Hyprocrisy

It turns out that Rick Santorum, the self-proclaimed paragon of moral values, may have received a sweetheart mortgage from donors to his campaign. I write “may” because after Santorum lost his seat in a landslide to Bob Casey Jr., the Senate Ethics Commission dropped the inquiry. Why does it seem that the virtues our political leaders most loudly proclaim become the ones that take them down? Remember Gary Hart’s 1988 challenge to the press to “put a tail on me” two days before he was caught on a boat called Monkey Business with a model named Donna Rice? Apparently Herman Cain didn’t. Is political success simply another narcotic that alters your reality by surrounding you with people who tell you how great you are? Newt Gingrich’s personal peccadilloes are too well-documented to need rehashing, but his loud complaints about being steamrollered by Mitt Romney’s SuperPAC seem a bit hollow given his enthusiasm for the Citizens United decision that brought them to life. It wasn’t the court decision that did him in, Gingrich told MSNBC. It was Mitt Romney and “a bunch of millionaires getting together to run a negative campaign.” Romney, of course, denied any connection to his own SuperPAC . . . just as Ron Paul, the man of the people, denied any connection to The Ron Paul Political Report whose analysis of the Los Angeles riots concluded that “Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks. . . .”