This is what it sounds like...

...when dopes lie.

You want to piss me off quicker than almost anything, insult my intelligence.

Not mock me for my ignorance of this or that (although that won’t exactly get you invited over for Beer Can Roast Beast during the Holidays) because there are whole reams and tomesfull of things I know nothing at all about, so you’re bound to catch me out over my not knowing something --

(And, to self-editorialize, shame on one anyone, including me, who hollowly boasts their way so far out over the ledge that one or two well-placed questions dislodge them. OK, now on with our Feature Presentation.)

-- but don’t treat me like an idiot. Oh, veeeery bad things happen then, but if you were ever bound and determined to goad me into going “Hulk, Smash!” nutty on you, here’s the formula:

First, say some silly or idiotic or factually ludicrous thing to my face.

Second, tell me you really didn’t say what you just said. Or because I’m such a dribbling halfwit, I somehow misunderstood.

And be sure to be veeeery patronizing about it.

Which leads me to the story of this boss I had once, and how, after a few twists and turns, it relates to the GOP. Swear to God.

You probably worked for someone like her.

To pare a long, meandering tale full of pustulent cul-de-sacs down to the lean meat, suffice it to say she was weak and stupid and deathly afraid of looking weak and stupid, so instead of doing the thing that will earn the respect of people who are brighter or more expert than you – namely just being up-front about it and asking for their help in a collegial way – she instead chose to compensate for her mediocrity by issuing directives that got progressively more and more ridiculous.

And the more absurd the situation got, the more intractable she got, and so the individual fuckups spiraled and evolved and mutated into clusterfucks.

She had our goodwill at the beginning, and she had to work her dim-witted ass off to lose it, but she managed to do exactly that.

What made it especially bad was her constant lying, but what made it Extra Super Ooper Duper Bad was what I call “Closed Door Lying.”

People like her, they always fall into the same, boring pattern. Big institutions or small, private or public or educational, it doesn’t matter.

Usually such a person is hired during the death-spiral of an organization by a President or a Chancellor or CEO who is every bit as flailingly inept as they are. And hired on the basis of some reeking, Park-District-outhouse-rat fucknut cray-gee scheme to Turn It All Around in one, sweet move.

Like, “We shall defeat Magnetism in our Time.”

Or, “Pepsi...Blue!”

Or, “We know where they [WMD’s] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.”

God help us all.

Then, like Stalin, comes the purging of anyone who has enough competence and guts to try to warn them they're headed over the cliff.

Then comes the long free-fall during which people are more or less randomly blamed for the catastrophe and tossed to the wolves – all while the boss carefully avoids referring to the general downward plummeting (that is now accelerating so fast that the wind is blowing people’s pants off and blasting their lips clean over the tops of their head) in anything but the most glowingly positive terms.

Whee! We’re flyyyyying!

Then as the finer features of the terrain towards which everyone is undeniably hurtling become visible, all pretense that we’re really flying along a-ok are lost. That’s when the boss bucks up the troops by beginning the Cowardly Recriminations phase of the project; stirring speeches to the already demoralized troops blaming everyone else for not doing a better job, or not having enough faith, or one way or another thinking bad thoughts, because badthinkfulness, and not her epic incompetence was apparently the real problem.

The things get extremely ugly, but the worst moment was the Closed Door Lie: the moment when she invited me into her office, closed the door, and lied right to my face.

No one else around and she flat-out denied issuing a very clear directive to me – and a whole bunch of other people – just a few days before.

I think I actually looked around, trying to figure out who the fuck she was talking to.

There was just me, who knew the truth, and her, who also knew ...and that was the most insulting, infuriating thing of all. I’d seen her lie in public, in groups, trying to shift blame for her myriad fuckups onto others...but behind a closed door, when there was no one else around?

There was no audience there, no gallery to play to, but she didn’t even have the balls to play it straight with me for five minutes in private when both of us damned well knew the deal.

There is something especially sinister about being lied to in that way.

To try to coerce someone go along with a lie to fool...who? If there are only two of you and you both know better? To be pressured to essentially conspire against yourself. This is the hallmark of someone who is so hopelessly, sociopathically steeping in an entire, rickety Universe of interlocking faslehoods that they lie with every breath. They lie in private. They lie to themselves. As Scott Peck wrote about in “The People of the Lie”, these people have disappeared so completely into their depravity, they don’t lie like normal people do.

Lying is not a means to a particular end any more.

Lying is their oxygen, and the utterly False Reality they have constructed for themselves is the ONLY thing that matters to them. That Palace of Deception in which they live must be defended at all costs, because if any truth is allowed to penetrate – on any subject on which the Lord of the Manor has already lied – then the whole enterprise collapses.

So why do I go on at length about this?

Because I believe that, far from being powerful and surging, the GOP is in fact trapped and doomed, and if we’re smart enough to capitalize on, it we really can take this country back.

I mean, we know they’re lying and, more and more, the facts on the ground are making them look progressively more ridiculous and borderline insane...so who are they lying to?

The answer is, their base.

The reliable base who happily sit like baby chicks and believes every little thing that the traitors in their party regurgitate into their mouths. The have no critical thinking facilities. No higher brain function. The GOP has carefully cultivated these Christopaths as their loyal orc army. Pig-ignorant, Creationist-ranting fucktards bred for loyalty and their ability to vote Republican as automatically and mindlessly as a meth whore raising nickel-bag money one $2 handjob at a time.

