Leonard Pitts Jr. / Syndicated columnist

"We need change, all right. Change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington. We have a prescription for every American who wants change in Washington — throw out the big-government liberals."

— Mitt Romney, Sept. 3

And then the gorilla run knee-socks paint porno on the Cadillac. But school laughed and didn't we sing hats?

Ahem.

Maybe you wonder what the preceding gobbledygook means. I would ask which gobbledygook you mean: mine or Mitt Romney's? If he's allowed to spew nonsense and people act as if he's spoken intelligently, why can't I? If he gets to behave as if words no longer have objective meaning, why can't I?

I mean, baffle grab on the freak flake. Really.

And again, ahem.

If you're a regular here, you've heard me rant from time to time about intellectual dishonesty. By this, I mean more than just your garden-variety lie. No, to be intellectually dishonest means to argue that which you know to be untrue and to substitute ideology for intellect to the degree that you'll do violence to language and logic rather than cross the party line.

Yes, we're all intellectually dishonest on occasion. But no one does it like Republican conservatives. They are to intellectual dishonesty what Michael Jordan was to basketball or The Temptations to harmony: the avatar, the exemplar, the paradigm. They have elevated it beyond hypocrisy and political expedience. They have made it ... art.

Which returns us to the astonishing thing Mitt Romney said while addressing the party faithful in St. Paul, Minn. You want to walk around it the way you would Michelangelo's "David," admiring the elegance of the workmanship. You hesitate to touch it, much less pull it apart. To do so seems almost an act of desecration.

Unfortunately, some of us are too plodding and earthbound, too blind to the seductions of art, too stubbornly wedded to some vestigial notion that intellectual honesty matters, to walk past a steaming pile of bovine excreta without calling it a steaming pile of bovine excreta.

So excuse me, beg pardon, so sorry, but I have to ask: what liberal Washington is he talking about? The federal government has three branches. The legislative, i.e., Congress, was under conservative control from 1995 until 2007. The judicial, i.e., the Supreme Court, consists of nine justices, seven of whom were nominated by conservative presidents. The executive, i.e., the president, is George W. Bush. Enough said.

Washington is already what Romney wants to make it. Our current state of affairs, love it or loathe it, is indisputably a product of conservative governance. I wish that mattered more than it does.

That it doesn't matter much at all you can credit to conservative politicians who have, over the years, trained their followers to respond with Pavlovian faithfulness to certain terms. Say "conservative" and they wag their tails. Say "liberal" and they bare their fangs. More to the point, say either and all thinking ceases, so much so that a representative of the ideology that has controlled most of Washington most of the last 12 years can say with a straight face that his ideology needs to seize control of Washington to fix what is broken there. And people hear this Orwellian doublespeak ... and cheer. Why not? They have been taught that words mean what you need them to in a given moment.

Sadly, it has proved an easy lesson to impart. Turns out, all it requires is a limitless supply of gall and the inherent belief that people are dumber than a bag of hammers.

And all it costs us is language, the ability to have reasoned and intelligent political discourse, the idea that words do, and should, have weight, dimension and intrinsic meaning. Maybe you disagree. In which case, let me just say this:

Piffle crack eat monkey snow. Really.

Liberals snort packed ham.

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The author confuses the Republican Party with conservatism and thus, his polemic is nonsense.

B

That's pretty good, but the Reich wing nut jobs won't like this kind of talk.

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Not true.

I agree that the author's use of the word "conservative" is incorrect - Bush, Delay, Scalia, Ashcroft, et al., are anything but conservative - but his point is dead on. During the years that these bizarre people controlled all three branches of government, things pretty much fell apart.

So, who are these people that Romney wants thrown out of Washington?

I say the essay is dead on, except he should have used "right wing" instead of "conservative." Pretty picky point, if you ask me.

The author confuses the term 'right wing' with conservatism and thus, his polemic is nonsense.

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I mentioned his speech in some other post. It was hilarious. He kicked it off by calling the Supreme Court liberal. Half the crowd looked at the other half for 2 seconds before a spattering of applause.

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You said "not true" and then support my contention that Republicans are not necessarily conservative. Certainly the current administration is not conservative.

I don't even think I'd call them "right-wing" though that particular moniker is so ill-defined it isn't work arguing.

B

I agree with the first part, but I don't think his polemic is nonsense. I think he is exactly right, he just used one wrong word.

Right. That's what I tried to say. Whatever one wants to call them, they are certainly not the liberals that Mitt Romney blamed for the problems in Washington.True, but "right wing" seems closer to the mark than does "conservative."

Okay, I'll give you that one. In fact, I think that maybe the best description of Dubyuh -- not conservative but right-wing. I'll have to think about it and see how it works in other contexts. May have to steal it from you.

B

Is that supposed to be one of the funny made up sentences ???


RichC

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