“But if I vote for Nader,” I said, “and Bush wins, I’ll never forgive myself.” I leaned my head against John’s shoulder. His hoodie smelled like oregano.

“You have to be brave to make change,” he said. “If we want better options, we have to demand them.”

I looked up at John. He’d recently bleached his hair, and the newly yellow spikes stuck out like fresh hay from his forehead. “Maybe,” I said and kissed him on the cheek. Later that night, alone in my dorm, I cast my vote and sealed the envelope. I agreed with John’s critique of the two-party system, but I wanted my vote to be more than symbolic. I wanted to be on the side of the winner.

 ***

I now teach freshmen at Xavier University, a historically black college in New Orleans, and though the class I teach is English, we spent a good portion of last semester sidetracked by politics. For the majority of my students, the 2012 presidential election was the first time they got to go to the polls. After each debate, we discussed the candidates. Romney used sentimentality more than Obama. Obama preferred statistics and numbers, logic. We compared Romney’s smile and Obama’s smile. “Why can’t Obama just get angry?” I asked.

Because then he’d be an angry black man, my students told me. Nobody listens to angry black men.

Most of the time when I teach, I’m the only Caucasian in the room. My students and I laugh often at what our different perspectives have taught us.

We talk about early voting and local amendments and voter suppression and mail-in ballots and the Electoral College. “If that’s how it works,” a young woman asked, “then why should I vote? If my state’s going to go red anyway, what’s the point?”

 ***

On December 12, 2000, the Supreme Court declared in a 7–2 vote that a recount of Florida’s ballots was unconstitutional, and though he lost the popular vote, George W. Bush was declared the president-elect based on the Electoral College. Afterward, independent organizations including the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago examined Florida’s ballots and concluded that the results would’ve been reversed had a reliable and uniform system of counting been employed.

At 2:00 am on January 20, John and I boarded a bus from Poughkeepsie, New York, to Washington, DC, to attend Bush’s inauguration. In the streets of our nation’s capital, a man dressed in black climbed a streetlight and chanted democracy-themed rhymes. Six young men lifted a parked Mazda and moved it into the street. Women dressed as caribou banged plastic buckets with spoons. Babies cried. John and I held hands and ran. Cold winds whipped frozen rain into our eyes. We’d become part of a pack. Our animal selves stampeded through caution tape, climbed fences, jumped on car bumpers. At one point, I looked to my left and saw my former Sunday-school teacher shoving aside a plastic barricade, howling obscenities at the sky. His face twisted in anger. Cops were everywhere. We were playing capture the flag for our nation’s future, and for a split second, we were having so much fun, we thought we were winning.

In the afternoon, we left the running mob and ducked into a diner for warmth and cheap lunch. We barely had enough change between us for a shared hot drink. In the distance, women in fur coats and men in ten-gallon hats gathered to applaud our new president. Refueled and slightly less frozen, we shuffled and shoved our way onto some metal bleachers. The motorcade inched toward the National Mall. We could see Rudolph Giuliani in a glass box across the street. He looked comfortable behind his safety glass, surrounded by men in suits. When Dubya drove past, we wailed like sirens. The new president stopped waving and rolled up his window. He continued on to the White House.

***

In my classes at Xavier, my students and I pondered potential outcomes for the 2012 election. “There’s a possibility,” I told my students, “that Romney might win the popular vote and Obama, the electoral vote. If this happened, it would be a repeat of the Bush/Gore election, but in reverse.” In 2000, I was furious about the Electoral College. This past October, it was my fallback hope.

 ***

“Two states legalized marijuana,” a student shouted when I got to class the day after the president’s reelection.

“Ganjaaa,” a young woman in pigtails moaned. She put her face in her hands. “They’re going to ruin it.”

The university had hosted a party in the campus ballroom the night before, providing free food while students watched CNN and Fox News—first wings, then Domino’s, then McDonald’s. By the time the president gave his acceptance speech, the students had eaten it all. “Tell me,” I said, “how did you feel as you were watching the results come in?”

