DO AS I SAY NOT AS I DO 33

A 2005 book Do As I Say (Not As I Do) by the conservative Hoover Institute’s Peter Schweizer exposes the hypocrisy of sanctimonious and prevaricating liberals such as:

►Michael Moore insists that corporations are evil and claims he doesn’t invest in the stock market due to moral principle. But Moore’s IRS forms show that over the past five years he has owned shares in such corporate giants as Halliburton (Can you imagine that – the company of the arch enemy, Dick Chaney, the bete-noire of liberals and according to them the apex of evil humans and corporations), Merck, Pfizer, Sunoco, Tenet Healthcare, Ford, General Electric, and McDonald’s.

►Staunch union supporter Nancy Pelosi has received the Cesar Chavez Award from the United Farmworkers Union, but the $25 million Northern California vineyard she and her husband own is a non-union shop. The hypocrisy doesn’t end there. Pelosi has received more money from the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union than any other member of congress in recent election cycles. The Pelosis own a large stake in an exclusive hotel in Rutherford, Calif. It has more than 250 employees. None of them is in a union according to Schweizer. The Pelosis are also partners in a restaurant chain called Piatti, which has 900 employees. The chain is – you guessed it – a non-union shop.

►Ralph Nader claims that unions are essential to protect worker rights, but when an editor of one of his publications tried to form a union to ameliorate miserable working conditions, the editor was fired and the locks changed on his office door.

►Linguist and socialist Noam Chomsky has described the Pentagon as “the vilest institution on the face of the earth” and has lashed out against tax havens and trusts that benefit only the rich. However over the last 40 years Chomsky has been paid millions of dollars by the Pentagon (one has to wonder why) and he used a venerable law firm to set up his irrevocable trust to shield his assets from the IRS.

►Al Franken says that conservatives are racist because they lack diversity and oppose affirmative action, but less than 1% of the people he has hired over the past 15 years have been African-Americans.

►Ted Kennedy has fought for the estate tax and spoken out against tax shelters, but he has repeatedly benefited from an intricate web of trusts and private foundations that have shielded most of his family’s fortune from the IRS. One Kennedy family trust wasn’t even set up in the U.S. – it’s in the Fiji Islands.

►Another Kennedy, environmentalist and congressman Robert Kennedy Jr. has said that it is not moral to profit from natural resources, although he receives an annual check from the family’s large holdings in the oil industry.

►Barbra Streisand has talked about the necessary of unions to protect a “living wage.” As for herself, she prefers to do her filming and postproduction work in Canada where she can pay less than American union wages.

►Bill & Hillary Clinton have spoken out in favor of the estate tax, and in 2000 Bill Clinton vetoed a bill seeking to end it. Yet the Clintons have set up a contract trust that allows them to substantially reduce the amount of inheritance tax their estate will pay when they die. Hillary, for her part, has written and spoken extensively about the right of children to make major decisions regarding their own lives, including having abortions without parental notification, but she barred 13 year old daughter Chelsea from getting her ears pierced and forbid the teen from watching MTV or HBO. Good for Hillary for making responsible decisions about her daughter – too bad she is such a hypocrite when it comes to other people’s children

►Billionaire Hungarian-American businessman and money exchange manipulator George Soros says the wealthy should pay higher, more progressive tax rates, but he holds the bulk of his money in tax-free overseas accounts in Curacao, Bermuda, and the Cayman Islands.

Schweizer writes: “Liberals claim to support affirmative action, but don’t practice it. They support higher taxes, but set up complicated tax shelters to avoid paying them. They claim to be ardent environmentalists, but abandon their cause when it impinges on their own property rights. The reality is that liberals like to preach in moral platitudes. They like to condemn ordinary Americans and Republicans for a whole host of things: racism, lack of concern for the poor, polluting the environment, and greed. But when it comes to applying the same standards to themselves, liberals are found to be shockingly guilty of hypocrisy.

Interestingly Peter Schweizer was served legal papers demanding to know where he obtained his information about some of the people he targets. Note there was no allegation of slander or false information in his book. His critics simply wanted to know how he found out about them. Fortunately there is this important document which states that: “Congress shall make no law….abridging the freedom of speech or of the press…..” Liberals might want to review our Constitution occasionally.