Hypocrisy Roundup

It was a good weekend if you’re the kind of person who likes to kick back, relax, read the news and then roll your eyes so hard that braindead Vegas slot jockeys reflexively thrust plastic cups under your jaw in the hopes that you’ll spit quarters.

Aside from the Winter Olympics, last week apparently saw the start of the World Hypocrisy Championships. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Donald Trump put in a strong performance straight away.

Trump is a man who started the current phase of his political life ranting that Barack Obama couldn’t possibly be a legitimate president and that he HAD to be from somewhere other than America, for some reason.

This is the same Trump who also refused to believe that the Central Park Five were innocent and continued to insist on their guilt even after they’d been exonerated.

Any similarities between Barack Obama and the Central Park Five are purely melanincial.

Trump is also the guy who was going to “lock up” Hilary Clinton for something or other. You remember.

Anyway, Donald Trump this weekend said that baseless accusations destroyed lives, and railed against the perceived decline of due process.

Not to be outdone, Vice President Mike Pence decided he could also be hilariously two-faced. You might remember Pence as the world’s dullest man – it’s equally likely that you don’t, for the same reason – but if you’ve managed to read this far into a paragraph about Pence without a spontaneous nap, grit your teeth and cast your memory back to the lame walkout of a football game he staged last year. Pence objected to players kneeling during the anthem as a form of nonviolent protest.

This week, Pence refused to stand for the Korean anthem at the aforementioned Winter Olympics. Y’know. Because he was protesting North Korea’s actions.

Yet again, there seems to be some hard-to-pin-down connection between Obama, the Central Park Five and kneeling NFL players that means they get treated differently… I’ve almost got it, I swear…

On my own side of the pond, the British government decided to show their plucky, underdog spirit in the hypocrisy championships.

There has been a recent scandal in the UK involving the charity Oxfam (an Oxford-based anti-famine charity, in case you wondered) and their aid workers, who apparently spent their 2011 trip to Haiti availing themselves of local prostitutes instead of, say, helping with disaster relief. The whole story is sleazy and gross and everyone involved should be fired. Which is exactly what has happened.

That has not, however, stopped a government minister from proclaiming that Oxfam should lose funding if it does not show sufficient moral leadership.

I’d say that a similar law imposed upon the government would see every politician begging on the streets within a year, but let’s not kid ourselves – they all have lucrative second jobs to fall back on, after all…