Many of my students said they’d felt scared. “If Romney won, I was going to move to Canada,” a student in the front declared. Several of his classmates agreed. “If Romney won,” he added, “this classroom would be empty.”

“I’m so relieved,” someone said. “I get to keep my Pell grant.”

“Who’d you vote for?”

I still hadn’t told them.

***

Before I taught at Xavier, I taught English at the University of Mississippi. My Ole Miss students weren’t that different from my Xavier students. Some were brilliant. Some had trouble with subject-verb agreement. In one class, we watched An Inconvenient Truth. Al Gore scared them. “That guy ran for president?” somebody asked. “I used to think climate change was a scam,” another said. “What can we do?” On the last day of class, I gave each student a cloth bag. “It’s a small gift,” I said. “But now you don’t have to waste plastic.” Many of them promised they’d use it.

***

“Students at my last school rioted last night,” I confessed to my Xavier students toward the end of our election discussion. “I’m so ashamed.”

“What did you expect?” a young woman said. “It’s Mississippi.”

I observed that sentiment a lot when I was scanning the Internet, trying to learn everything I could about the incident. Undergraduates burned an Obama/Biden sign in a central area of campus known as the Circle. Some shouted racial slurs. Some threw rocks at cars. Two people were arrested. Between 300 and 400 students came out for the event, though it’s unclear how many were rioters and how many were there to witness the commotion. In the comments section below these articles, no one seemed surprised: “What do you expect from the state with the lowest literacy rate and the fattest population?”

When racism occurs in Mississippi, no one’s surprised. “We’re always getting accused,” my Ole Miss students used to complain.

“Why do you think that is?” I’d ask them.

During my four years at Ole Miss, white frat boys threw beers at a black student who tried to attend their party and students dressed in black face on Halloween. Undergrads and alums agitated to reinstate Colonel Reb, a beady-eyed man reminiscent of a plantation owner, as the school mascot. “It’s about keeping up traditions,” they claimed. And fans rose at each and every football game to chant, “The South will rise again!”

Two days after the riot, someone scratched KKK into the hood of black student’s truck and etched Go Home N—- onto the side. The stereo had been stolen and the radio antenna broken off.

 ***

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “The loss of a white majority has helped drive a truly explosive growth of the radical right.” Hate groups are on the rise throughout the country, and with them, the likelihood of racial violence. Ta-Nehisi Coates, senior editor at the Atlantic, recently observed, “The election of an African American to our highest political office was alleged to demonstrate a triumph of integration.” Instead, Obama’s presidency has “demonstrated integration’s great limitation—that acceptance depends not just on being twice as good but on being half as black.” The president’s near silence on the topic of race is both the proof and the consequence of this double standard. Even so, commentators have compared Obama’s presidency, and the consequent white backlash, to the end of Reconstruction, an era when hope for racial justice was replaced by the implementation of Jim Crow laws, widespread lynchings, and economic disparity.

 ***

“My mom suggested that I apply for law school at Ole Miss,” a Xavier student tells me. We’re talking about the riots, again. “’Listen to yourself,’ I said to her. ‘Why would I go there?’”

“We’ve had forty-three white presidents,” a young man points out, “and everyone gets angry when we finally elect a black one?”

“I only experienced racism once,” another woman says, “when I was a child. I was in line at the grocery store. I didn’t understand what was happening.”

My class erupts with stories. “The kids at my high school made fun of my skin.”

“There are counties in Kentucky no black person will drive through.”

“Six white girls beat up my cousin, and she was the one who got in trouble for defending herself.”

“A cashier at the grocery store accused me of stealing when I was holding my grandmother’s purse.”

“My father got pulled over for having tinted windows. I know the cop who did it—his son has tinted windows.”

“The park in my town locks up their basketball courts only one day a week—the day that my church has always had our picnic.”

