Welcome to the Etch-a-Sketch.

Now, if you’re paying attention, you just learned the Achilles heel of the Romney campaign. If you haven’t been paying attention, that’s YOUR Achilles heel, which they intend to exploit.

I speak of course, of Ann Romney’s dirty crack.

ABC News leads off with this Orwellian horse-puckey:

ABCNEWS:
Ann Romney Fights Back: Debuts on Twitter to Counter DNC Advisor’s Insult  —  PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Ann Romney’s debut on Twitter couldn’t have come at a more opportune time.  —  Ann’s first tweet came just moments after Democratic strategist and DNC adviser Hilary Rosen lobbed an insult at Ann Romney …

It’s only an insult if it ain’t true, just like it’s only libel if it’s not true, and it’s only news if the soulless imbeciles at ABC news actually used facts.

They did not.

The logical argument was this: is there a war on women? and, if so, is Mitt Romney’s astonishing assertion that NO, Republicans aren’t engaged in it, OBAMA is engaged in it (false 90%+ figure of women’s job losses under Obama). Oh, and Ann Romney is Mitt’s advisor on female matters.

Mitt Romney put his wife in the cross-hairs. Moreover, she was placed on the public stage by her own volition and by her ambitious husband. (This will be important later.) It was her CHOICE.

Ann Romney as she sees herself

In a season of mendacity, it seems a strange thing that so blatant an untruth, a lie, a fiction would pass so easily through the catamite press corps(e), but there you have it.

See see the “firestorm” on Memeorandum this morning.

Hilary Rosen, a CNN talking head identified as a “Democratic strategist” made the logical statement in rebuttal that Ann Romney was not in the least qualified to discuss the travails of working women and single mothers in this economy, including the “unfortunate” statement “she’s never worked a day in her life.

By this, of course, it is CLEARLY meant that Ann Romney has never worked in a W-2 wages time clock commercial job in her life.

But the mendacious Romney campaign (who have issued lie after unchallenged lie throughout this poisonous primary season) intentionally misconstrued the word “work,” so that Ann Romney could pull herself into high dudgeon — even creating a Twitter account to plead her sooty purity as a voice for vee-jay-jays everywhere — that she’s raised several Orthodontically engineered children, which is “hard work.”

Perhaps.

Working mother?

But clearly she didn’t “work” in the context the statement was made in.

And she and her lying husband and his Cthuylu corps of advisors well know it. The lie is clearly intentional, and the phony outrage is all the more demonic for it.

But we live in a Goebbels-style media age, and the “Big Lie”ers of Romney cry great crocodile tears that those awful Jews are abusing the poor Brownshirts by repeatedly smashing their knees and jackboots with their Semitic testicles. And, to add insult to injury, they repeatedly smash the Brownshirts in the fists and elbows with their eyes and noses.

And the “civil” morons of the media and the “left” go right along, demanding that Hilary Rosen publicly APOLOGIZE to Ann Romney for the “insult” to her hyper-productive genitalia. Which Rosen did.

I will stipulate that Ann Romney has done “hard work” in raising her children in the lap of luxury — even though that assertion, in itself, is probably laughable; but the mere functioning of her reproductive apparatus no more makes her an “expert” on women’s issues than owning a cheap telescope (never used) makes one an astrophysicist.

playing to the fools

The fundamental argument here is so laughable that only the criminally insane and those who have sustained organic brain damage could possibly take it seriously.

But no: the Obama Administration and its functionaries all instantly distanced themselves from Rosen, even as the Right Wing Smear Machine sprang into sulphurous action. As per usual, all the Righties banded together in their alibi, and all the Lefties fled the field of rhetorical battle, tails tucked twixt tibiae.

Has no one been paying attention, say, since George H.W. Bush based his 1988 election on smearing Dukakis as a “card-carrying member of the ACLU” and “Willie Horton”? (Implicitly, of course, that they were AGAINST civil liberties, as has been amply demonstrated in the intervening years — emphasis on “demon.”)

The functionality of Ann Romney’s lady parts no more makes her an expert on women’s issues than her imputed ability to drive two Cadillacs (at the same time, seemingly, a sort of Amazon Ben-Hur, astride the twin yoked mechanical beasts), or her assertion that, with nine figures in hubby Mitty’s account, she “doesn’t think of herself as wealthy.)

Ann’s two Cadillacs, ‘Willard’ and ‘Ben’

Someone is comatose here, and that needs to be pointed out.

Especially noteworthy are two sleazeballs at Politico, who write this bit of offal:

“There’s no such thing as a mom who’s not a working mom, so this was an unfortunate incident,” said Virginia Del. Barbara Comstock, a longtime Romney backer. “But it highlights some of the division that we’ve been seeing from the Obama campaign because they don’t want to talk about the fact that the Obama economy isn’t working for women.”

Utterly begging the question throughout, taking GOP talking points as gospel and pretending that they, in Olympian detachment, are “judging the facts” when their conclusions (implicit and explicit) belie the actual facts.

What we have to ask ourselves is this: are the reporters from ABC, Politico, et al so STOOPID that they don’t know what’s being pulled? (Hardly.) Or, rather, are they willing participants and collaborators  in what is transparent mendacity and Rovian lies?

