Two Faces

Lost in the amusement over the Perry brain freeze (which, like Cain's proclivities, will likely help him among teabaggers) are a couple of other significant moments from the latest Republican parade of pareidolia.

Asked about the $300K he received as a consultant for Freddy Mac and Fannie Mae, Newt the Simpering Slimeball claimed they paid him to be a "historian" for the agencies. A note-taker, I guess. Accurate, other than the fact that it's a complete revision of the truth:

... Commercial banks regarded Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae as competitors and were anxious to pick up business that would result from scaling back the two companies.

Pushing back, Freddie Mac enlisted prominent conservatives, including Gingrich and former Justice Department official Viet Dinh, paying each $300,000 in 2006, according to internal records.

Gingrich talked and wrote about what he saw as the benefits of the Freddie Mac business model.

Dinh wrote a legal analysis of private property rights that viewed a hypothetical government-enforced sale of Freddie Mac assets as constitutionally suspect.

The difference between the facility with which both Gingrich and Romney produce lies is that the former brazens through them with his faux-professorial demeanor, assuming that his "I'm-the-smartest-guy-in-the-room" attitude will simply overwhelm any lesser being who'd think to question him. Romney, on the other hand, sort of slinks by his lies hoping no one will notice. He's more like the kid with the cookie behind his back, pretending the lid isn't off the jar.

Which brings us to the other noteworthy moment: asked about his flip-flopping, Romney claimed the mantle of constancy for staying married and remaining in the church of Moroni. Allowed completely to ignore the central point of the question, he went on to claim that Obama's is the most "political" presidency in modern history, after which he declared that Obama is planning when to leave Afghanistan based purely on politics. Follow up questions, demands for explication? Are you kidding?

I'll ignore Herman Cain's arch arithmetical announcement that for every woman who claims he sexually harassed them, there are thousands who don't. Gotta give him that. Probably several thousand. It's a big country.

The above examples are significant for showing the disregard those sad samples of humanity hold for their public. (It's true, of course, of the whole lot of them with the possible partial sometimes exception of Jon Huntsman; but it's starting to seem as though Newt will be the only non-Mitt left standing, while the rest are just background noise, which means, as I said long ago, it'll be Romney...) And they demonstrate their certainty that the media they love to bash won't ever really call them on it. But mostly, they confirm the Death Valley level to which partisanship has sunk us: among Republican voters, lies don't matter. Facts don't matter. What matters is getting the black guy out of the white house. That their grievances and beliefs about what he has and hasn't done have nothing to do with reality is the least of their concerns. And the Republican candidates know it.