“I’m starting to get emotional.”

“It makes me so angry.”

“We can’t even defend ourselves.”

“Nobody’s born hating anyone. Someone taught those kids to be that way.”

 ***

2012 marks fifty years since James Meredith integrated Ole Miss. In 1962, white students and anti-integrationists rioted in the Circle, the very same space where an Obama poster flared on election night. In order to navigate the rioters at Ole Miss, Meredith was accompanied by 500 U.S. Marshals, the 70th Army Engineer Combat Battalion from Kentucky, the U.S. Army Military Police, the Mississippi Army National Guard, and the members of the U.S. Border Patrol. Two people died in the ensuing violence, and 160 U.S. Marshals were injured. If you take a tour of the campus, the guide will show you the bullet holes in the Lyceum columns, markers of a clash that is supposed to be long over. “This year, we voted for our first black homecoming queen,” your guide will likely say. “Her name is Courtney Pearson. Perhaps, you saw her on TV.”

***

Words come easy when you’re angry. I had no difficulty yelling at President Bush when I was eighteen and felt my vote had been steamrolled. I didn’t want to be arrested, but I decided that if I was, I had nothing to be ashamed of. I’d be on the correct side of history. I’d be exercising my First Amendment rights. These were easy conclusions for me to come to. I was white. I grew up in the suburbs. At that time, no one I knew had ever been to jail. Prison, to me, was a concept. I wanted to be heroic.

“There’s pleasure,” a colleague of mine observed, “in indignation, but not every one chooses to express it.” As a first-time voter, I’d felt a strange joy when Gore lost and I got to declare that I’d been disenfranchised, ignored. For once, my anger felt important. The anti-Obama rioters, no doubt, felt similarly. Indignation clicks on in moments of perceived injustice. Unchecked, it rolls quickly out of control, gaining momentum at the expense of perspective.

***

In response to the riots, students, faculty, and alumni at Ole Miss gathered the following evening in the Circle to “redeem the meaning of ‘Mississippi’ and, through that redemption, to claim the promise of America.” They came together to affirm by candlelight that they were better than their reputation. An anonymous person wrote on We Are All Mississippians, a brand new webpage, “The heart of democracy is embodied in the First Amendment. We support the rights of individuals to be fearful and to express their hatred, but we also know that such expressions demand [us] to affirm our values, of love, of peace, of justice. And we must go to the source of the pain, not run from it. It cannot be healed in darkness and silence.”

 ***

It’s easy to get caught up in the sport of politics—picking sides, scoring debates, cheering on favorite players. But like any game, democracy requires good sportsmanship. Just because you play, doesn’t mean you’ll win. Being blue in a red state, as I am, or red in a blue country, as many Ole Miss students are, is a discourse to be undertaken with dignity. Our country is only as good as our dialogue. 

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It was clear to him that he needed to project empathy, and a genuine concern for the “middle class,” and he did so relentlessly.

2.  The frantic “all the pressure’s on Mitt!” narrative was complete bullshit.

Romney had acquired such an awful reputation by Wednesday night that most viewers half expected him to pull an impoverished infant from beneath his podium and consume it onstage. He was supposed to be awkward, disingenuous, and snide. This made his performance striking: he played against type. Give Romney credit, here: he recognized that the “debate” was a piece of theater. He knew that his target audience was independent, low-information voters and he presented himself to them as an earnest moderate who just wanted to rouse the country from its torpor.

3. The absence of moral and factual oversight benefits the guy with the smaller conscience.

To come off as moderate, Romney had to lie. He had to say that his tax plan doesn’t cut taxes for rich guys and doesn’t cost five-trillion dollars. He had to promise that he’ll keep the Affordable Care Act’s most popular provisions, and that he’ll eliminate only the bad regulations on Wall Street. These claims are demonstrably false.

But because there is no mechanism in place to punish candidates for lying—a moderator empowered to correct them, say, or a Fourth Estate willing to treat veracity the central measure of an argument’s merit—he got away with it.

