President-in-Waiting Willard and his Boy Companion Paul sure have different styles of lying

The stuff Willard says is just, you know, stuff he says. Why would anyone want to try to hold him to it?

by Ken

Here was my first reaction to the news that Willard and Mrs. Willard secretly made a bloody frigging fortune off the government auto-industry bailout: So maybe Willard wasn't kidding after all when he pretended that he hadn't opposed the bailout, even though we all know that he sure as hell did, at least publicly, as a matter of policy. There's more to life than policy, however. There's also mad, seemingly insatiable greed.

It was just two weeks ago that Greg Palast reported on "Mitt Romney's Bailout Bonanza":

Romney has done a good job of concealing, until now, the fact that he and his wife, Ann, personally gained at least $15.3 million from the bailout -- and a few of Romney’s most important Wall Street donors made more than $4 billion. Their gains, and the Romneys’, were astronomical -- more than 3,000 percent on their investment.

Yesterday Greg followed up with "UAW Files Charges Against Romney on His Auto Bail-out Profiteering":

For Mitt Romney, it's one scary Halloween. The Presidential candidate has just learned that tomorrow afternoon he will charged with violating the federal Ethics in Government law by improperly concealing his multi-million dollar windfall from the auto industry bail-out.

At a press conference in Toledo, Bob King, President of the United Automobile Workers, will announce that his union and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) have filed a formal complaint with the US Office of Government Ethics in Washington stating that Gov. Romney improperly hid a profit of $15.3 million to $115.0 million in Ann Romney's so-called "blind" trust.

The union chief says, "The American people have a right to know about Gov. Romney’s potential conflicts of interest, such as the profits his family made from the auto rescue,” “It’s time for Gov. Romney to disclose or divest.”

“While Romney was opposing the rescue of one of the nation’s most important manufacturing sectors, he was building his fortunes with his Delphi investor group, making his fortunes off the misfortunes of others,” King added.

The Romneys' gigantic windfall was hidden inside an offshore corporation inside a Limited Partnership inside a trust which both concealed the gain and reduces taxes on it. . . .

So, considering the size of Mr. and Mrs. Willards' windfall, I'm prepared to believe that Mr. Willard had his fingers crossed when he inveighed against the Obama administration's strategy for saving the U.S. auto industry.

My second thought about Willard's bailout whopper was: My goodness, for two such tireless liars, Willard and his Boy Companion Paul sure have different styles of tale-telling. With Willard, the lies are buried within lies within lies curled around other lies that twist around the block and up the hill to other lies.

Somewhere in there there must be some sort of truth, but Willard -- doing his best Jack Nicholson impression -- seems to think we can't handle the truth. Or maybe that we just have no right to it. All we're entitled to is stuff he says, which is just designed to sound nice in that particular moment. He seems to genuinely resent being held to account for anything he's said in the past, even if that past is only 10 minutes ago. That was just stuff he said, after all. Why even bring it up?

Despite the fact that Willard want us to vote for him to be president, he seems shocked by the very idea that we have any right to know what he believes. Maybe he fears that it would turn into a slippery-slope deal: If he were to humor this mad notion that voters have the right to know what he believes about the issues of the day, as a possible indication of what he might do as president, the next thing you know we would go hog wild and, say, demand to see his tax returns! Like as if that could be any of our damn business!

WITH YOUNG PAUL IT'S DIFFERENT: HE JUST
OPENS HIS TRAP, AND THE LIES POUR OUT

You know, like when Young Paul made up that flagrantly, nonsensically false story about his imaginary athletic glory as (guffaw) a marathon runner. Surely everyone remembers that episode! As Alana Horowitz reported it for HuffPost on September 1:

Paul Ryan's campaign walked back comments the VP nominee made about running a marathon.

"I had a two hour and fifty-something" marathon, Ryan said last week an interview. "I hurt a disc in my back, so I don’t run marathons anymore."

But the Ryan campaign confirmed to Runner's World that he has only run one marathon, the 1990 Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth, Minnesota, which he finished in just over 4 hours.

"The race was more than 20 years ago, but my brother Tobin—who ran Boston last year—reminds me that he is the owner of the fastest marathon in the family and has never himself ran a sub-three," Ryan said in a prepared statement. "If I were to do any rounding, it would certainly be to four hours, not three. He gave me a good ribbing over this at dinner tonight."

The admission comes after wide speculation that Ryan had exaggerated his marathon time. Running a sub-3 hour marathon means averaging under 7 minutes per mile for the entire race, a possible but extremely impressive feat. As the New Yorker's Nicholas Thompson put it, "It’s the difference between racing and running."

This isn't the first time Ryan has come under fire this week for stretching the truth. His RNC speech was chastised for misleading claims about Medicare and the 2008 closing of a Wisconsin plant.

The running fib "sounds trivial," wrote the New York Times' Paul Krugman. "But I remember the 2000 campaign, when Al Gore was constantly hounded by claims of fibbing on trivial issues — claims that, by the way, were all, as far as I could tell, fabricated. These alleged fibs supposedly showed some deep defect in his character. So if Ryan is making false claims about his physical prowess, this is absolutely fair game."

It's not just "fair game," Paul K. This episode tells us crucially important information about a joker who pretends to be a great political thinker, a man of ideas destined to be, even if not vice president just now, then perhaps soon speaker of the House, and beyond that, who knows?

Young Paul can laugh off the lie about the "sub-three" marathon, but boy does it tell us a lot about his character, or lack thereof. This was no slip of the tongue, or of memory. It was whole-cloth fabrication, just another piece in his life-long effort to persuade people, possibly including himself, that he's somebody despite the all too evident reality that deep down he's an absolute nobody. Cruelly, the pathetic lie revealed what a pathetically inept faker he is. Nobody who knows anything about marathons, anything at all, could casually utter such piffling nonsense about a sub-three-hour time.

Meanwhile Young Paul pursues his compulsive gym rattery in the apparent hope that it will make him feel, or at least look, sort of like, you know, a man. In the same way that stuffing his head full of nonsensical pseudo-philosophizing like the "thought" of Ayn Rand will make him feel, or at least seem, like a thinker. But when it begins to penetrate his dim consciousness that people actually capable of thought regard Madame Ayn as a laughingstock, he lies and says he's not a disciple, notwithstanding how often and how widely he's claimed just the opposite.

I suppose you could suggest that Willard's and Young Paul's contrasting styles of lying "complement" each other. I'm afraid that's too subtle for me. I'm just left wondering how anyone could even consider voting for either of them.

#