In the eyes of conservative author Peter Schweizer, hypocrisy is like breathing - everyone does it. But liberals manage to get away with it.
Conservative principles, he said in a Wednesday-night talk sponsored by the Young Conservatives of Texas, are like guardrails. They tell you what to do, and if you go against them, you'll suffer (just ask Larry Craig). Liberal principles, on the other hand, don't really exist, because liberals have trouble practicing what they preach (just ask Eliot Spitzer).
According to Schweizer, liberal hypocrites "actually improve their lives." They experience "greater prosperity, better schools and improved safety" through shirking their so-called principles. Schweizer gave many examples to support this assertion: Ted Kennedy, Noam Chomsky and John Edwards rally for tax obedience, yet they have private trusts in exotic locales to avoid paying hefty sums to the government. Michael Moore fights for affirmative action, but has not employed a single black person on any of his film sets. And despite his $109 million fortune, Bill Clinton has given used underwear to Goodwill in order to claim a $5 tax return.
"Liberals want ordinary Americans to make radical changes," Schweizer explained, "But then they gas up the jet and take the kids to Disney World for the weekend." Liberal caws for progression and equality are rendered null and void by flagrant hypocrisy, he claimed, and members of the left are "personalities" who act this way not out of principle, but because they think they are immune to society's universal expectations.
But it's hard to take seriously a guy who bases the philosophy of a 40-minute talk on what he himself called "the minor, chintzy stuff" - like Bill Clinton's underwear. Do these things really matter?
Schweizer skillfully picked apart the private lives of his favorite liberal personalities, but failed to present a coherent argument abutting the conservative ideals that cause us all to suffer under our current administration's lack of public principle. While President Bush's Crawford ranch may be more "green" than Al Gore's Nashville house, according to Schweizer, a world in which a banana costs $4 and airplane travel is only for the richest of the rich doesn't seem too abstract anymore. In a world of hypocrisy, calling out hypocrites in an effort to bolster conservatism is unproductive for both sides.
Perhaps it's acceptable to pick people apart if everything needs to be rebuilt anyway. Let's start with Schweizer: He may pay his taxes, but as he stood before students swigging from a verboten bottle of Coca-Cola and professing "it's not OK to be a liberal," we saw a personality we'll soon forget.
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