[Third of my weekly five-minute oratorial expositions on Broad View, KBZZ 1270 AM Reno.  Click on the microphone to listen.]

This week’s Moment of Common Sense is dedicated to public figures who are hypocrites... and boy are there a lot of them.  Doctors have an oath called the Hippocratic Oath in which they swear to do no harm and apparently politicians have something called the Hypocrite Oath in which they swear to never tell the truth.

Take our own Harry Reid, for example.  (Please.)  This little weasel bellyaches about bipartisanship and compromise constantly but Thursday he named Senator Patty Murray to the brand new Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction.  That’s the bipartisan super committee tasked by last week’s debt limit deal with the job of finding ways to cut the federal deficit.  Patty Murray is possibly the most partisan member of the senate.  She’s well-known for two things: number one, she’s dumb as a box of rocks; and number two, she never met a government program she didn’t think should get a boatload of money.  Patty Murray loves spending taxpayer money so much that she arranges federal pork for people who didn’t even ask for it.  Even liberal watchdog groups accuse her of overspending.

And Harry Reid didn’t just put her on the committee, he made her co-chair of the committee so she’ll be running things half the time!  Then he used one of his other two picks to put John Kerry, another mental giant and partisan hack, on the committee right alongside her.

So we know there won’t be any worthwhile spending cuts coming out of that committee—which means the whole debt deal is already toast.  Good job, Harry.

Back on November 2, the day after Republicans shellacked the Democrats in the mid-term elections, Mr. Reid was preaching bipartisanship and had this to say:

“I think the main message that we should have received last night... is that the people of Nevada and the American people want us to work together.”

But when it comes to politicians, watch what they do, not what they say.

And it’s not just Democrats.  The Republicans put Fred Upton on the fiscal committee.  This is the guy who wrote the light bulb ban and then realized that people hated it so he promised to repeal it.  Based on that promise, Republicans made him chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, and since then he hasn’t done one thing about giving us back our incandescent light bulbs.  How many times does this guy need to do the opposite of what he says before conservatives get a clue?

Al Gore was in the news this week, too.  He was in Colorado giving an angry speech about his favorite topic, global warming, which, because they ran out of actual evidence that the globe is warming, had to be renamed.  Now it’s called “climate change” so they can blame all the weather on American SUVs and cow farts, not just the hot days.

Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for the gung-ho sales job he was doing on the global-warming-now-called-climate-change issue, and he brought his prize money home to Tennessee and dumped it into his housing fund to pay for his 10,000-square-foot Nashville mansion that gobbles energy twelve times faster than a normal American house, and his nine-million-dollar ocean-front villa in California that will soon be underwater if his own sea-level predictions come true, and his 100-foot houseboat.  Yep, that’s right, you heard me correctly: Al Gore has a boat that is one hundred feet long.  If you know anything about boats, you know that’s a big boat.

This is a guy who wants the rest of us to cut back on our energy use to save the planet, but look at what he’s doing, not what he’s saying.

Meanwhile, in the White House we have our hypocrite-in-chief, Barack Obama, whose wife is running a healthy eating campaign while he’s down at the local fast food emporium eating cheeseburgers and fries.  Obama loves to chastise congress for lack of work right before he goes on vacation, as he did last week, and only two years after taking office he’s vying for the presidential record for number of rounds of golf.  He brags about openness and transparency but won’t release any of his personal school records, medical records, travel records, or passport records, took more than three years to release a scanned image of his birth certificate, and wrote an autobiography that is consistently contradicted by the few actual facts we know about his childhood.

Our president’s favorite whipping boy is Wall Street.  He loves to give speeches where he criticizes Wall Street greed, Wall Street bonuses, and Wall Street blame for the financial crisis, but guess where he got his biggest campaign donations?  That’s right, Wall Street showered Obama with money during his 2008 presidential campaign.  His largest single source of money was Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street investment banker whose employees subsequently swarmed into Washington, D.C., to work for the Obama administration.  Many people call this the Goldman Sachs presidency rather than the Obama presidency because there are so many of them running the government right now.

Is it any wonder that every White House decision regarding the ongoing financial crisis has benefited Wall Street in general and Goldman Sachs in particular?  Watch what he does, not what he says.  Obama doesn’t hate Wall Street—he is Wall Street, bought and paid for, more than any other president in history.

Gee, maybe that’s why Wall Street is fat and happy while American homeowners are still losing their homes to foreclosure in record numbers.  Ya think?

It’s simple, people.  The big secret to being an informed voter, to helping America take back its freedom and sense of purpose from the professional politicians, and to making yourself immune to the mainstream media’s lies and misinformation, is this: watch what they do, not what they say.

“Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises, for never intending to go beyond promise, it costs nothing.” —Edmund Burke

From Reno, Nevada, USA        Tweet