"Have you ever thought how embarrassing it might be to have to preach what you practice?” Hamilton G. Park, Salt Lake Tribune,1951
By: Linda Case Gibbons
Either that or they should really figure out how to join the "Have My Cake and Eat It, Too Club” and avoid all the fuss.
ABC News’ foreign affairs correspondent Martha Raddatz is a member.
One of the Club’s by-laws states that members get to point out any rules in the world for others to obey, but then can choose to do whatever floats their own boats.
It’s a "The rules apply to you, but not to me,” sort of thing.
At this point in time, however, poor Martha is furious that people think she should not have moderated the Biden/Ryan 2012 Vice Presidential debate because she had a conflict of interest.
People can be so judgmental.
Just because Obama attended her wedding to ex-husband Julius Genachowski, a former Harvard classmate of Obama’s who then was appointed Obama’s Federal Communications Commission chairman in 2009 and just because she did not disclose this information, is that any reason to think she would be biased one way or another?
Yet when asked whether this presented any wrongdoing on her part during a recent National Press Club Event, Martha was flummoxed.
"I didn’t do anything. I mean, I didn’t have to handle that. It was – and I’m really not going to comment about that. That was something that happened two days before the debate. It had been in The New York Times quite a while before that, I believe. I just got to put this out of my head. That had nothing to do with what I did at the debate. Nothing.”
Well, technically The New York Times did run an article in the Fashion section -- a year ago -- but it never mentioned that Obama attended her wedding and neither did Martha. So Martha did get to put that out of her head.
Heck, just because judges have to recuse themselves from cases where there is the slightest conflict of interest or the possibility of a lack of impartiality, or a dog show judge whose kid has a poodle in show – that doesn’t apply to Martha. She knows she’s impartial. She knows she’s fair.
Picky, picky. People are so picky.
Just because someone attended your wedding, doesn’t mean you’ll show favoritism toward them, does it? So what if failure to disclose the conflict of interest is a violation of the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics? Some rules are so silly.
And Al Gore would be the first to step up to the plate and defend Martha. He’s a member of the Club, too, and Lord knows he’s taken his share of criticism, so he knows how Martha feels.
Do you know there are actually people who say Al didn’t "walk the walk” when he sold his TV network to Al Jazeera or when he tried to grab his profits before year-end 2012 to avoid taxes?
Come on, people! Be fair. Now Al Jazeera can come into everyone’s living rooms, including those elusive sleeper cells. It’s so much easier than before when you had to search to even find the channel.
"Al the Environmentalist” sold the TV network to oil-backed Al Jazeera, something that managed to perplex even David Letterman and Matt Lauer.
"So you’re selling this TV network to a gas and oil supported emirate,” Letterman said. "Isn’t that one of the problems with global warming, our dependence on petroleum-producing countries?”
Letterman also mentioned that most people were leery of Al Jazeera.
"Why do we think that they may be propaganda for Muslim violence and terrorism?” he asked.
And Lauer brought up the criticism that was swirling around Al’s sale.
"They said, here’s the guy who just sold Current TV to Al Jazeera which gets an undetermined amount of funding from the country of Qatar which gets its money from oil reserves. Isn’t there a contradiction in that?”
Al’s response? He said he understood the criticism Lauer mentioned, he understood where Letterman’s questions were headed, but that he simply disagreed.
That’s what members of The Cake Club do when unjustly attacked for saying one thing and doing another. It’s in the by-laws.
Some people actually accused Al of environmental hypocrisy because of that time he left his Chevy Suburban SUV idle with the air conditioning running for some 45 minutes while he attended an environmental conference. Some even took umbrage at his flying around on a private jet.
Like I said, picky.
Members of his family were in the car, so what was wrong with making them comfortable? And besides, when Al Gore has to get somewhere, do people really expect him to fly commercial?
Al’s critics are probably the same people who criticized Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry when he berthed his $7 million yacht in Rhode Island to avoid paying $500, 000 in sales tax in Massachusetts. Don’t these people realize Kerry has been a supporter of the "rich paying their fair share,” that he continues to be and he spares no effort to that end?
These people – the media, the president -- are all different from the rest of us. The rules don’t apply to them because they are smarter and more gifted, and yes, rules do get in their way.
But it does cause the middle class to wonder: "What about us?”
Gore or Raddatz or Hillary or Obama spinning their tales and exempting themselves from blame because they are special is wearing kind of thin.
Did Gallup call you up and ask you if you considered Hillary the most admired woman in the world? They didn’t call me.
Did you manage to stifle a laugh when the National Father’s Day Council voted Bill Clinton "Father of the Year?” I couldn’t.
But true to form, when liberals mess up, the rest of the gang gives them a reward even if it isn’t a real one.
After her Benghazi testimony, while the middle class was outraged at her lame testimony, the left didn’t miss a beat and immediately started running Hillary for president and suggested that throwing in the Nobel Peace Prize might not be a bad idea, either.
But all the while the middle class is looking around and wondering: "What about us?”
The middle class pays the country’s taxes, observes the country’s laws, carefully budgets their own money, doing it all right and yet they see attention focused not on them, but toward illegal immigrants – how to make them feel accepted, how to give them healthcare benefits, and they wonder, what about us?
They see their president crack open the nation’s piggy bank again and again while they rework their household budgets again and again to make ends meet.
They see their president refuse to negotiate on anything, refuse to even entertain the possibility of securing the borders just because he doesn’t want to.
They see him pushing, pushing, through everything he wants, by whatever means he can, including bitter threats when he doesn’t get his way, but never because he is honoring the will of the people.
They see this president and his Department of Justice selling guns to Mexican drug cartels, exempting the Attorney General of any and all blame for it and then having the nerve to make gun control an issue, shamelessly jockeying to take guns away from law-biding, permit-carrying citizens.
And they wonder, what about us?
But "The Cake Club” members are different from you and me, friends. They can do whatever they want because they are all members of "The Club." For them, the rules do not apply. But we can’t help thinking, "What about us?”
Hold the line, America.