msn's "Hypocrisy Hall of Shame"

[underpants]

Rush Limbaugh
“If people are violating the law by doing drugs," Rush Limbaugh pontificated in 1995, “they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up.” Eight years later, the radio giant was himself under investigation for violating drug laws, and after three years of legal wrangling, Limbaugh was charged in Florida with fraudulently concealing information to procure prescription drugs. Translation: He allegedly “doctor shopped” to feed an addiction to painkillers. Prosecutors agreed to drop the charge if Limbaugh, now 57, remained in rehab and reimbursed the state $30,000 in legal fees. So much for throwing away the key.


Eliot Spitzer
Jaws dropped in March when the New York Times identified holier-than-thou New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer as Client 9 of a big-bucks prostitution ring. Wasn’t Spitzer, 49, the white knight who vowed to restore ethics to Albany? The guy who, as state attorney general, routed out Wall Street corruption? The same crusading prosecutor who only years earlier had busted up prostitution rings? Indeed it was. Spitzer resigned, the investigation continues, and behavioral psychologists gain a textbook case of hypocrisy.

Marion Jones
Among America’s greatest athletes, Jones, 32, won five medals at the 2000 Sydney Olympics and for years slammed suspicions that she had used performance-enhancing drugs. But in 2007, Jones came clean, telling federal investigators that her 2003 denials under oath were lies. “The fastest woman on earth” was sentenced to six months in prison and 400 hours of community service for her fibs (and role in a bad-check scam). So what makes Jones a hypocrite instead of just a cheater? Her moral posturing: “I am against performance enhancing drugs,” she wrote in large red letters in her 2004 autobiography. “I have never taken them and I never will take them.”


Bill Bennett
Education secretary for President Reagan and the first President Bush’s drug czar, Bill Bennett, 65, calls himself in his official bio “a man of strong, reasoned convictions.” He writes books with titles like "The Moral Compass" and "The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories." Basically, not the kind of guy expected to lose an estimated $8 million over a decade at video poker and slot machines. But in 2003, the Washington Monthly revealed Bennett had done just that. Perhaps recalling his own harsh words toward irresponsible addicts, America’s morality maven said he would quit gambling.


Laurie David
The go-to green gal for Oprah Winfrey and other media titans, Laurie David, 50, has done more to sound the global warming alarm than almost anyone except her chum Al Gore. She even produced the former vice president’s Oscar-winning documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth." So why does the soon-to-be ex-wife of comedian Larry David keep homes in both California and Massachusetts, and fly a private jet between the two? “It’s not about being perfect. It’s about doing something,” she tells Condé Nast Traveler. “If we’re looking for perfection, we’ll never, ever get there.

Green Issue Publishers
Magazines from Time to Vanity Fair are warming up to environmental coverage and publishing annual “green issues” dedicated to eco-friendly subjects. “But many of these green glossies seem determined to test their readers’ capacity for cognitive dissonance,” writes Advertising Age, “by editorializing for eco-friendly action on virgin paper that lugs big carbon emissions behind.” Not to mention all those ads designed to encourage consumption.


Christina Ricci
She’s got a point. Christina Ricci ranted to BlackBook magazine about the rise in sleaze culture, especially how it debases women. “I think people are learning to actually aspire to be objectified. It’s like the highest form of flattery for teenage girls,” the actress said. “I just feel like sexism is alive and well, and misogyny.” If only the 28-year-old "Speed Racer" actress hadn’t undermined her argument in photos that accompany the article. Ricci’s wardrobe included short-shorts that barely cover her pelvis, a boob-squeezing cropped tee and lace-up stilettos a stripper would call skanky.


Ted Haggard
He was pastor to thousands, president of the National Association of Evangelicals and consultant to presidential strategist Karl Rove. Ted Haggard, 52, was also a regular customer of male prostitute Mike Jones, who in 2006 claimed monthly, drug-fueled romps with the preacher. Haggard confessed to “sexual immorality” and resigned from his Colorado Springs’ New Life Church. As Jones later told the New York Times, “Here is Ted preaching about being shameful — You won’t see the kingdom of God if you’re gay, and blah, blah, blah — and then he sneaks around with me.”

Laura Schlessinger
Radio’s Dr. Laura berates callers for premarital sex and cohabitation, and working while raising children. Recently on “Today,” she said wives who don’t focus on their husband’s needs are partly to blame if he cheats. One would assume that Schlessinger, 61, has lived a moral life. Well, except for the time a boyfriend snapped nude photos of her, while she was married to another man. When the pics surfaced in 1998, Schlessinger, who actually isn’t a shrink (she has a doctorate in physiology), denied their veracity before coming clean: “I was my own moral authority,” she said in Newsweek. “The inadequacy of that way of life is painfully obvious today.”

Suzanne Somers
Comedians dubbed the scandal Thighgate. When a tabloid photographed actress and diet guru Suzanne Somers leaving a liposuction clinic in 2001, publishers were preparing to release her latest book "Eat, Cheat and Melt the Fat Away." And it wasn’t a plastic surgery guide. Seems Somers, then 54, didn’t owe her great body entirely to her signature product, the ThighMaster exercise gizmo. She told People the lipo was needed after radiation treatment for cancer to slim the area where her breasts met her back. “It's not about having a perfect body,” Somers told the magazine, “but about having a body I could be proud of at this age.”


Clarence Thomas or Anita Hill
There’s no way to reconcile the testimonies of Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill at his 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Hill accused Thomas, her former boss, of sexual harassment in the early 1980s; he denied her charges, and the Senate confirmed his nomination by a vote of 52 to 48. Both vehemently claimed the upper moral hand. Which means that either Thomas, 60, or Hill, 52, perjured himself or herself in front of Congress — and went on to interpret and teach U.S. law as a Supreme Court justice or a Brandeis University professor.
( someone hasn’t read “Blinded by the Right”)

Strom Thurmond
This controversial son of the South led the splinter party Dixiecrats in the 1948 presidential campaign on a pro-segregation platform. After losing his White House bid, Thurmond served a record 47 years in the U.S. Senate, punctuated by his 24-hour, 18-minute filibuster (another record) against the 1957 civil rights bill. Yet throughout this era, he knew he had fathered a child of an African-American housekeeper. The child, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, was 78-years-old when Thurmond died at age 100 and it became public that she was his daughter. As the New York Times indelicately put it, Washington-Williams is "the unacknowledged mixed-race daughter of the Senate's most notorious white supremacist."


Vote: Who doesn't belong on the list? Who is the biggest hypocrite?
http://specials.msn.com/AreTheyHypocrites.aspx?cp-documentid=9374298>1=34124

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[polmaven]

1. I just finished reading it

and was about to post it.....What a great list...Headed by truly the country's #1 hypocrite!

Must have been a hard job, though, picking only 12!

[peacetalksforall]

2. I object to this list. I think the Spitzer paragraph is hypocrisy in itself.

He was an Atty General targeted by agencies of the FBI, possibly on behalf of the WH. The way they went after him was no different that the way they targeted the other AGs. Rove and Gonzalez. The Republican agenda is to populate all legal seats with their people so that they have a winning ticket to the Supreme Court and they get all their corporate and reverend co-op and profits and paybacks in place.

Also, most of the corporate tv and news twisted the words to make people think Spitzer ran a ring. Probably, including MSN.

Where is the true hypocrisy in his case?

I think the entire article is lower crap. A hypocrisy list on the top involving the source of where we hurt - K street WH Texas Pentagon to name just a few - would be worthwhile.

I guess I don't trust and I don't appreciate MSN.