Twelve years ago, when he was still making sense and before he lifted Sarah Palin out of Alaska and inflicted her on the rest of the country, U.S. Sen. John McCain said this:

"Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell on the right."

Fast forward to his 2008 presidential candidacy and he was cozying up to Falwell and the intolerant religious right in an effort to convince them he was worthy of their support.

Take even another leap forward to just a few days ago and we have him excusing Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's efforts to attract evangelicals by saying that "the more inclusive our party is the better off we are."

Hypocrisy is as endemic to American politics as an overpriced rubber-chicken fundraiser, and neither Democrats nor Republicans are immune. But the examples of hypocrisy in the current race for the GOP presidential nomination may be taking things to a whole new level.

In his book, "Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond," political theorist David Runciman of Cambridge University writes, "There is a lot of hypocrisy at work in contemporary politics. No doubt we all have our favorite examples, from the moralizing adulterers to the mud-slinging do-gooders. … The problem is that hypocrisy, though inherently unattractive, is also more or less inevitable in most political settings, and in liberal democratic societies it is practically ubiquitous."

Let's take Newt Gingrich, the moralist who declares his opposition to gay marriage by saying he believes in the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman. He believes in that sanctity so much, as someone wrote recently, he has tried it three times. He's also an admitted adulterer.

Or how about his criticism of President Barack Obama in 2008 for accepting campaign contributions from federally backed mortgage companies Freddie Mac and Freddie Mae? We now know that Gingrich took $1.6 million in consulting fees from Freddie Mac between 1999 and 2008.

The Republican frontrunner and the man presumed to be a lock for his party's nomination, Mitt Romney, is so full of contradictions and hypocrisies that it would take more space than we have here to enumerate them all. The former moderate-to-liberal governor of Massachusetts has raised pandering to the religious right to an art form.

Then there is the new darling of the evangelicals, Rick Santorum, who poses as a reformer and attacks government spending but was known when he was in the U.S. Senate for directing a river of federal money to his home state of Pennsylvania that paid off in the form of campaign contributions.

The self-declared family values candidate routinely opposes actual policies to help workers, the underprivileged and families.

Which brings us to Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the latest candidate to exit the race, who loved describing himself as an anti-government outsider even though he has been drawing a government paycheck much of his adult life.

Perry, like Santorum, boasts of his family values but, as governor, has cut school funding, health care appropriations and other spending to help the unemployed. Texas ranks near the bottom nationally in money spent to educate the children of the families he professes to represent.

So there we have it. Or, as Runciman writes, we might as well accept hypocrisy as a fact of politics but without resigning ourselves to it. Since an ideal politician is a contradiction in terms, that leaves us, as he writes, "to distinguish between harmless and harmful hypocrisies." Good luck.

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