4. Obama was not inept; he was just himself.

Within a minute of the debate’s conclusion, the Arbitron zombies on CNN had managed to describe Obama as “listless” and “angry.” He didn’t want to be there. Blah-blah-blah.

But Obama played to type. He’s a ruminative guy who can summon rhetorical grandeur when he has time to prepare a speech. But he lacks the ability, or willingness, to speak with moral force in live settings. His intellect hasn’t been honed into bullet points by a thousand business presentations. He’s not especially articulate, or forceful. He refuses to call someone who is lying to his face a liar.

To put it in literary terms: he’s a lousy narrator. He can’t spontaneously locate heroism or villainy. He’s a text book, not a novel.

5. The voters don’t want a text book this year.

Last time around, the economy was hemorrhaging. (Or at least the press was hemorrhaging about the economy, which may be the same thing.) Obama’s thoughtful reserve was seen as a virtue, especially weighed against the doddering histrionics of John McCain and his soap opera co-star. As a fiscal strategy, the GOP playbook of soaking the rich and deregulating industry was failing before the public’s eyes.

But four years is a long time in a nation as distracted as America. The recovery has been slow. The systematic economic inequalities initiated by Ronald Reagan and enthusiastically supported by every Republican since (aside from Mitt Romney, who is, as of last night, a compassionate conservative, just like George W. Bush) has left most Americans in a state of impatient grievance.

6. Reality is harder to defend than fantasy.

Obama isn’t just running for office. He’s in office. He has to make decisions, not just promises. He has a record. Whatever problems the country has—whether he caused them or not—they officially belong to him. It doesn’t matter that he took over an economy in free fall, or that Republicans have obstructed him at every turn. To the voters just tuning in, Romney only has to make the case that America is still sick, and that he has the right medicine.

So how’s that for irony? Mitt Romney: the hope and change candidate.

7. Obama will lose if he doesn’t step up.

There’s an old saying in poker: lose early, win late. The GOP ticket has mostly lost thus far. They have been mocked and dismissed and excoriated. This makes Romney’s reinvention that much more compelling: it’s an unexpected wrinkle, a comeback story. The media will spend far more time focused on this notion than whether Romney was telling the truth, because these races are, in the end, major products launches for them. A dirty race is desirable, in fact, just so long as it’s close.

But hey, newsflash: this thing is close. And it’s going to get closer.

The President can no longer afford to sit back and let Team Romney trip over its wingtips. He’s going to have to sharpen his rhetoric. He’s going to have to become a more compelling narrator.

Mitt Romney is no dope. He’s got half a billion dollars to make his case, and some of the most despicable ad men in the business.

Obama knows what he’s up against now.

Do you?

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“This embedded idea, that there was something liberating in the elimination of risk, led Stevens to write approvingly in that company journal of social insurance in Italy, Germany, and England. For Stevens, these policies embodied the ideal that in order to imagine the better world, you needed to have some semblance of a foothold.”

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The response has varied. Fact checkers Politifact and the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler have called this attack what it is–a lie. That’s unusual for a press corps which generally prefers to act as if there are always two equally valid sides to a story, even when there really aren’t.

In the past, a political campaign caught promoting such obvious falsehoods would pull the ads, maybe retool them so as to be just vague enough to let the fact checkers be willing to say they pass the Candid Camera “take seven steps back, turn around and look at it through your legs” test. Not so with the Romney campaign. Even after President Clinton dismantled the welfare argument at the Democratic Convention Wednesday night, the Romney campaign doubled down on the attack according to Talking Points Memo. The Romney campaign is indeed holding to their promise that they were “not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.”

That last statement from Romney pollster Neil Newhouse was greeted online with gasps and incredulity back on August 28, but my reaction was more “sounds about right.” Because we’ve been building to this moment for a long time.

