Hypocrisy Watch category archive

Render unto Caesa–oh, wait.

James E. Causey marvels at Scott Walker’s fantasy world, a world in which persons born on third base convince themselves that they have hit triples. A snippet:

Many people are born into circumstances that place them behind the 8-ball from the start. Generational poverty. Poor public school systems. Unsafe neighborhoods. Crime, violence and trauma. Throw systemic racism and segregation into the pot, and it’s a recipe for hard times.

Walker did not mention this during his campaign sermon.

In Walker’s world, opportunities abound if people just work hard enough.

What a fantasy.

More at the link.

Those who have the gold make the rules.

A San Francisco Catholic church has reportedly installed a “watering system” that discourages homeless people by drenching them as they sleep.

KCBS reported that the “no trespassing” signs outside the primary church for Archdiocese of San Francisco, Saint Mary’s Cathedral, did not mention what would happen to the homeless who tried to sleep under the cover of the building’s doorway.

Words fail me.

Dick Polman, citing Aldous Huxley, points out that “some animals are more equal than others.”

Imagine, for the sake of argument, that you or I had a sensitive government job. If you or I were brazen enough to lie to the FBI – if we told the feds, for instance, that we hadn’t shared highly classified material with unauthorized people when in truth we had done it – we’d surely be ticketed for jail. Because lying to the FBI, and sharing highly classified material with unauthorized people, are big-time felonies.

But if you’re David Petraeus – former Army general and bipartisan demigod – and you’ve done those very things, you get a slap on the wrist and a punched ticket to rehabilitation. This is manifestly unfair to the people who have been prosecuted and jailed by the Obama administration for doing arguably less than what Petraeus did, but, hey, Orwell covered that ground in his farm fable 70 years ago.

It doesn’t get much ranker than this, now, does it?

I call shenanigans (emphasis added).

A former University of Oklahoma fraternity member who was shown in a video chanting a racial slur has issued an apology, as have the parents of a second student.

In a statement Tuesday, former OU student Parker Rice called the incident “a horrible mistake” and “a devastating lesson” for which he is “seeking guidance on how I can learn from this and make sure it never happens again.”

Think he would be saying this if he hadn’t got caught?

I’ll suggest some guidance.

Don’t act like a racist bunghole.

There’s some guidance for you.

Daniel Ruth is not amused by the annual nattering over nativity scenes.

Once again, it is time for the annual pie fight over religious displays in public spaces. Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas if there wasn’t a Nativity creche set up in the midst of that cradle of spirituality, the Capitol rotunda in Tallahassee.

Or think of it this way. For the better part of 11 months, there are probably more sins, lapses of ethics, payoffs and duplicitous backstabbing in the Capitol than in Game of Thrones. And then in December, Florida’s feedbag of power is supposed to be transformed into an ecumenical haven honoring the Yuletide spirit.

Not just in Florida, folks.

University of Virginia faculty will seek to ban fraternities from campus for at least the rest of the academic year as investigators sort through a report of an alleged gang rape two years ago.

Meanwhile, apologists for the fraternity systems are doing their best to impeach the original report (follow the link).

I was once a college student. Granted that that was a long, long time ago, the charges depicted in the original article were consistent with everything I knew and observed about fraternities at my school and, during a year of grad work, at Mr. Jefferson’s University. I doubt that much has changed since then. Men are still pigs, and most fraternities are still sties.

Animal House may have been a comedy, but in comedy there is truth. The US college fraternity system, like Crabby Appleton, is rotten to the core, as are its apologists and defenders.

Via Job’s Anger.

Really, now, isn’t it about time for a grand jury?

Vagabond Scholar dissects the reasoning of those who demand that tolerance requires tolerating their intolerance. This reasoning has informed efforts to deny birth control, gay marriage, and, ultimately, equal rights in many areas.

A nugget.

A tolerant person says, “I will live my life the way I like, and you can live your life the way you like.” An intolerant person will say, “I will live my life the way I like, but you must also live your life the way I want you to.” These are not equivalent. Both people have beliefs, it’s true, but one is seeking power over the other.

The three minutes it will take you to follow the link and read the rest will be well worth your while.

Via PoliticalProf.

The New York Times stumbles over unknown object, upon investigating discovers something called “truth” and “accuracy.”

What Noz said.

You have all heard non-apology apologies. They commonly contain phrases such as “I am sorry if anyone took offense,” when the speaker knows damned well he or she did offend someone. That’s why he or she is apologizing, for Pete’s sake.

Radley Balko takes on a cousin of the non-apology apology: the non-explanation explanation, specifically police departments’ explanations of police officers shooting innocents. A nugget, after a quotation from a news item about the shooting of a 10-year old boy in Georgia.

The most plausible scenario is that the deputy tried to shoot the dog and mistakenly shot the kid instead. It’s less plausible but possible that the deputy didn’t intend to fire at all, in which case he’s still negligent for mishandling his weapon.

What isn’t remotely plausible is that the deputy’s gun jumped out of its holster, walked up to the kid and shot the kid in the leg. . . . Yet the sheriff’s explanation, at least the way the WALB reporter relays it, leaves open just that possibility.

I agree with Leonard Pitts, Jr., that “Thank you for your service” uttered to a member of the armed forces is a callow and empty phrase. Indeed, I have had veterans of my personal acquaintance tell me that their reaction to hearing it ranges somewhere between apathy and loathing.

It’s as empty as “I’m sorry for your loss” said by the detective on the telly vision to another character just before starting the third degree.

Pitts points out that the empty thanks have been expressed for a long long time–indeed, for much longer than he cites. A nugget from Pitt’s column:

What would it look like if we gave our service personnel a love they could see? Well, here is what it would not look like:

It would not look like Veterans Affairs facilities across the country requiring sick and injured veterans to wait months to see the doctor, then falsifying records to make it appear they were actually being seen much more quickly. This, of course, is the scandal that has roiled the White House and put Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki on the defensive.

But look past that. A love they could see would also not look like a backlog of disability claims that peaked last year at more than 900,000, forcing some veterans to wait a year or more for their benefits. Nor would it look like the 2007 Washington Post report about wounded men recovering in a military hospital with rotting walls, creeping mold and vermin sauntering about.

Point being, this new scandal is not new. Rather, it is but a variation on a sadly recurrent theme: the neglect of our veterans.

Read the rest. Then read this. And this.

Steven M. predicts that the right-wing will pick Cliven Bundy up, dust him off, and make him their BFF once more when memories of his racist remarks recede. A nugget:

But will the right-wing media continue to keep its distance if there’s another attempt to bring him to justice? No. Let me tell you what the right-wing noise machine’s line will be in that case: Cliven Bundy was a martyr to political correctness. Yes, that’s right: Sean Hannity and others will ignore his decades of defying the law and say he was fined/arrested/deprived of his cattle because of what he said about black people. He’ll be a free-speech martyr.

Do read the rest.