Picking and choosing America’s current most outstanding hypocrites involves a daunting challenge. Separating the spoiled wheat from the rotting chaff is only doable providing one can pick and choose at the same time one holds one’s nose. The trouble is, there’s just so much competition, so many vying for the hypocrite crown that the only practical thing to do was to set aside two separate and equal crowns, for the political and non-political spheres.

Today, the political arena.

Needless to say, so I’ll say it anyway, hypocrisy is most prevalent in the smarmy world of politics where it’s so ingrained that it all but defines that world. Most people, unfortunately, anticipate lying, cheating, finagling, and subterfuge from most politicians who denounce the lying, cheating, finagling and subterfuge in other societal fields as if they were shocked, shocked, I tell you, at the corruption in the human soul. However, hypocrisy is hardly confined to politics where, thanks to our system of virtual lifetime tenure for career politicos, they have perfected the art of hypocrisy which others can only hope to emulate.

Let’s therefore begin with the political sphere and, since we’re there, why not start at the top, namely with the presidency of Barack Hussein Obama. Still shy of a hundred days in office, Obama and his appointed henchmen and henchwomen have already set a multitude of hypocrisy records. They range from the president’s accepting purebred Bo instead of adopting one of those puppies in a shelter window to his knowledge of Cabinet nominees’ tax cheating, most of which have been detailed in this space. Since we’re focusing here on the most recent events, we can narrow the field.

Many Americans very intelligently despise politics and all its related ickiness and generally ignore what comes out of D.C. and state capitals rather than getting involved in the nitty-gritties and rolling in the political mud. As a friend once confessed, he gets all the news he needs from ABC, NBC, and CBS even though he knows the coverage is slanted and superficial, and he’s pretty typical of the average guy, except in his awareness that network news is as skewed so far to the left it’s virtually objectively useless.

Obama, (no dumb bunny, he), is fully aware of the inclinations of Joe Average. After all, he was elected largely by the uninformed and misinformed. So, when he announced at his first full Cabinet meeting that $100,000,000 must be, ahem, slashed from his department budgets, he knew full well that the headlines would read just that, “PRESIDENT SLASHES $100 MILLION FROM BUDGET,” and my friend and Mr. and Mrs. Joe Average would be thrilled that our leader is leading the pack in cutting the federal fat. Maybe, only maybe, the mass media might mention, might mention, somewhere how many zeroes there are in the total budget of $4,000,000,000,000. Someone did the math and that Obama’s admitted “drop in the bucket” was a rousing 0.0025% of the total planned outlay and 0.007% of the projected deficit: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0409/21480.html.

Obama richly deserves to take top place in our CURRENT HYPOCRITE AWARDS not because of Bo but because of, once again, fooling some of the people all of the time while thinking he can fool all of the people all of the time.

Hot on Obama’s heels for the hypocrite pinnacle is Senator Dianne Feinstein, (D. CA), one of the dozens of multi-millionaires sitting in those taxpayer-provided seats in Congress. She was very eager to share the wealth, a goal expressed, then hushed, by candidate Obama. It would be admirable on the good senator’s part if it were her own wealth she were sharing. However, it’s taxpayer wealth she wanted doled out–to her husband–but indirectly, of course.

It was no paltry sum that Feinstein wanted shared. In fact, it was $25 Billion she wanted doled, to the FDIC, the agency which is normally funded by banks. She all but fell over herself when congress convened this year to get those billions shared but failed to mention that the FDIC “had just awarded her husband’s real estate firm a lucrative contract to sell foreclosed properties at compensation rates higher than the industry norms:”
http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/apr/21/senate-husbands-firm-cashes-in-on-crisis/. What’s that adage, “One hand washes the other?”

Feinstein’s intervention with that unorthodox end-run for redistribution of wealth to the FDIC and, again indirectly, to Richard Blum, her loving and equally wealthy hubby, earns her second place in the hypocrite sweepstakes. As they say, the rich get richer and the poor either get pregnant or go broke keeping the rich happy.

Third place in political hypocrisy goes to an old favorite, . . .

(Read the rest at http://genelalor.com/)