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What Would Hypocritical Look Like in the Pictionary?

This morning's New York Times (24 SEP 08) reports that Rick Davis's "consulting" firm Davis Manafort has been paid $15,000 per month by Freddie Mac, the troubled (to put it mildly) mortgage lender, "from the end of 2005 through last month."

Rick Davis is Senator John McCain's campaign manager. Until this week, both he and his candidate had been acting as if being associated with either Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae was a bad thing. As in: 

The campaign released a video September 18 that graphically suggested (without directly saying) that Franklin Raines, former CEO of the bankrupt mortgage giant, was an economic advisor to Senator Obama. The Washington Post said the video was "clearly exaggerating wildly." Other observers, like those wild and crazy gonzo journalists (not) at Time magazine, found the video to be an indirect, but "hardly subtle," appeal to racism.

But, getting back to the McCain campaign's own unexagerrated association with Freddie, The Times didn't do the math for you, so I will. (Isn't that what you pay me for? Oh. Wait.) Assuming "end of 2005" means very end, December, and "last month" means August. That's, um, 33 months. Times $15,000: $495,000, so less than half a million bucks.

According to the article, "two people with direct knowledge of the arrangement" told the Times that "they did not recall Mr. Davis's doing much substantive work for the company in return for the money, other than to speak to a political action committee of high-ranking employees in October 2006 on the approaching midterm Congressional elections."

"Mr. Davis's firm, Davis Manafort, had been kept on the payroll," they said, "because of his close ties to Mr. McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, who by 2006 was widely expected to run again for the White House."

The point here is not that having worked for Freddie or Fannie should automatically disqualify anyone from working anywhere else. The point is, you appear to be hypocritical when you claim that someone else is unqualified for the office of the presidency if they have so much as talked to anyone who has worked for Freddie or Fannie when you yourself have worked for Freddie.

Quoting the New York Times article: 

Several top McCain campaign officials have ties to either Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae. So do at least two McCain advisers outside the campaign. The lobbying firm of William E. Timmons Sr., the Republican whom Mr. McCain has enlisted to plan his transition to the White House, earned nearly $3 million from Freddie Mac from 2000 until its seizure, federal lobbying records show. Mr. Timmons is the founder of Timmons & Company, one of Washington’s best-known lobbying shops. 

So, there you have it. If a guy is telling you to not vote for one candidate because that candidate may have sought advice from a couple of Freddie and Fannie employees, yet that guy was working for Freddie himself, and has hired several more former Freddie and Fannie employees to work for his candidate, and his candidate has "enlisted" still another Freddie employee to work for him if he wins; can we not conclude that this guy is saying even more strongly "and don't vote for my candidate either."

That, or maybe he's a hypocrite who'll say anything, no matter how dishonest, employ any tactic, no matter how despicable, to win.

Could be either, I suppose.