It was bound to happen because there’s no longer any downside for a Republican candidate to be called a liar by what Fox News viewers and Dittoheads call the “liberal media.” In fact, Republican candidates called out by anyone other than Fox News or right-wing talk radio wear the accusation like a badge of honor. It wouldn’t surprise me if, by the end of this election cycle, the Romney campaign ran ads directly attacking MSNBC, CNN and the New York Times, casting them as biased enemies of conservatism and, by extension, America.

This has been going on for a long time–Pat Buchanan has been complaining about the liberal media for as long as I’ve been alive. Eric Alterman, in his book What Liberal Media? called this “working the refs,” i.e. getting reporters and editors to feel like they had to provide a “balance” of opposing viewpoints in their stories, even when a story was straightforward and clear.

The world that Fox News is reporting on (and I use the term loosely) is not the world that other media outlets are reporting on. I am not saying here that Fox News’s competition is always correct or even that they commit quality acts of journalism every day, but they are, more or less, reporting on the world as it exists. Fox News does not, and has not for a while now. This is not an issue of quality control, of poor executive oversight. This is by design. Fox News seeks to create a new reality, and they are succeeding.

Fox News’s audience may be notoriously uninformed about current events, but they’re incredibly well-informed on Republican talking points, especially the inaccurate ones. And because Fox News, along with their allies in talk radio, have convinced their audience that everyone else is biased and suspect, no amount of fact-checking, no amount of evidence, can shake their belief in those talking points.

During the George W. Bush administration, Fox News was doing the same thing they’re doing now, but then they had a little help. The rest of the corporate media saw Fox News’s ratings climb and sought to emulate it. Thus, during the run up to the Iraq War, MSNBC (now considered a bastion of liberal news) cancelled their highest rated show, hosted by Phil Donahue, and then briefly experimented with a Saturday show starring the mostly rabid Michael Savage. The New York Times “reported” on the Bush administration’s case for war with all the credulity of a three year old being told the story of Santa Claus. Almost everyone wanted to capture that demographic.

But Fox News viewers are loyal, and while other cable networks have floundered for an identity, Fox News has strengthened its hold on the minds and hearts of its audience. It’s akin to the fervor evangelists feel for their pastors; this audience has faith in what they hear. They believe.

That’s why the Romney campaign has been so open about their disdain for fact checkers. They can afford to be. They know that their base will never hear about the falsehoods, and even if they do, will dismiss them as lies of the liberal left, of the “lamestream media” as Sarah Palin refers to them.

But what about the independent voters? you ask. Two things: one, they’re an increasingly small part of the voting public. There may be roughly a third of the populace which identifies as independent, but their voting habits lean strongly to one party or another. There’s maybe 3% of the populace that’s really up for grabs, and perhaps the Romney campaign feels they’re low information voters who can be won over by the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of ads that will grace the screens of televisions in swing states over the next two months.

But more likely the Romney campaign thinks the independents don’t matter, that they can win this with their base turnout, that their captive audience will show up in such numbers that it won’t matter what whoppers they tell in ads or on the campaign trail. It’s an incredibly cynical strategy.

It was also inevitable.

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Nonetheless, I want you guys to please take a few minutes to watch this, if you haven’t already:

It’s the first time in a long while that I’ve seen a television personality confront a political operative in such blunt terms at the level of his sin.

You can tell how unprecedented this event is because of how nervous the other talking heads are. They keep telling Matthews to calm down, to watch his tone. They treat him as if he’s gone crazy. Because, of course, the expression of genuine moral distress has no place on a polite corporate-sponsored television set. The whole point is to sell gourmet coffee, pal, not to save the world.

***

But what Chris Matthews is saying, right there on the teevee, is more crucial to understanding this election than the joyless spasm of propaganda that just concluded in Tampa.

The Republican Party, saddled with a stiff, elitist candidate, unable to run on its wildly unpopular policy ideas, and unwilling even to pretend that it cares about the concerns of minority voters, has gone racist.

