The New Jimmy Swaggerts

I like Victor Davis Hanson's take on the Democrat leadership (from The Corner):

The New Jimmy Swaggerts [Victor Davis Hanson]

The cap-and-trade prone Congress ordering up brand new Gulfstream luxury jets is the sort of thing that is contributing to this growing backlash against expanding government.

Besides all the other worries, the public is finally starting to fathom the nature of our new technocratic government overseers. A Pelosi who rails about carbon footprints, but wants the biggest private-use jet she can get; "pay your fair share" Dodd and Rangel, who skip out on their own taxes, and find all sorts of immoral ways to finance and maintain second and third properties; a Geithner or Daschle who favor more taxes and less perks for the elite — if they can avoid taxes, or have tax-free limo service; the millionaire Gore who earned a lavish lifestyle by warning of its pernicious effects in others; and who created a television network to “democraticize” the media, but then called on his Washington insider contacts to cut a deal with the North Korean kidnappers to release two of his own employees who ventured on assignment into our modern Mordor.

So predictable has this become, that when one reads elite Left pontification about the environment, the economy, or the need for high-tax redistribution, one assumes that such moral hectoring not only does not apply to the advocate, but serves as some sort of psychological justification, a way of damning the appetites in others so that they can all the more fervently be pursued by themselves.

And all this was supposed to be the corrective to Wall Street piracy?

There is certainly a sense of entitlement among our Washington noblemen. They can have things and live life in ways that the rest of us can't because...well, they're better and smarter than us and we need them to show us the way to enlightenment and inner peace.

There were days when their hypocrisy could be hidden by a media with plenty of bias and no competition. Those days are over.