How Much Do Republicans Love Lies?

When they start attacking eachother over credit for writing and stuffing them in George Bush's mouth.

As a serious writer myself, someone who'd regarded being away from home without a Zebra pen and a notebook as a life-or-death matter loooong before he got suckered into the thankless and ultimately losing and futile venture called political blogging, I recognize the need for speechwriters in our day and age. Even our greatest statesmen had to use speechwriters. To me, they're a necessary evil, like AZT for AIDS victims, or the old-fangled mercury-for-VD cure.

The boobs that we elect and re-elect to office every other year are so feeble-minded and/or triangulating and dissembling by genetic mandate that it necessitates the need to hire wordsmiths (as opposed to actual writers) to chisel blocks of prose with surgical precision not to explicate and clarify complicated and weighty policy decisions to the American public but to brainwash them in a way that they can never feel the Brill-O pad against their gray matter.

It's this art of choosing words for maximum effect and telling the public one thing while meaning and doing another is what keeps etymological Pla-Doh artists, verbal alchemists who turn bullshit into plowshares like Frank Luntz rolling in filthy Republican lucre. Speechwriting is the art of providing politicians to the front door of their personal ambitions while simultaneously giving them an emergency back door if and when their dishonesty, venality or corruption blows up.

Michael J. Gerson's diaper is saggy these days because Mike Scully, fellow wordsmith and liar to the American public, claimed in The Atlantic that no more than a third of Bush's post-war speeches were written by the much-lionized Gerson.

Oh, say it ain't so, Mike, that the immortal phrase that had proven so prescient, "axis of evil", wasn't penned by Gerson, after all, but was a collaboration between David Frum and Mike Scully himself.

So, the Man himself behind the words didn't write the words and the Man behind the Man behind the words didn't write the words, although Scully never pointed to a single example of Gerson taking credit for speeches that he didn't write.

But he's still a glory hog, insists Scully from the pages of one of America's most august publishing institutions.

Perhaps if we were talking about them fighting over who wrote, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself" and "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country", I could see these bozos climbing all over eachother like the Three Stooges trying to get out a narrow doorway at the same time while water and sharks are gushing through the portholes.

But these are guys fighting over who wrote what lies, lies that helped get thousands of people killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But such men and women are necessary to Republican America because they don't want to have their compassionately conservative, war-loving brains to have to do a U-turn in ideological thinking. They need to be comforted by lies told by their political elders and godfathers. Republican godfathers such as Mitt Romney, that oleaginous preppy fuck with his five war-dodging Osmond Brothers boys when he repudiates Bush while embracing his most disastrous decisions, such as, oh I dunno, attacking Iraq then blaming everyone under the sun except for himself and his closest circle.

"I'm not Bush," Romney and the other 9 clowns in the GOP field say, "nor should we be but you gotta love his policies!" How wonderful that Republicans are so flexible in their thinking that they can separate the man from his failings.

Because Republican voters need lies as much as that fat lady at Lane Bryant trying on that pants suit two sizes two small, the wall-flower daughter on prom night or a war family putting the remains of their son or daughter to rest and needing to be told that there was some justification for it all.

Because some lies are just worth fighting for, as Republicans remind us every day, while those same lies are worth others dying for.