Matt Taibbi has latched onto the very same section of Mitt Romney's speech that irritated me so much (as evidenced by a previous post or two).

The line that astonished me most from Mitt's speech was this one, where he talked about the changes Americans "deserved" and should have gotten during Obama's presidency:

You deserved it because you worked harder than ever before during these years.  You deserved it because, when it cost more to fill up your car, you cut out moving lights, and put in longer hours.  Or when you lost that job that paid $22.50 an hour, benefits, you took two jobs at $9 an hour…

Are you kidding? Mitt Romney was the guy that fired you from that $22.50 an hour job, and helped you replace it with two $9 an hour jobs! He was a pioneer in the area of eliminating the well-paying job with benefits and replacing it with the McJob that offered no benefits at all. One of the things that killed him in the Senate race against Ted Kennedy were Kennedy ads that reminded voters that Mitt's takeovers resulted in slashed wages and lost benefits. He was exactly the guy that eliminated that classic $22.50 manufacturing job, like in the case of GST Steel, where Bain took over with an initial investment of $8 million, paid itself a $36 million dividend, ended up walking away with $50 million, and left GST saddled with over $500 million in debt. 750 of those well-paying jobs were lost.

What kinds of jobs were left for those fired workers to look for? Well, in the best-case scenario, you might have found one at Ampad, another Bain takeover target, where workers had their pay slashed from $10.22 to $7.88 an hour, tripled co-pays, and eliminated the retirement plan.

So a guy who eliminated hundreds of $22 an hour jobs and slashed hundreds more jobs to below $9 an hour blasts Barack Obama for not giving you the better life you deserved, after you lost your $22/hour job and had to take two $9/hour jobs. Are we all high or something? Did that really just happen?

Are there people out there who really think that the best way to earn more money is to vote for the guy who fired you?

Yep. These are the same people who (as Taibbi notes) sit in their wheelchairs -- purchased by Medicare -- while applauding a conservative ideologue who denounces entitlements.

Such people spend their days wandering in a miasma of cognitive dissonance. Salon's Irin Carmon describes their altered state of consciouness in a dispatch from the Republican National Convention. Carmon describes her encounters with Republican women who have surprising views on contraception:

I was surprised to hear her use the phrase “reproductive rights,” which I’d never heard a conservative use. Berden blamed it on seeing Sandra Fluke on TV all the time, volunteering with a chuckle, “She’s a grown woman, we shouldn’t have to pay for her stupid birth control. She could cross her legs.”

“To be fair,” I replied, with some hesitation, “she never talked about herself. She talked about her friend who was raped, she talked about her friend who had a medical condition...”

“She did so,” Berden persisted. “She said that she couldn’t afford as a student to pay for birth control. She said that. I heard her.”

She didn’t. That was what Rush Limbaugh said she said, though.

These people are so devoted to Limbaugh that they consider his bizarre version of Fluke's testimony more believable than an actual transcript of what she said.

These are the same people now flocking to see an anti-Obama movie by (and, I've heard, largely about) Dinesh D’Souza, the guy who wrote The Roots of Obama's Rage. Anyone who can put the words "rage" and "Obama" in the same sentence has more imagination than you'll find in a room full of science fiction writers.

Incidentally, you may enjoy watching Bill Maher skewer D'Souza. D'Souza tries to convince the audience that Obama's health care plan was -- get this! -- completely liberal, completely one-sided, and completely devoid of compromise. Christ, is that guy serious? That whole thing reeked of compromise. That was precisely the reason why people like me became so infuriated: Before negotiations even started, Obama compromised away the true liberal position -- i.e., single payer, the choice of more than half the population at the time.

In the afore-linked video clip, Maher heroically puts D'Souza in his place. We must follow his example. The kind of cognitive dissonance which is the theme of this post can be dispelled only if we tell both the deceivers and the deceived that they will no longer get a free pass. We have to call the shit-spewers on their shit each and every time, even at the risk of being considered rude or unpleasant.

(And anyone -- anyone -- who pipes up with "Maher is a mean old sexist!" will find his or her comment deleted on sight. Now and forevermore. No exceptions. Understood?)