Hypocrisy of the Elite

Hypocrisy the Great Divider

The View from the Middle

There was a great book written about 10 years ago called Do As I Say Not As I Do, which pointed out the duplicity of Michael Moore, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and others.  It made me sick, sad and angry all at the same time.  But recent statements by politicians and celebrities have reminded me that hypocrisy is still alive and well in America and unless it is exposed it will continue to divide us.

Mark Zuckerberg recently came out and lectured those of us who favor border security by claiming that, “Instead of building walls we can help build bridges.”  That sounds so compassionate until you imagine what a borderless America would look like and cost.  But it borders on ironic when it comes from Mark Zuckerberg who purchased all the houses around his home in Palo Alto just to build a wall of control around it.  So, I guess walls are good for him, but just not for us.  Then I thought about all of the Hollywood celebrities in gated communities or who live in walled estates making the same unthoughtful, hypocritical claim.

But the duplicity doesn’t stop there.  When we discuss education in America, there are people, like me, who believe that we need competition that charter schools and vouchers deliver to solve our problems.  Bill and Hillary Clinton, however, would push the failing public school system and call me a racist for even suggesting such things.

But when the Clintons were in Washington, they sent Chelsea to the exclusive Sidwell Friends School in DC., and Congress today is five times more likely to send their kids to private schools than the rest of the country.  I don’t begrudge them those decisions, I just want to give that “choice” to every family in America, not just the rich and well connected.  Bill and Hillary would say that we have public and private schools in this country, and public schools are good for you and me.  But they need a choice.

The global warming crew isn’t any better.  Did you know that Al Gore has 15 homes, and just one of his mansions uses 20 times the energy to warm and cool than the average home in America?  Yet, Al tells us that we need to live in smaller homes and reduce our carbon footprint.

And the climate change conference in Paris may be the absolute definition of hypocrisy and possibly absurdity.  To get the President to the conference, Air Force One consumed 19,275 gallons of jet fuel and emitted 189 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  Just getting the 20,000 attendees to and from the conference, in their planes, trains and automobiles dumped 300,000 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.  That’s as much energy as the entire City of Los Angeles will consume in a week.  Has anyone told these idiots about the availability of teleconferencing?  Now, that would have made a statement.

Finally, just last night in her victory speech in New York, Hillary Clinton talked about reducing the vitriolic political rhetoric and uniting America.  While I applaud that sentiment, isn’t Hillary guilty of the very same divisive language that she is condemning?  She has called anyone who disagrees with her solutions a racist, a misogynist, a homophobe, a xenophobe and a bigot.  Is this the kind of language that will unite our country?  Do you think those terms really describe half of America that just happens to disagree with Hillary?

Do we need border security and to improve the immigration process at the same time?  Yes.  Do we need good public schools and school choice to solve our education problems?  Sure.  Do we need to be good stewards of our world without destroying economies and lives?  Of course!  Finally, do we need to listen before we condemn?  Absolutely.

As a country we need to avoid extreme positions and malicious rhetoric and gravitate to the middle where truth can be found, compromise forged and progress made.