But this is also why, despite having a solid base, the GOP can’t advance any further than where they are.

When congenital liars like Keh Mehlman or Mary Matlin make the rounds of the Bobbleheads, they’re not talking to you or me. That's what is so creepy about it. We are watching as they desperately lie to their own base, and the more they do that for short term survival, the more they cut their own throats in the long term.

This is why they’re stuck.

This is why they’re trapped trying to quietly convince black voters that the GOP campaign of actively courting bigots and segregationists for the last 35 year was all just some kind of terrible misunderstanding. Just a Merry Mixup, because it they actually told the fucking truth, those same racists on which they are so dependent would bolt, and the Party would collapse overnight.

So since they are prohibited from telling the simple truth, they’re stuck telling black folks a bunch of Closed Door Lies – ridiculous bullshit that everyone on both side knows are lies, and which not only fails, but has the additional, salutary effect of actually being vastly more insulting to black voters that just being openly racist.

Because by continuing to spew lies that we all know are lies, you are also calling them stupid.

Nice move!

This is why Bush surrounding himself with eely sycophants is becoming such a disaster for Republicans. Why the “Flowers for Algernon” popularity of Bush that artificially peaked during the months following 9/11 enough to make tragedy-blinded GOPhers actually elide right over the fact that he was still a vicious, half-bright drunk, has stopped being Marx Brothers funny and every day becomes more and more the last act of MacBeth.

Because they’re cornered. It’s a big corner to be sure, but they have left themselves no room to maneuver.

There’s a quote by John Stuart Mill that goes, “Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.”

That sums it up very nicely I think.

Because I don’t know any fence-sitters anymore, do you?

I don’t know ANYONE who honestly can’t quite make up their mind whether or not Bush is a disaster or not. The Liberals, Progressives and Moderates Dems I know are all united one one issue: that Bush should have been impeached long ago. Not that he’s a little bit wrong, or slightly unpleasant, but that he is a traitor and a war criminal of the First Water.

As as their Palace of Deception begins to fall apart, more and more the Administration is stuck playing to the “stupid people”, and so more and more anyone who isn’t a hardcore wingnut starts to feel lied to, insulted and shat upon.

That was the astonishment of his re-election: that 51 million Americans looked a criminal in the eye, steeped in his crimes to the point of bloody saturation...and then looked at a genuine war hero, a grown-up and, for all his flaws, more of a statesman in any contiguous five minute period than Bush has ever been his whole, sorry life...

...and said, “I’d like a double scoop of Criminal Dumbass please. With extra treasonous sprinkles!”

And if we lived in a static Universe where the rules of Causation had been suspended, that’s where we would be forever: Thanks to the simultaneously craven-and-arrogant failure-citizens who hold themselves aggressively and willfully blind to the consequences of their cupidity in order to keep America eternally tipping ever so slightly – 51/49 – in the direction of Corporate Theocracy.

But we don’t live in a vacuum. We live within the Veil of the Maya; in the Field of Time, and once events are set in motion, they will have their Newtonian way with us.

You can’t wish it away, or pray it away or vote it away. Heave a million metric tons of raw sewage straight into the air and turning 51 million pairs of blind eyes to it won’t affect the relentless ballistics of its arc in the slightest. Not all the Administration Lies or Congressional Refusal to investigate those lies will make any difference.

Which leaves the Administration stuck and fucked.

They could theoretically start telling the truth and practicing a little good, old fashioned American Glasnost. That’s ceratinly what would be best for the country, but go ahead and blow in a call to Mikhail Gorbachev and ask him how easily a policy of openness can be controlled once it is unleashed, and how gently a such policy treats the regime in charge when they have plenty to hide.

And anyway, the “good of the Nation” has never been of the slightest fucking interest to George Bush.

Or they can continue as they have been, playing more and more to Potemkin Audiences of soldiers and boyscouts and hand-picked “citizens” who will flagellate themselves into multiple, frenzied orgasms every time Bush comes within a Gentleman’s “C” of conjugating the verb “dissemble” correctly. Getting more and more Nixonian in their collective detachment from and seething hatred of Reality.

Leaving swing voters who may have liked Bush when he said all that cool shit on the rubble to ask, "Who the fuck is this guy covering up for the guy who blew the cover of one of our spies and the front company she worked for?

Where’s Mr. Integrity now that the GOP is being asked to actually live up to all of those High Falutin' Standards they set for everyone else when it was all just talk they could use to make Clinton look foolish?

Where’s all the lacerating wit and outrage about parsing what “is” is...now that we’re parsing what “imminent” meant, and there are 1,700 dead Americans because of such verbal weasling?

Where’s all of that big, “Bring it on” talk now that they went and brought it and we can’t cope with it?

Because their Dear Leader will never allow a single discouraging word from the real world to be uttered in the halls of his drunken, Liberator Barbie and Konservative Krisitian Ken Go To Baghdad Dreamhouse, and because those around him were chosen for their ideological purity, slavish loyalty and toadying expertise, the GOP is doomed to telling ever more and ever more outrageous Closed Door Lies to keep their base from rebelling...

...and in the process, permanently alienating and insulting the very people they need to make their majority last.