They’ve crunched the numbers and concluded that the only way to win in November is to drive up the white turnout. And that the best way to do this is to remind white voters that Obama is not white, and that deep down he means to rip them off because that, after all, is what blacks folks do to white people.

***

This helps explain a fact that any sensible political observer should find profoundly mysterious: why Romney’s central line of attack to date has been to assert that Obama dropped the work requirement from welfare.

To begin with, why pursue a claim that has been so widely debunked? But even more curiously: why focus on an obscure issue like welfare reform? Why not attack the sitting president on his jobs record? Or the national debt? Or any of the other issues that American voters say they care about?

The answer, of course, is that Romney doesn’t really want to campaign about “a positive vision for the future” as his doe-eyed veep keeps repeating on the stump. He wants a campaign that will make white voters insecure and angry enough to come out in droves.

This is why the Romney welfare ads have been carefully stocked with hard-working, frustrated-looking Caucasians. The embedded message is simple: Obama is going to take your hard-earned tax dollars and give it to a bunch of his shiftless black pals.

***

Asked about these bogus welfare claims by USA Today, Romney asserted their veracity while offering no facts to substantiate them. It does not appear to have occurred to anyone at USA Today that they might fact check the matter.

Instead, the paper allowed Romney to suggest that Obama had stripped the work requirement from welfare, which he didn’t do, in an attempt to “shore up his base” for the election. Because, see, the president’s base is welfare recipients. Or, as they are commonly known, black folk.

USA Today: an awesome newspaper, and not at all a dumb tool of propaganda!

The president of the Republican super PAC American Crossroads, Steven Law, put it like this: “You can tell [the ads] are landing punches.”

***

Lee Atwater, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, interviewed by the author Alexander Lamis back in 1981, put it like this:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

***

I’m not sure I have to mention that Mitt Romney is the first candidate ever to register zero percent of the African-American vote.

And yet, there is this profound expression of his soul:

***

I’m making a joke, but only because I find all this so heartbreaking. The Republican Party, after all, was founded by anti-slavery activists. It is the party of Lincoln, the party of the Emancipation Proclamation, the party that saw the Union through the Civil War and fought (though not hard enough) for Reconstruction. The founding ideology of the G.O.P. was “free labor, free land, free men.” Its members opposed not just the moral atrocity of slavery, but the notion that plantation owners should be allowed to usurp the best land and leave independent farmers with the dregs.

The party was founded, in other words, on egalitarian principles.

By the dawn of the last century, the G.O.P. had transformed into the party of business, which is a code word for profit. It drove off reformers such as Teddy Roosevelt, and encouraged the financial speculation boom that led to the Wall Street Crash, and the Great Depression.

***

In the second half of the 20th century, Republicans managed to recapture their mojo not by offering a unified vision of the country, but by adopting a strategy to divide the country along racial and economic lines. Richard Nixon was the first candidate to exploit the resentment Southern whites felt at the Civil Rights Movement. He did so using the coded language Atwater notes above.

It has since become a staple of the GOP playbook, from Ronald Reagan’s references to mythical welfare queens to George H.W. Bush’s use of the ominous Willie Horton ad against Michael Dukakis. Racial incitement has migrated into the media ecosystem via the leering innuendo of Fox News coverage, which specializes in ginned up stories of white victimization, from the New Black Panthers to Shirley Sherrod to Obama’s death panels.

The goal isn’t just to rile white voters up, but to make them feel that their own racist impulses are merely reasonable responses to a culture stacked against them.

***

The most despicable and concerted byproduct of this mindset is the effort, launched over the past few years by Republican state legislators, to disenfranchise poor and minority voters. Using fake claims of voter fraud, they have passed laws expressly designed to make it harder for such populations to cast a ballot.

Given the history of this country—the fact that women were granted suffrage less than a century ago, and that minorities were routinely deprived of the right to vote fifty years ago—it is astonishing that our Fourth Estate has been so quiet in the face of this moral regression.

