Members of the liberal left often exude an air of moral certitude. Priding themselves on commitment to the highest ideas, they are particularly confident of the purity of their motives and of the evil nature of their opponents. In his latest book, Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy, Peter Schweizer shows how many prominent liberals do not embody their enlightened views in their private lives. Schweizer investigates the lives of liberal politicians and celebrities such as Michael Moore, the Clintons, Barbara Streisand and Ted Kennedy. Schweizer found what he called a “stunning record of open and shameless hypocrisy” exhibited by eleven of the United States’ most active liberals. More than just an exercise of “gotcha journalism,” the book explores a possible link between a few cases of liberal hypocrisy and a larger phenomenon of hypocrisy.

In one example, though Michael Moore set out to destroy Halliburton in his comically false documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, Schweizer’s investigation discovered that Moore had stock in that company in 1999-2000. The book also mentions how Al Franked calls Republicans racist, yet he has hired only one black person onto his 112-person staff.

Ann Coulter proclaimed this the “book of the century,” and I tend to agree. It is well-written and not difficult to read. Schweizer somehow incorporates his extensive research while keeping the size of the book down to a manageable 258 pages – never failing to illustrate how liberals triumph party platforms in public and quickly ditch them behind the scenes. Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy is climbing up the New York Times Best Seller List and should be in the library of anyone interested in politics.

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