Smoke gets in your lies

They asked me how I knew

None of this was true

Oh I of course replied

It cannot be denied

Bill O'Rielly lied

 -With apologies to Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach-

Newspapers have long been chastised for either getting it wrong or just plain lying on the front page and apologizing or retracting on the last page.  And then there's Fox News where the lies never stop, the lies never die -- ever.

On a recent Thursday night, Lyin' Bill  O'Reilly told us he'd found a "smoking gun" of some unspecified sort because  former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman had visited the White House 157 times between 2009 and 2012. One has to wonder what kind of smoke it was or into what orifice it was being blown since in actuality, as it came out the following day, the story was fake, Shulman having only attended 11 events having to do with health care, far fewer than he had been cleared to attend and having nothing to do with any kind of scandal, real or imagined. 

"You must explain under oath what you were doing at the White House on 157 separate occasions."

 Not much need to actually, Shulman had been cleared, as the public record shows, to meet, mostly in other venues than the White House with administration staffers involved in implementation of the health-care reform bill.  Still he did not attend 146 of them. Is it possible, under oath or not to explain what one was doing at a place one was not?  Perhaps Lyin' Bill would like to explain what he was doing in North Korea 157 times.  What?  He wasn't there?  Now there's a smoking gun for sure.

But it's too good a story for Fox to let go, even if it's not true, so although the debunking was thorough, Lyin' Bill was at it the next day saying:

 "We still don't know much about former IRS Chief Douglas Shulman visiting the White House 157 times.  That's extraordinary."

No, of course we don't know what he was doing there when he wasn't there to do anything and  if anything is extraordinary it's Lyin' Bill's ability to charge about like a bull in the arena with all sorts of facts stuck in his hide like banderillas and  bellowing discredited and debunked charges ad nauseam. Of course we're talking about Fox News here and their garbled and disreputable gospels have a following of the faithful and of course it was picked up as divine word by Investor's Business Daily and metastasised through the drainage system of the Blog world where, at least in the minds of the Right, it became true.

You know we still don't know about Bill O'Reilly meeting 157 times with Kim Jong Un to discuss an attack on Hawaii.  I think he needs to explain under oath just what he was doing there don't you?

Good ol' boy in Gucchi loafers

As much as I like living in small towns - and I do live in one - I must be out of touch with small town America; at least insofar as Karl Rove is being honest and genuine. (feel free to snicker.)

Karl has taken it upon himself, as a true man of the people and judge of patriots, to point out to a meeting of the National Rifle Association yesterday, that Barak Obama is out of touch with the people one needs to be in touch with in order to be the chief executive of the United States, Commander in Chief of the armed forces and representative of our country to the world at large. I must be out of touch because I am, given the chance, going to vote for Barak Obama. I own a number of firearms and learned to shoot when I was 10. I'm an outdoorsman who once had a farm, doesn't drive imported cars or drink Zima and is often seen dining with the local fisherman and bikers at the local tavern. I'm a Democrat. I'm educated. I don't support the NRA. I don't believe in faith.

Rove, whose neck is only red when he ventures out of his burrow, lives in a brand new palatial home in Florida and has spent most of his life promoting the interests of the very powerful to the detriment of truth, justice and what we'd like to call the American Way -- as well as to the detriment of the interests of the people he is now pandering and condescending to by insisting that Barak Obama is a panderer.

Convoluted? Sure, but that's Karl Rove. Karl, whose name has become synonymous with mean, ugly and dirty politics recently advised Obama

"Americans want to see you scrapping and fighting for the job, not in a mean or ugly way but in a forceful and straightforward way."

One has to wonder at the twisted and hidden paths Rove sees as the high road.

Karl, of course isn't exactly the hunting, shooting outdoorsman he was condescending to at the National Rifle Association Convention, and much less is he the God, Guns and Guts kind of a guy I'm familiar with in rural Florida. His face isn't tanned. I'm sure he doesn't wear camo boxer shorts or drink Budweiser or shoot pool with the boys after he punches out for the day. I'm sure he doesn't drive a 'pickemup' with Jesus stickers or gripe about them Jews driving up the price of gas or the Mexicans stealing his livelihood or the mill he works for shipping jobs to India. So it's a bit hard to see him as anything other than the manipulative, propagandizing, phony, lying, condescending, pandering bastard who has been sucking up to the power elite since he had hair.

By suggesting that the political opinions of what he calls "small town Americans" are what is and should be the policies of the United States, he's suggesting the kind of dictatorship of the proletariat that would have him screaming Marxism like a crazed parakeet if any Democrat had said it, and by categorizing the vast majority of us who live in urban or metropolitan areas as unAmerican by virtue of education and affluence he proves himself to be little more than an opportunist looking to rise above the masses by standing on their backs.