And that we, the people, have been so meek.

***

The sad truth is that for most of us, “politics” is just something we watch on television, a thing to grumble about, to absorb our personal failings and anxieties.

Most of us won’t even see the worst of the racist garbage that Romney will need to get himself elected. It will be aimed squarely at the enclaves of white voters in the swing states he needs to find his 270 electoral votes. Thanks to Citizens United, you can be sure the pitches will be slickly produced and lavishly funded. No one will say the word “lazy” or the word “nigger.” You’ll just hear about “entitlements” and “government spending” and “welfare.”

***

Which brings us back to Chris Matthews and his outburst of conscience. What makes the clip so revelatory is the very real sense of anguish amid the “political experts” flanking Matthews. They’ve become so acquiescent to the GOP’s coded race-baiting tactics that hearing them called out feels scandalous, forbidden. Their panic is that of journalistic quislings forced, at last, to face the depth of their collusion.

As for Reince Priebus, the current chair of the RNC, he is no Lee Atwater. Atwater at least had the guts to tell the truth.

Priebus can only muster the petulant self-pity of a guilty man. He knows the jig’s up, that the monstrous cynicism of his party has led to these ploys. He knows that he’s stuck with a dud candidate and a platform that, if honestly expressed, would appeal to one percent of the American people. He knows that this strategy is nearing its end, that white Americans will soon lose their place as the dominant and unquestioned majority in this country, and become just another electoral faction.

But Priebus also knows that this is just television, just another segment on another morning show. The idea in politics is to win, not to be honest or fair or even far-sighted. So he sits there and he takes it.

He’s got a billion dollars in the bank.

He’ll have his say.

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In response to Mitt Romney’s recalcitrance to release more of his tax returns, Rumpus columnist and author Steve Almond has provided Boston’s NPR affiliate radio station WBUR with his own returns — complete with explanatory notes that give financial transparency a new meaning. To find them, click here.

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BOSTON, Mass. (Rumpus Press) – Seeking to defuse a growing controversy over his involvement with Bain Capital, the leveraged buyout firm he founded, GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney appeared Friday on five network news programs to lie his fucking head off.

In clearly scripted and nearly identical language, Romney claimed he “had no role with regards to Bain Capital after February of 1999”—an effort to evade blame for the company’s subsequent outsourcing and firings.

Multiple filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, list Romney as the company’s “sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president” up until 2002.

In a report submitted to the SEC by Bain on February 20, 2001, for instance, Romney is identified as “sole shareholder, sole director, Chief Executive Officer and President of Bain Capital and thus is the controlling person of Bain Capital.”

Romney, who, unless he is lying, is 65, was not asked to explain how he could be the “sole shareholder, sole director, Chief Executive Officer and President of Bain Capital and thus … the controlling person of Bain Capital” while having “no role” in the company.

But investigative reporters were able to deduce a subtle flaw in Romney’s logic: either the SEC form was fraudulent, which is illegal, or Romney was lying his fucking head off.

Complicating matters are yet more forms, which Romney signed and which also reveal him to be lying. In 2002, for instance, the liar Romney signed a financial disclosure form, under the penalty of perjury, declaring he was not involved “in any way” with Bain after 1999, when he relocated to Salt Lake City to take over the Winter Olympics.

That same year, hoping to prove his residency in Massachusetts so he could run for governor, Romney, or El Mentiroso, as he is known amongst Hispanic activists, testified that “there were a number of social trips and business trips” that brought him back to the Massachusetts from Utah, including “board meetings.”

And back in 1999, presumably long before he planned to run for president, Romney told a reporter from the Boston Herald that he would “stay on as a part-timer with Bain, providing input on investment and key personnel decisions.”

Because it is technically impossible to not be involved with an entity “in any way” while also being a part-time employee of that entity who provides input and attends board meetings, Romney can be said, technically, to be lying and is ergo a liar.

