Hypocrisy Abounds

The assertion that there is plenty of hypocrisy to go around in the world of politics won’t surprise anyone. In the recent past conservatives/Republicans have been covered widely in the media for various indiscretions, straying from the straight and narrow path that conservatives and Republicans so unwaveringly promote.

Examples of conservative straying include Rush Limbaugh having developed an addiction for pain killers, Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s excursion into nude photography, and Bill Bennett’s gambling.

All of these examples enjoyed intense coverage in the media at the time they became public knowledge, and only the brain-dead could have failed to be aware of them. The hypocrisy of these individuals was trumpeted far and wide, and in black-and-white terms: Schlessinger was a porn queen; Limbaugh was a common drug addict; Bennett a common back alley dice thrower.

The traditions of our culture, which are promoted by all three of these personalities, oppose illicit sex and pornography, people ruining their lives because they like being drugged out, and people gambling away the family grocery and utility money. For the record, posing nude is posing nude, taking drugs you don’t need is wrong, and gambling is gambling. But as liberals are so fond of telling us, the world is not black and white; there are shades of grey. Some wrongs are worse than others.

While the media did a thorough job of getting the stories out, it did a less admirable job of telling the whole story.

Schlessinger, for example, posed nude for her boyfriend back in the 70s, when she was reportedly 28 years old, long before she realized that such things were wrong. Anybody here ever done something in their youth you regretted 20 years later?

Limbaugh started taking pain medication for a legitimate medical condition, not because he wanted a buzz, and he got hooked. Is it right to use pain pills for something other than the purpose for which they are intended? Of course not. Is Limbaugh a drug-addict who will take whatever will give him a buzz, and who can’t hold a job because of his addiction? Of course not.

Bennett had an affinity for high-stakes poker games that he indulged mostly in private, and which did not put his family’s financial stability at risk. He had the money and he liked to play poker, and that was common knowledge in D.C. while Bennett was in government. Anybody here like to play the ponies, the greyhounds, the tables or cards?

But hypocrisy is hypocrisy, right? And when someone in the public eye commits hypocrisy the media ought to tell us about it. Right?

Well, why have the media not told us about the liberal icons whose very lives personify hypocrisy? Why do we hear and see only about hypocrisy from the Right? Is it because hypocrisy is only important when conservatives do it?

Why haven’t they told us, for example, that Michael Moore, the self-proclaimed “average Joe” who wears scruffy clothes and a scraggly beard, claims to own no stocks, and condemns companies like Halliburton as being run by a bunch of thugs, actually has always lived a life of ease, and has had a substantial portfolio of stocks for many years that has included Halliburton stock. Or that the man who accused Hollywood of being racist hires proportionately fewer black people for the production staff of his own movies than does Hollywood?

I wonder why we haven’t been told of the scandalous behavior of Barbra Streisand, who publicly champions the working man against greedy, rich employers, but treats her own employees so badly that they are constantly in fear of losing their jobs, and who lets other employees go months without being paid? Why don’t they ask Babs why, if she is so concerned for the working people of the United States, she produces her movies in Canada, using cheaper Canadian labor? Why don’t we all know that this supposed environmentalist who chastises the rest of us for wasting precious natural resources spends $22,000 a year watering her lawn? Or that instead of investing in solar energy or energy cell technologies that would advance the environmentalist cause, prefers to invest in “evil” oil companies?

Noam Chomsky calls himself a socialist and professes to speak for the poor, the oppressed and the “victims of capitalism.” He has referred to himself as an “American dissident,” and considers the United States a “police state.” The Pentagon, he has said, is “the most hideous institution on this earth” and “constitutes a menace to human life.” This is the persona the media has helped him promote. Such a man must eschew the trappings of capitalism for the simple life of those whose cause he professes to champion. So he could be expected to avoid the Pentagon like a plague, could he not? But no, Chomsky has been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by the Pentagon over a period of many years for writing books on linguistics for the military. Through profits from these and other books, his public speeches against the U.S., and his income from teaching positions, he has earned a spot in the upper 2 percent of Americans in net wealth, which he has carefully protected from Uncle Sam through an irrevocable trust. His primary residence and vacation home in Massachusetts are valued at more than $2 million.

Are you surprised by these factual accounts of hypocrisy on the part of liberal icons? Do you wonder why these hypocrisies have not been trumpeted as loudly as those of Limbaugh, Schlessinger and Bennett? Doesn’t this glaring omission call into question the motives of the media? And isn’t the media itself grossly hypocritical?

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