joe when in fact he was never anything even remotely like a regular joe.  When he flew overseas to promote his movies he flew the Concorde and stayed at the Ritz while taking interviews at a cheap hotel in the ghetto to pose as "working joe.  He is all about taking from the rich and giving to the poor but he switched his residence address from New York (which he had claimed as his residence for a decade prior) to Michigan just before he was set to rake in a ton of cash for "Bowling for Columbine."    Wanna guess why? 

New York tax rate = 7.7%
Michigan tax rate = 3.9%

He pummels Halliburton and pharmaceuticals companies but his foundations own all the most "evil" stocks:

Publicly, Moore claims that he doesn’t invest in the stock market out of moral principle. Privately, he tells the IRS something completely different."

Schweizer explains how the widely acclaimed anti-corporatist set up a private foundation after his first major film, "Roger & Me," started making serious money.

In 1999, "the year Moore claimed in ‘Stupid White Men’ that he didn’t own any stock, he reported to the IRS that his foundation had more than $280,000 in corporate stock and close to $100,000 in corporate bonds."

"And in perhaps the ultimate irony," notes Schweizer, "he also has owned shares in Halliburton. According to IRS filings, Moore sold Halliburton for a 15 percent profit and bought shares in Noble, Ford, General Electric" and other allegedly evil corporations.

Moore is currently working on a documentary attacking big pharmaceuticals.

But Schweizer discovered that Moore’s foundation holdings have "included such evil pharmaceutical and medical companies as Pfizer, Merck, Genzyme, Elan PLC, Eli Lilly, Becton Dickinson and Boston Scientific."

Schweizer continues:

"Moore’s supposedly nonexistent portfolio also includes big bad energy giants like Sunoco, Noble Energy, Schlumberger, Williams Companies, Transocean Sedco Forex and Anadarko, all firms that ‘deplete irreplaceable fossil fuels in the name of profit’ as he put it in ‘Dude, Where’s My Country?’

"Also on Moore’s investment menu: defense contractors Honeywell, Boeing and Loral."

But the main point in all this is the differences between conservatism and liberalism.  Conservatives insist on standards. Liberals are non-judgmental.  As long as you SAY your a working joe, or for Socialism, or sympathetic tor the poor, or for raising taxes, then your a-ok in their book.  The way you live your life makes no difference.

A bit different on the right side of the aisle tho. 

Think about this, had Bill Clinton been a Republican (I know, makes me shudder to even think of it) do you think he would have stayed in office after committing adultery and lying under oath? 

He would have been forced out.  But he was a Democrat so immoral behavior is no big deal.

Curt

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