Jaw-Dropping

[Click to enlarge, prn.]

I wish I had a better phrase than jaw-dropping. No words for the dumbfundament he invokes; no experience to draw on that provides a touchstone, a base from which to find expression. It's not of this world; there's no vocabulary.

In their ability to accuse their opponents, with no sense of irony at all, of doing exactly what they've been doing, and to do exactly that which they'd previously criticized when the power curve was reversed, politicians are a breed apart. And deeper within that breed than any previous group are today's Republicans, a subspecies of particular mendacity and of conscience-free hypocrisy. But that's nowhere near the nadir: drilling down even further, alone at the bottom, there sits The Rominee: a man of unprecedented comfort with overt lying; a man of singular ability to do it without even a flinch, as if it's his right, his rite, his -- and only his -- special entitlement in his own special life.

But suddenly Mitt, he's upset, down there in his zone of indifference to truth, his cone of confabulation. He doesn't like it when people say stuff about him, especially when it's true and puts the lie to everything he says. Fortunately for him, as long as he stays among his kind at Fox "news" and in the Hamptons, it doesn't happen very often. But when it does, well, he's doggone miffed.

“A campaign based on falsehood and dishonesty does not have long legs,” Romney said on “Fox and Friends,” later adding: “The president only has one thing going, and that is constant attacks on me. They’re dishonest. They’re misdirected. And I think the American people recognize that kind of politics as something of the past. It may work in Chicago, but it’s not going to work across America.”

(Tells you a lot about the lot of them, doesn't it, that he hangs out all the time with Fox and Friends.) This, said with a straight face and not the least amount of embarrassment, mind you, from the guy whose stump speech is one lie after another, nothing but. Purposefully. (Please don't make me provide all the links again: just search the blog, or better yet your favorite search engine, for "lies of Mitt Romney" and stand back.) This, from the guy whose entire campaign is based on attacking Obama, devoid of any positive message about his own plans, talking about which he avoids like a rum and Coke. (Even his senatorial surrogates don't know WTF to say when asked about them.)

Obama is a man who beats his dog, Mitt said, beating his dog. This is a man who sets houses on fire, he claimed, blowing out a match and tossing a can of gasoline behind a tree, moving away from the heat as the second story crumbled. President Obama eats babies, he bleated, spitting out a tiny knitted bootie. Anyone got a toothpick?

Honest to god: I mean, sure, Mitch McConnell is doing everything he derided the Ds for doing when they were in the minority -- and has raised it to Guinessian levels. (Wait for the one-eighty if he ever gets control again.) Newt Gingrich, in the smoking ruins of the last vestiges of cooperation he left on the House floor, has decried "the politics of personal destruction." But that's just everyday hypocrisy. It's what they do when they're not sleeping. But The Rominee. He's a whole new game-ball. He makes you want to scream yourself into silence, to hit yourself over your head with your dropped jaw, cover your ears and go blind. He lies, and lies about it. He lies about his lies, and then he lies some more. And, boy, does he ever hate lies. He's unbelievable.

Except to teabaggers and that group of conservatives still willing to call themselves Republicans. They believe it like they believe the universe appeared a couple of years before the pyramids.