Politics as Fashion Ware

What lies beyond hypocrisy? Fashion!

"Caring isn't something you do," my wife informs me, "it is something you are." How else to explain the following?

• Most Florida boaters assert that they care about manatees, even as they speed recklessly through manatee protection zones.


• Al Gore's house guzzles more than twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year.


• John Edwards publicly claims to be the champion of the little guy while surreptitiously signing up to work for an extremely wealthy investment group from New York.


• Hillary Clinton is in favor of the war except when she's against it.


• Cameron Diaz carries fashion accessories extolling the very Maoist sayings used by communist terrorists insurgents.


• Barry Ritholz demands that the government do something about the oil situation, while personally continuing to drive around his gas guzzlers.


• The "Concerts for a Climate in Crisis" will involve a projected 2 billion people tuning into their computers to watch 150 bands flying to various venues all over the world, with untold thousands or hundreds of thousands burning fossil fuels to go see these concerts in order to save the planet. How much excess energy will this whole process burn up? How much impact will this grand extravaganza have on global warming? Don't ask; that's not the point! Tim Blair calls it "Live Earth – this weekend's festival of carbon destruction in the name of carbon conservation." Seems to capture it pretty well. [Actually somebody did the numbers: "The total carbon footprint of the event, taking into account the artists’ and spectators’ travel to the concert, and the energy consumption on the day, is likely to be at least 31,500 tonnes of carbon emissions ...
  
  Throw in the television audience and it comes to a staggering 74,500 tonnes. In comparison, the average Briton produces ten tonnes in a year."]

This is the world we live in. Hollywood Democratic gazillionaires exhort the rest of us to use less energy just before boarding their private jets to Acapulco and Aspen. People put on and take off political opinions with the vagaries of current political fashion. None of it means a thing. This isn't hypocrisy because it has nothing to do, in their minds, with their own lives or actions. What difference does it make whether you wear a green sweater or a green opinion? What matters is having tasteful right-thinking opinions, not boorish Republican ones.