(Illustration found here).

Last night at the Al Smith Memorial Dinner in New York, a big political-bullshit laugh-fest where the public-servant 1 percent pretends they’re human, Mitt Romney attempted some side-splitting humor: In discussing how he prepares for the debates, Romney said his strategy was to “find the biggest available straw man and mercilessly attack it; Big Bird didn’t even see it coming.”
Funny as a tumor.

Facts are not allowed to stand in the way of comedy, or a run for the presidency.
Not even with image facts — this past weekend, Romney’s nit-twit teen-age bowel-throb (vs heart throb) running mate, Paul Ryan, created a lie with images, a fraudulent photo-op, if you will.
And the media was complacent at best, part-of-the-lie at worse.
The Washington Post tries to belittle the situation:

Were you shocked to learn those photos of Paul Ryan washing dishes at a soup kitchen were basically staged?
The VP candidate got blowback this week from the charity president, who claimed the campaign “ramrodded” its way into a dining hall that wasn’t even serving at the time.
But if it had been, would the photo op have been much less fakey-fake?

BagNewsNotes, which has a thing for factual pix, pushes back at the bullshit:

Well, for starters, that first line is a straw man since I doubt anything a politician does from a persuasive standpoint (including lying to the American people through his or her teeth for months on end) is going to “shock” the American people.
The key term in the paragraph, though, even if the authors put quotes around it, is ramrodding.
That “ramrodding” is what’s in the pudding that can’t be scrubbed away, no matter how much Sno-ee you pour on it. …
…
Ryan not only fabricated the circumstances, but in doing so, he put in jeopardy the integrity, the credibility and the responsibility of not just the people associated with that charity, but (hello, Reliable Source!) every journalist, photojournalist and media organization aware of the deceit but expected to play along.
I’m so sorry it’s Washington’s premier news institution that forces me to have to spell this out in such frank terms, but the Ryan photo-op was much less theater than it was fraud.

And on top of the lying, donations at the faith-based apolitical group that runs the kitchen are way down: “It appears to be a substantial amount,” Brian Antal, president of the Mahoning County St. Vincent De Paul Society in Youngstown, told The Huffington Post. “You can rest assured there has been a substantial backlash.”
Apparently, that visit was a first for Ryan at any soup kitchen, anywhere — HuffPost reports Ryan has never even visited the kitchens back in his Wisconsin congressional district.
An asshole, as HuffPost reminds: Ryan’s budget plan calls for $133.5 billion in cuts to food stamp programs over the next 10 years, including cuts to emergency food programs that help to supply food pantries.

This a dream ticket?

And of dreams and fairy dust, Paul Krugman in his column this morning in the New York Times nails Romney’s truthiness in getting Americans back in the work force — just a bunch of bullshit:

But Mr. Romney, it turns out, doesn’t have a plan; he’s just faking it.
In saying that, I don’t mean that I disagree with his economic philosophy; I do, but that’s a separate point.
I mean, instead, that Mr. Romney’s campaign is telling lies: claiming that its numbers add up when they don’t, claiming that independent studies support its position when those studies do no such thing.

Krugman’s apt column title: Snow Job on Jobs.

However, it’s a blow-job on jobs in actuality.

Adding this from UPI and Romney’s non-show this week on ABC’s ‘The View,’ though, his wife did appear:

Romney had been scheduled to appear on the talk show with his wife, but his campaign said this week the show “was no longer going to work in the campaign schedule.”
In remarks made at a May fundraiser he had called the show “high risk” because the hosts, including “Whoopi Goldberg,” are “sharp-tongued” and “not conservative.”
Ann Romney jokingly said her husband actually said “sharp and young.”

Remember, in ‘truthiness‘ the T in truth is silent.