Hypocrite.

“One of the darker periods of modern American history was J. Edgar Hoover’s long reign over the FBI, as we have learned since he died in 1972. So it is more than a historical footnote to discover new records showing that prominent public television broadcaster Bill Moyers participated in Hoover’s exploits.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, the Washington Post has obtained a few of the former FBI director’s secret files. According to a Thursday front-page story, Hoover was “consumed” with exposing a (nonexistent) relationship between a gay photographer and Jack Valenti, the late film industry lobbyist who was then an aide to Lyndon Johnson. Hoover’s M.O. was to amass incriminating personal information as political blackmail.

But as the Post reports in passing, the dossier also reveals that Mr. Moyers — then a special assistant to LBJ — requested in 1964 that Hoover’s G-men “investigate two other administration figures who were ‘suspected as having homosexual tendencies.’”

This isn’t the first time Mr. Moyers’s name has come up in connection with Hoover’s abuse of office. When Laurence Silberman, now a federal appeals judge, was acting Attorney General in 1975, he was obliged to read Hoover’s secret files in their entirety in preparation for testimony before Congress — and as far as we know remains one of the only living officials to have done so. “It was the single worst experience of my long governmental service,” he wrote in these pages in 2005.”

OTB asks

“It seems perfectly plausible that young Bill Moyers did something that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time that he’d condemn if it were happening in 2009.”

It’ would, IF Moyers had ever changed his ways. From what we’ve have seen in the past few years there is little evidence of that.