Making It Up

What is it about Royalists? It has been abundantly clear since at least the 1970's that His Imperious Cluelessness would rather lie than tell the truth. Perhaps it's some sort of contagion -- passed from one Royalist to the next like a social disease. Whatever the reason, those who would prop up the usurper can't help themselves. They lie. Repeatedly, unabashedly and in the face of all evidence to the contrary. Take Martin Frost. Once upon a time, he was a Democratic congressman from Texas. Before that (loooong before that), Frost was a newspaper reporter. It says very little about his journalistic mentors that the ex-politician, now shilling for the state-run media, can't be botherd to get his facts straight. In a column on the Internet version of the American Izvestia, Frost (correctly) warns that the Royalists are on the cusp of losing their Congressional majority. But that's where his contact with reality ends. Frost writes:

"The current page scandal is an exact re-run of the scandal House Democrats faced in 1994 over the House Bank and the House postal system, except that the parties are reversed. This year it’s the Republicans who are on the ropes and the outcome should be the same…devastating results for the party in power."

"Exact re-run", Frost assures us. That would lead the reader to conclude that the House Bank scandal involved sexual predators in the Democratic Party, and efforts by party leaders to cover-up for their activities. Of course, nothing like that ever happened. As Frost explains:

"The House Banking scandal was pretty simple. Members of Congress were permitted to open bank accounts with a special bank operated by the Sergeant at Arms. There were no service charges and, more significantly, members of Congress had unlimited overdraft protection. In other words, they could write any number of hot checks (checks that exceeded the amount on deposit) and they were given a significant amount of time to deposit funds in their account to make these checks goods [sic]."

So let's review: in the House Bank scandal, members of both parties were permitted to use an office in the Capitol Building as a sort of free-form ATM, cashing checks without facing the typical bank's pressure -- or penalty fees -- to cover them. Oh, yeah -- that's an "exact re-run" of what Mark Foley was doing. Just like the 1968 Democratic National Convention was an "exact re-run" of the Battle of Gettysburg.

Not content to make such a specious comparison, Frost then starts spinning a fiction:

"In 1994, then Speaker Tom Foley, D-Wash., was slow to react to growing scandals surrounding the operations of the House Bank and the House postal system. There were early warnings that things were amiss but it took Foley and the rest of the Democratic Leadership months to respond and by then the entire matter had spun out of control. "

Only the first seven words of that passage bear any resemblance to the truth. The House Bank scandal did erupt in an election year. But it was 1992, not 1994. Then there was the Congresssional Post Office scandal, which broke in 1991 and became an issue in 1992. In the election that November, despite the largest turnover among members of Congress in 40 years, Democrats not only retained their majorities in the House and Senate, they won the presidency as well. Perhaps Frost doesn't remember, but he was one of those Democrats who got elected that year.

To his credit, the former politician does acknowledge that neither of these Congressional scandals of the 1990's is nearly as serious as the Foley page-trolling affair. But no sooner has Frost made that concession than he rolls out the biggest lie:

"Nevertheless, the House Bank scandal and the House post office scandal became big issues in the 1994 elections and were a major contributing factor to the Republican victory that year.
The Republicans in 1994 raised these scandals as proof that the Democratic leadership had lost its way and could not be trusted to run the House in the proper manner."

False. Utterly and blatantly false. And Frost, who was there when it happened, should know it.

By 1994, the House Bank scandal had absolutely no traction with voters -- largely because voters had learned in the intervening years that two of the three most egregious abusers of the House Bank were Republicans! Moreover, three members of the Republican Cabinet (including a fellow named Cheney) admitted bouncing checks while they were in the House. Even the chief flamethrower, the person most loudly screaming "corruption" as the House Bank scandal was stoked by right-wingers -- yes, Newt Gingrich -- helped himself at the "no cash - no problem" check-cashing service. He used his role in blowing the "scandal" out of proportion (and his earlier nakedly vicious attacks on the previous House Speaker) to catapult from the back benches into the GOP leadership.

From that perch, Newtie spearheaded the political guerrilla warfare that won the Republicans their congressional majority in 1994. It wasn't the House Bank scandal that energized the GOP that year. It was, in large part, the electorate's weariness with 40 years of Democratic control in Congress, coupled with its uneasiness about the ineptitude of Bill Cinton's first 18 months in the Oval Office.

None of this is news to Martin Frost. He was there for all of it. But he's pretty sure you don't remember, so he's re-writing recent history in an effort to raise the appearance of equivalency. The Democrats got their comeuppance because of a tempest in a teapot, he argues, and now it's the Royalists' turn. Those silly American voters, he's saying, they are so easily influenced by the inconsequential.

As it happens, if Frost really were trying to draw parallels between 1994 and 2006, he had no need to invent events. Reality tells the same story. In 1994, Democrats were focused only on keeping the levers of power in their own hands. They were widely viewed as -- if not corrupt -- then at a minimum complicit in a corrupt system (known as The United States Government - proving some things never change). Voters decided they would no longer be taken for granted and washed them out in an electoral tsunami. The Royalist Party of 2006 has taken corruption to new levels of avarice and arrogance. Their blind devotion to power for power's sake (including their lock-step march in the shadow of King George) appears to be wearing thin.

But Frost, having firmly fallen in line with the Royalists, has also cloaked himself in their trappings. He will, just as they, choose to lie when the truth can suffice. That tendency has always puzzled me. Why fabricate when the facts are in your favor? Even if you don't believe "honesty is the best policy", or "the truth shall make you free", it's actually more difficult to make stuff up. Especially if you do it in public. Not everyone is a slobbering moron with the memory capacity of a lobotomized gnat. Someone, somewhere, at some time, will eventually call you on your lies.

I admit I don't understand this borderline-patholigical need to concoct facts. But it occurs to me the Royalists may do it for a merely practical reason: to keep in practice.