In yet another financial disclosure form, Romney testified that he received more than $100,000 to serve as an “executive” at Bain in 2001 and 2002. It is unclear how much more than $100,000 Romney was paid for being an executive with “no role whatsoever” at Bain, because Romney has refused to release more than one year of his tax returns.

But reporters were able to establish that Romney was either paid for doing nothing, or that he actually did some work for Bain during those years—and is thus lying.

Romney, a liar, has a long and storied history of lying. He once claimed to have watched his father, George Romney, march with civil rights leader Martin Luther King. It was later revealed that the senior Romney, who was not, like his son, a prodigious liar, had never marched with King.

At six-feet-two-inches tall, Romney is not only one of history’s tallest presidential candidates, but arguably its most dishonest. He has repeatedly lied about his opponent, asserting that Barack Obama “did not cause the recession, but he made it worse.”

When a reporter from NBC news asked Romney about this claim, noting that virtually every economic indicator, from unemployment to GDP growth to stock prices, has improved under Obama, Romney said, “I didn’t say things were worse. What I said was that the economy hasn’t turned around.”

In other words, when confronted with one of his many lies, Romney, whose real first name is Willard and not Mitt, lied.

Romney also has accused Obama of doubling the deficit, cutting Medicare benefits, raising corporate taxes and failing to make trade deals – all of which are demonstrably false statements. He has lied about the budgetary effect of the President’s health care reform, claiming it will add a trillion dollars to the deficit, when, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, it will in fact reduce the deficit.

Romney also has lied about his evolving policy positions, such as his regard for Ronald Reagan, his willingness to sign a no-tax pledge, and his views on global warming. As governor of Massachusetts, he said, “I respect and will protect a woman’s right to choose.” What he meant by this, as he explained recently, is, “I never really called myself pro-choice,” which is, somewhat predictably, a lie.

Like many habitual liars, Romney has endured occasional disastrous forays into veracity. In January, he told an audience he was “not concerned about the very poor.” The following month, in an attempt to curry favor with voters in Michigan, where many people are poor, he mentioned that his wife, Ann, “drives a couple of Cadillacs.” He also told a heckler that “corporations are people, my friend.” The heckler, it was later learned, was not his friend.

Romney, whose faith of Mormonism includes a practice known as “lying for the Lord,” has also told audiences that his favorite foods are hotdogs and meatloaf cakes. There is, as yet, no evidence to suggest that he is lying.

Thus far, Obama and his campaign officials have refrained from pointing out Romney’s pattern of constant lying. His opponents in the Republican primary were not as deferential.

Asked in January whether he thought Romney was a liar, Newt Gingrich replied, “Yes.”

“You’re calling Mitt Romney a liar?” asked a stunned Norah O’Donnell, the network’s chief White House correspondent.

“Well, you seem shocked by it!” said Gingrich. He went on to note that Romney’s staff had created the Political Action Committee that battered Gingrich with negative ads. “His millionaire friends fund the PAC, he pretends he has nothing to do with the PAC – it’s baloney. He’s not telling the American people the truth.”

Romney, who lies virtually every time he speaks in public, has come under increasing pressure, both from liberals and conservatives, to release his tax returns.

To date, he has released only one full tax return, which showed that he paid 13.9 percent on more than $20 million income—the effective rate generally applied to a family making $20,000. The return, which presumably contains no lies, also revealed that Romney has a Swiss bank account, and unexplained investments in known tax havens such as Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.

Romney’s response to these calls for greater financial candor has been to express an understandable concern, given his own patterns of aspersion: “I’m simply not enthusiastic about giving [the Obama campaign] hundreds or thousands of more pages to pick through, distort, and lie about.”

Romney, who is like many liars extremely handsome, may announce his vice presidential pick as soon as this week, in an effort to distract the media from his refusal to release additional tax returns, and his habitual and possibly illegal deceptions regarding his departure from Bain.

It is not yet clear whether Romney will require his running mate to lie as much as he does.

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