Lies that Won't Fly, or, Wingnut Defilade

I must be getting cynical or something.

It's not so much a sort of general outlook sort of thing. It's just that I've gotten completely used to - still a trifle irked with, but used to - the idea that "conservatives" will lie about whether the sky is blue or the grass is green if it serves their purposes, or if it doesn't, or when the sky IS blue, or for no reason at all.

As an example of this, I give you the second sentence in today's editorial in the World's Worst Newspaper by Susan "I'm an independent, no, really, I am, I just HAPPEN to have the same position as the wingnuts 99.86% of the time" Nielsen:

"The Obama administration picked a fight it was sure to lose by decreeing that all Catholic hospitals and other religiously affiliated employers should be required to offer birth control."

In fact, think I gave her some extra credit for waiting until the second sentence to lie out her ass.

It's not like I EVER expected the truth from these gomers on some things.

For example, I have always and fully expected to hear lies about gays from these wingnuts, other than the truly unhinged and rabidly feral ones, the ones that really believe that Baby Jesus cries when gay people have sex.

The semi-sentient ones, the others, the ones who know full well that they have lived with and befriended and partied with and shot the shit with homosexuals of various flavors for years, who know perfectly clearly that their position on denying these other human beings the legal sanction of their personal union is both inhumane and idiotic, are just straight lying, however they may try to shove their fingers in their ears and chant "lalalalalalala!" to drown the savage condemnation of their own consciences.

They really have no option, given the unhinged condition of their faction; it's either lie to us or tell the truth to themselves, and they can't do the latter, their brains would probably explode.

But it's one thing to lie to try and save oneself from self-immolation.

So that kind of wingnut lie never bothered me. But it's another thing entirely to lie about simple, obvious facts. And it's here that I can feel myself sliding down into a sort of frustrated anger-defilade. Because it used to set me alight when I'd read these ridiculously idiotic bullshit lies, lies that wouldn't convince a four-year-old, amateurish, moron-grade, sad, shitty little lies about simple facts that were gob-smackingly obvious to a gibbering poop-flinging monkey.

(Let me add here that my experience in the fine art of lying comes from when I was posted at Ft. Bragg. I had a friend there, Alfie, who was a sort of Vegas-blackjack-dealer-class liar, a positive maestro of the lie, a man who could lie to your face about something you knew positively otherwise and may you believe him with the effortless grace of water sliding off a cat's ass.

One thing Alfie always insisted on was that you had to lie around a core of the truth; the essence of a lie that will fly is not that it's true, and is not that you'd like it to be true, or you want it to be true but that it COULD be true.

In that respect your desires actually get in the way of telling a truly effective lie, and so it has proved. The things that wingnut "conservatives" usually like and want to be true are either hopelessly moronic or physically impossible; a "free market" (as if the second and third merchant in Babylon hadn't immediately colluded against both the first merchant and all their customers or that their breed had stopped ever since...), "low taxes and strong defense", "social decency", "job creators"...you get the picture.

So the lies they tell are, by their very nature, ridiculous. They aren't built around a core of truth, they're built around a core of pink rhinoceros fairy dust, so for those of us who don't spend six or seven hours a day hammering a FOX "News" cork into the top of our heads to keep the packing peanuts from fluffing out the idiocy is so apparent as to be kind of embarrassing.

Alfie would have told them that they had their heads jammed up their fourth point of contact so far they could see the back of their own teeth; that was the kind of guy he was.)

So I've been reading wingnut after wingnut going on and on about this whole ridiculous business of how the Evil Kenyan Usurper, the New Justinian, the Scourge of God, is making all these poor holy prelates pay for flushing the bleeding fetuses out of women's wombs as they sob and pray for righteousness, just like this Neilsen idiot. And back in the day I'd have gone utterly, full-gonzo, bull-goose looney, totally Asiatic, really medieval on their lying ass. And then here comes this Neilsen goof, and I'd have hung her up and flayed her like a windsock.

Because "decreeing that all Catholic hospitals and other religiously affiliated employers should be required to offer birth control" is, simply, an incredibly simple, rudely stupid lie. A lie as amateurish as the eight-year-old caught pissing her pants who looks down at the spreading yellow stain and mumbles "Uhhhhh...it wasn't me..."

And because the truth is a lot simpler, like most truths.

The Catholic - and other religious employers - are offered a simple choice.

Charlie Pierce describes this choice in his usual delightfully rotund fashion:

"...the president has told various Catholic institutions — and told them quite gently, too — that, yes, if they want all those nice juicy tax advantages, they must abide by the federal law and, in their capacities as employers, make contraceptives available to their employees under the new Affordable Care Act."

Period.

That's it.

So no, Susie, no one is "decreeing" anything.

No cardinals or priests are being hauled weeping and praying into the regulatory arena where they will be devoured by ruthless federal health bureaucrats.

No one is demanding that Plan B be offered up with the Eucharist, or that good Catholic matrons be offered contraceptive devices (and wouldn't these good matrons refuse the offer, anyway?) and, when they refuse to accept them, be held down by the Contraception Goon Squad and forcibly contracepted.

Tax break? Contraceptives for those who want 'em.

It's that simple.

And - as little as a couple of years ago - the incredible arrogance of this lying little Neilsen shit would have been enough to spin me up like a fucking Beyblade Metal Master.

I'd have gone off on the issue to all my friends who had the patience to listen as well as writing a long blog post about how utterly fucked-up this was and what it said about the desuetude of American politics, throwing in allusions to the fall of the Roman Republic and all sorts of other dire warnings of what this Meant To Our Future.

And now?

It's just like watching a cow. It wanders around, shits everywhere, and what the hell can you do about it? It's not worth getting excited about. It just is.

These people are just lost. Gone. Pinin' for the fjords. A rough third of the U.S. public has gone and taken the mental dirt nap. Their brains are good to holding their hats off their shoulders, and that's about it. And where that used to frustrate the hell out of me and madden me to fury, I've gotten so I just shrug.

Rain is wet, night is dark, "conservative" liars lie.

But I think there's a worse part to this.

Because I used to believe that the third of the U.S. public who sits their staring at these knuckleheads like they've never seen a cow or heard a lie would smell their bullshit and hear their lies and get tired of being lied to by a herd of goddamn beefwits and toss the idiots out into the far end of the pasture.

And I don't believe that anymore.

And that feels like heading down into a very deep defilade, indeed.