Daily Satire

Borowitz Report:

DEBATE VICTORY VALIDATES ROMNEY STRATEGY OF NONSTOP LYING

Posted by Andy Borowitz

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—Taking a victory lap after their candidate’s win in the first Presidential debate Wednesday night, Romney campaign insiders today attributed his success to his strategic use of relentless lying.

“We worked for hours on this during the practice debates,” said the campaign manager Matt Rhoades. “We were, like, ‘Mitt, if you find yourself on the verge of saying something true, bite your tongue.’ ”

Mr. Rhoades said that the nominee was allowed to say his real name and acknowledge that he used to be a Governor, “but other than that, he was on a very short leash, truth-wise.”

Thomas Frank:

THESE are the times that try rich men’s patience. Not because this interminable economic crisis threatens to cost them their fortunes, of course, but rather the reverse: that by humiliating so many others, the slump has exposed the mighty to the horrors of criticism. Yes, sour sounds have reached their ears: recrimination, reproof, ridicule, rebellion!

The people have been thinking about how the economy came to collapse in the first place, of the role that great wealth and the deregulation of the financial industry played. And over the years, the unthinkable has happened. People have started to say mean things about billionaires. Even the president has engaged in the “rhetoric of class warfare.” During Wednesday’s debate, for example, this Danton of the Democrats went so far as to say that businesses shouldn’t get tax breaks for moving jobs overseas and even scoffed at that archetypal small-business man, Donald J. Trump…

The most famous example is the open letter to the president written last year by the hedge fund manager Leon Cooperman and dissected at length in this week’s New Yorker magazine. In it, Mr. Cooperman blames Mr. Obama (and his “minions”) for “setting the tenor of the rancorous debate now roiling us that smacks of what so many have characterized as ‘class warfare.’ ” This is serious, this roiling and this tenor-setting, but it is not the only damage the president’s words have done. The “divisive, polarizing tone of your rhetoric is cleaving a widening gulf,” Mr. Cooperman continued, “between the downtrodden and those best positioned to help them” — meaning, apparently, hedge fund managers like himself…

In the broad scheme of things, these are excellent times to be a billionaire. Labor is powerless. Taxes are low. The banks that survived the crisis are bigger than ever. So why do the well-to-do whine so? Why do they wring their hands?

For one thing, their criticisms reveal a contemptuous view of their fellow citizens. That all the books and articles on the financial crisis and the recession might have had an effect — that people might see the economic downturn as a reflection on the individuals who were, a few years back, lionized as the economy’s leaders — is inconceivable to the class-war complainers. The public’s attitude, they seem to believe, can have arisen only as a result of propagandizing by Mr. Obama. No American would ever stop respecting his betters unless he was brainwashed into it.

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