We EXPECT the cynical manipulation of OUR civility to barbaric ends, of course. But, inevitably, we give in to Republican bullying tactics, and hide under our bedclothes while we wet our pants (or, panties, in deference to actual working women) in terror.

And it is getting OLD, people.

This entire phony controversy has been ginned up to distract from the irrefutable FACT that there IS a war on women, and four more bills were signed in Arizona and Wisconsin just this week, in case you were needing an exclamation point to drive it home.

But the soulless vampyres of the GOP/Romney Etch-a-Sketch machine know that merely gainsaying naked facts creates a false controversy, and, ultimately, reality — in the minds of the viewers of the swill that CNN, ABC, Fox, et al, ad nauseum produce like pink slime as a political additive to their rhetorical scheiss-burgers.

The Achilles heel of the Romney (or is that the Romany?) campaign is the Truth.

The Achilles heel of the rest of us, seemingly, is the Lie.

It’s really as simple as that.

I just want to see somebody have Hilary Rosen’s back,  and somebody challenge Ann Romney’s affront.

She IS a part of this campaign, and, having made herself a public figure, is undeserving of any special benefit or protection. She has to face the same political ugliness that the Obamas have (where are the cries of wounded womanhood when Michelle Obama is called “The Mooch” and derided as a mad spendthrift, behaving as Marie Antoinette in the midst of this horrible Recession?), that Hillary Clinton has, that every other man and woman in the political arena must face.

The “iron maiden” of the Romney Campaign

But, such would be sane.

And again, the Morlocks have shamed the Eloi, even as they feast on their warm, tender flesh.

Get a grip America, before we truly become Amerika.

A man who will say anything to get into office will do anything once IN office.

Or haven’t you been paying attention.

You spoke correctly, Hilary Rosen, and I do not accept your apology.

Because you had nothing to apologize for.

The truth is the truth: Ann Romney has never done an honest day’s work in her life. Vee-jay-jays and output  excluded.

Pity the poor multi-millionairess?

In a pig’s eye.

Courage.

=============

Personal note: Today marks my 28th year back from Boulder. Happy Rebirthday.

Healthcare reform will be decided by the justices of the Supreme Court, particularly Chief Justice Roberts and his conservative allies.

With at least much of the Supreme Court’s conservative bloc “spoken for,” a pair of Democratic strategists say that they are not as optimistic as perhaps the Obama administration appears to be that the healthcare reform law will survive this week’s legal challenge at the high court.

Oral arguments began this week at the high court in a number of cases brought against the landmark two-year-old law. The court could rule for or against all or part of healthcare reform as early as June.

“Conservatives have made national health care a partisan issue because it was such a signal accomplishment by President Obama,” says a statement issued Monday by Robert Weiner, former senior White House spokesman, and national Democratic strategist; and Richard Mann, senior policy analyst at Robert Weiner Associates. “An overriding national need for health care can be determined as part of the Constitution’s ‘general welfare’ clause and Congress’ right to legislate funding.”

Weiner and and Mann note the existing rightward tilt of the court.

“Most of the conservative bloc — Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas — could be called ‘spoken for,’” they say.

Even Justice Anthony Kennedy, who once had been a “swing vote” on the court, has increasingly sided with the court’s right, they add.

Much of the issue with the reform law is its individual mandate provision, which says that starting in 2014 nearly all Americans will have to have some form of health insurance, or face paying a penalty.

“The whole law is at stake. Striking down all or part of it would take benefits away from people, but far more is at risk with a total overturn,” Weiner and Mann contend. “Without the mandate, the law could continue to cover citizens with pre-existing conditions, allow children to stay on their parents’ insurance until age 26, block lifetime benefit caps and expand Medicaid.

“Howard Dean, a physician and former Democratic Chairman, has said that the mandate is only 4 percent of the law.” Weiner and Mann add. “While the mandate helps pay for the other provisions, the health insurance companies are making hundreds of billions in profit, continually increase premiums anyway, and can and should absorb the cost of actually providing health care.”

Blocking Benefits Americans Already See?

Still, Weiner and Mann say it is “hard to imagine” the court blocking those reform benefits already underway:

•Children’s care through age 26 (2 1/2 million have already received);
•Cheaper and free drugs for 45 million seniors
•Pre-existing conditions coverage
•No lifetime coverage caps
•No being thrown off insurance if Americans become sick;
•Free prevention including mammograms and colonoscopies
•Overseeing insurance companies’ premiums and assure 85 percent go to people’s benefits
•Saving $200 billion hospital costs from previously uninsured people formerly costing all premium-payers $1,000 — the lack of insurance made millions of Americans die sooner;

They say that “the Administration seems oddly confident that the Supreme Court will take its side on the mandate and the rest of the law. Don’t bet the farm.”

They point to the Justice Department statement that “there have been similar challenges to other landmark legislation, such as the Social Security Act, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and all of those challenges failed,” and the department’s assertion, “We believe the challenges to the Affordable Care Act will also ultimately fail and that the Supreme Court will uphold the law.”

Scott Nance is the editor and publisher of the news site The Washington Current. He has covered Congress and the federal government for more than a decade.