This ("Who's Pretending?" on Townhall) I can't vouch for one way or another, but it reminds me of something I've been meaning to post about lately.

Every year, the wisdom of "actions speak louder than words" strikes me as more and more true; every year, I find myself valuing words less and less, and actions more and more.

I also consider "meta-words" in the action department. Someone who criticizes their ideological opponents for racism, but gives their ideological allies an unlimited pass for racism, to me this says that racism is at least less important that partisan politics, and quite possibly indicates that they don't really care about racism at all. (I think that using an issues purely cynically is less respectful than completely ignoring it.)

I doubt I need to encourage political cynicism amongst anybody reading this, but this standard really shows up politicians in general. If I tried to make a list of politicians attacking their opponents for something that's perfectly OK for their allies, I wouldn't get any work done for the rest of this month! In fact, I'm having a hard time coming up with any position that any politicians pass this test for; just about the only thing I can come up with is that there are a some politicians that will condemn their own party members for corruption... but not even a majority, and there are still an awful lot of more-or-less openly corrupt or unethical Congresspeople in positions of power.

You still need to beware the token action (like in my billionaire example here), but it's so easy to bamboozle people with words that such things are only rarely necessary.