A while back, people were picking on such prominent conservatives as Rush Limbaugh and Bill Bennett, accusing them of being hypocrites because, while espousing traditional values, the former had become addicted to pain killers and the latter had lost millions in Las Vegas.

I didn't agree that either was a hypocrite. Any number of people who'd never think of shooting up heroin, snorting cocaine or even smoking marijuana, have, through no fault of their own, become addicted to prescription pain killers. As a matter of fact, many of those people who threw brickbats at Limbaugh are the very same people who are most sympathetic to run-of-the-mill drug addicts, which strongly suggested it was the man's politics, not his habit, that had set them off.

Where gambling is concerned, I don't happen to see it as a transgression. If Mr. Bennett had the money to lose, and didn't have to rob banks or gut a pension fund to finance his hobby, I might wish he'd sent it to me instead of leaving it at the casinos, but that's strictly between the two of us. And since so much was made of the fact that he lost a small fortune, I kept wondering if his enemies would have felt better about it if he'd only won. Besides, however much he dropped at the tables, I guarantee it was a drop in the bucket compared to what George Soros lost, betting on John Kerry in 2004.

As I see it, hypocrisy is most often practiced by those on the left, and it consists of doing the very opposite of what one preaches. So, for example, when Arianna Huffington makes it her mission in life to eliminate SUVs from our roads, while she and her two tots inhabit a mansion that requires tons of fossil fuels to heat and cool, that, my friends, is hypocrisy.

In similar fashion, when Robert Kennedy, Jr., lectures us all on becoming more ecology-conscious while he flies hither and yon on private jets, that is certainly hypocrisy.

When Hollywood hot shots claim to be populists, but move production out of the country to avoid paying decent wages to American working stiffs, that's hypocrisy. And when they wear red ribbons to prove they're not homophobic, but then force someone like Brad Davis to conceal the fact he was HIV-positive for six or seven years, lest he be blacklisted, that was hypocrisy, too.

Frankly, I don't think conservatives tend to be hypocritical in such blatant fashion simply because they don't have to pretend to be something they're not. Because they're not constantly pandering for votes among the have-nots, they don't have to pretend that they, too, lie awake nights wondering where their next meal is coming from. The astonishing thing is that such multi-millionaires as Kennedy, Kerry, Boxer, Dean, Feinstein, Jesse Jackson, and the Clintons, manage to pull it off with a straight face.

However, I must confess that I sometimes find myself wondering about such right-wing stalwarts as Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly. Both men preach family values, and both men at least appear to be devoted husbands and fathers, but Hannity seems to spend an awful lot of time away from the home fires. If he's not signing up new radio stations, he seems to be patrolling the border on the look-out for illegal aliens. And when he's not doing either of those things, often as not, he seems to be on a book tour, although why anybody who has a TV show and a widely-syndicated radio program has to travel around the country hustling books is beyond me.

At least O'Reilly appears to stick closer to home, apparently realizing that he really doesn't have to shlep off to the Barnes and Noble in Bakersfield or Tuscaloosa in order to make the Best Seller list. On the other hand, if I were one of his kids, I'd sure want to know why I had to stay home on opening day at Yankee Stadium this past season while dad sat in a box seat, watching the game with Regis Philbin and Donald Trump, for crying out loud!

You can learn more about Burt and his latest book, Conservatives Are from Mars (Liberals Are from San Francisco) at his home page. Write Mr. Prelutsky at: