At Victor Davis Hansen’s website, by Bruce Thornton, is a review on Peter Schweitzer’s Do as I Say (Not as I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy, (Doubleday, 2005, 272 pp.).

Interestingly enough, I received a forwarded email that held similar content.

Naom Chomsky, called capitalism a

“‘grotesque catastrophe’ and a doctrine ‘crafted to induce hopelessness, resignation, and despair.’” Yet Chomsky is “himself a shrew capitalist, worth millions, with money in the dreaded and evil stock market, and at least one tax haven to cut down on those pesky inheritance taxes that he says are so important.” Apostles of economic redistribution via the income tax like Chomsky are very clever at making sure that somebody else’s nickel will fund their utopian schemes. Chomsky has set up an irrevocable trust to shelter his money, with his tax attorney and his daughter as trustees.

The examples continue in the email regarding Schweitzer’s book:

Michael Moore denounces oil and defense contractors as war profiteers. He also claims to have no stock portfolio, yet he owns shares in Halliburton, Boeing, and Honeywell and does his postproduction work in Canada to avoid paying union wages in the United States.

Ted Kennedy’s closets are chock full of hypocrisy. For example, Schweizer reveals how Ted and the Kennedy clan have protected their assets from estate taxes – as Kennedy fights to keep this tax on other Americans! Kennedy also has fought an environmental program near his Cape Cod home.

Noam Chomsky opposes the very concept of private property and calls the Pentagon “the worst institution in human history,” yet he and his wife have made millions of dollars in contract work for the Department of Defense and own two luxurious homes.

Barbra Streisand prides herself as an environmental activist, yet she owns shares in a notorious strip-mining company.

Hillary Clinton supports the right of thirteen-year-old girls to have abortions without parental consent, yet she forbade thirteen-year-old Chelsea to pierce her ears and enrolled her in a school that would not distribute condoms to minors.

Nancy Pelosi received the 2002 Cesar Chavez Award from the United Farm Workers, yet she and her husband own a Napa Valley vineyard that uses nonunion labor.

Schweizer’s conclusion is simple: liberalism in the end forces its adherents to become hypocrites. They adopt one pose in public, but when it comes to what matters most in their own lives-their property, their privacy, and their children-they jettison their liberal principles and embrace conservative ones. Schweizer thus exposes the contradiction at the core of liberalism: if these ideas don’t work for the very individuals who promote them, how can they work for the rest of us?