Congressman Alan Grayson really likes taxes when he doesn’t have to pay them
quips
Benny Huang. (
Instapundit, the
National Journal, and
Gawker have more on "the liberal populist hero Florida congressman".)
His tax shelters are entirely legal, of
course, which makes Grayson more of a tax-dodger than a tax-cheater.
The distinction is noted.
But if the congressman isn’t guilty of cheating on his taxes, isn’t
he at least guilty of hypocrisy? This is a man who was critical of Mitt
Romney’s Cayman Islands accounts and who urged the IRS to audit every
Fortune 500 company because he suspected that many of them were “evading
taxes through…offshore tax havens.”
Rich people really should pay their fair share; starting with Alan
Grayson, whose net worth approaches $100 million. Disadvantaged children
need to eat, congressman.
Grayson isn’t alone in his tax-shirking or in his hypocrisy. A list of tax cheats—real
tax cheats—reads like a who’s who of the Democratic elite. Left-wing
sugar daddy George Soros, without whom the Left would probably wither
and die, owes the IRS an unimaginable sum of $6.7 billion dollars.
Nearly the entire lineup of MSNBC owes back taxes, including the good
reverend, Al Sharpton, who is delinquent to the tune of $1.5 million.
Then there’s the Tim Geithner, former Secretary of the Treasury, the
department under which the IRS falls, who somehow forgot to pay his
taxes.
… Another difference between liberals and conservatives is that
liberals seem obsessed with the sin of hypocrisy, a common human frailty
that we’re all guilt of, to a greater or lesser extent. On the surface
it might seem that they really don’t care what you do—cheat on your
wife, use drugs, dodge the draft—just as long as you don’t get preachy
about it. From their perspective, only those who espouse standards
should be held to them. If, on the other hand, you don’t pretend to be
anything other than a dirt ball, welcome to the (Democratic) Party!
You can almost see the glee in their eyes whenever they find a
conservative who has fallen short of his professed values. Recall
Stephen Glass, the young reporter for The New Republic, a liberal
magazine, who, in 1998, was embroiled in a scandal after he was caught
fabricating juicy details for his stories and even creating some stories
out of whole cloth. One of Glass’s more sensational pieces was “Spring
Breakdown,” a story about drunken debauchery at the Conservative
Political Action Conference (CPAC).
… Despite the fact that every iota of the article sprung forth from
Glass’s imagination, “Spring Breakdown” may still have some redeeming
value as a case study on the liberal thought process. Glass probably
believed that all of these hijinks were really going on at CPAC, so sure
in fact that he didn’t even need to be there. His editors believed it too. The hypocrisy was just too delicious.
While it may seem that liberals can’t be brought up on the same
charges of hypocrisy because they aren’t a bunch of finger-wagging
scolds like the rest of us, that’s not entirely true. Liberals do have
an unwritten code of conduct based on a common set of principles. The
fact that those principles are truly bizarre makes them no less real.
Taxes are an illustrative example of their hypocrisy. If there’s
anything they hate more than a one-percenter, it’s a one-percenter who
doesn’t pay his taxes. Don’t these people want roads and schools? Geez, I
don’t know. If rich people just say that taxes suck, does that mean
that they can cheat on them and no one can say boo? If I’ve learned
anything from adultery scandals, the answer is yes. Only those who claim
to have principles can be held accountable for violating them.
This whole hypocrisy shtick is a one way street. Liberals are in fact
deeply hypocritical about hypocrisy. It’s not that they’re tolerant of a
few peccadillos so long as you’re not self-righteous, they’re tolerant
of pretty much anything as long as you’re on their team.
