Over at The Other McCain, Stacy McCain quotes a friend of his, Chris Moody and Moody’s interview with Herman Cain:

After a few caffeine-heavy refills at our corner table, I asked him about President Obama’s new effort to raise taxes on the wealthy, and Cain just about blew a blood vessel–especially when I mentioned the part where Obama says it’s about “math” not “class warfare.”

“Can I be blunt? That’s a lie,” Cain said, before the sound of his voice began to rise noticeably higher. “You’re not supposed to call the president a liar. Well if you’re not supposed to call the president a liar, he shouldn’t tell a lie. If it’s not class warfare, it’s highway robbery. He wants us to believe it’s not class warfare, oh okay, it’s not class warfare. Pick my pockets, because that’s what he’s doing!”

Cain paused, took a breath and looked at me.

“I’m not mad at you, I just get passionate about this stuff,” he said. “I have to tell people because I get so worked up . . . . I’m listening to all this bullshit that he’s talking about, ‘fairness’ and ‘balanced approach’ to get this economy going.”

Cain is expressing a frustration that I, and many like me, share. I am sick of the parsing of words, the political euphemisms and the outright lies coming from our political class. Carol Platt Liebau zeroed in on this intellectual dishonesty when she wrote,

“And just know that when the President invokes “revenue enhancement” and “shared sacrifices” and “a balanced approach” and “making spending reductions in the tax code,” he’s trying to make his single-minded obsession with tax increases more palatable to a government-weary, overtaxed electorate”

We have this dishonesty going all the way back to Nixon’s “plausible deniability”. It continued with Clinton’s “it depends on what the definition of “is” is” to the current iteration of Obama and his minions shoveling loads of horse manure about some mythic “recovery” and jobs that were “saved or created”. As we now know, Obama lied about almost every aspect of the health care bill from “you can keep your current plan” and it will “bend the cost curve” to “nobody but your doctor will see your records”, yet when Representative Joe Wilson gave voice to what many were thinking, he was summarily vilified.

In this contemporary age, political positions and elected offices are the only jobs on the face of the Earth obtained and held by talking about them rather than doing the actual job. Obama is getting prepared to spend a billion dollars to convince America that he has done something – anything- to improve the country when the real evidence of that is as scarce as hen’s teeth.

One wonders that if politicians would actually do what they claim to do, that they would demonstrably achieve stated goals, would there would be little need for campaigns?

Of course, I can’t speak for all but I do think that most Americans are tired of the “are too, am not” political argument. What we have now isn’t debate, it is a food fight. With any given issue, there are as many politicians spinning faster than a child’s top as there are those doing imitations of Chicken Little. In a basic bit of common decency, isn’t it incumbent on our leadership to be honest with us and stop the lying? When we get to the point that an outright lie told by a president is defined as “over suggesting”, we have simply gone too far.

This idiocy serves only to divide us…to keep us fighting and apart. How many instances have we all seen where there seems that there can never be any agreement – and that disagreement starts with the argument over the problem? How can we ever hope to move forward if we don’t even understand the obstacles ahead?

In an excerpt from his great post today, Why Does the Good Life End?, at his blog, Works and Days, Victor Davis Hanson provides insight to the questions that are at the core of our contemporary challenges. I know that it goes without saying but read it all, it is worth it.

Unreality is an especially disturbing symptom. When Jimmy Hoffa threatens the non-unionists, one imagines that Detroit is building better, safer, more reliable cars at a better price and has for decades. When Barack Obama urges the Black Caucus to march for equality, and adopts the cadences and pose of a 1960 civil rights leader, one would think the right wing in Florida just picked Bull Connor, not Herman Cain, as their straw poll winner. When the third-generation, hip spokesman for La Raza talks about inequality, one would think she herself just crossed the border from Oaxaca, forced to flee a benevolent Mexico to work in the pits of an American Mordor.

Hanson illustrates the hyperbolic reasoning of every hysterical “activist”, how every “subjugated class” presumes to claim their little slice of the pie due to some presumed “wrong” done to them by someone, somewhere, at some point in the revisionist version of their history. I always marvel at both the “reparations” crowd wailing about slavery like only American blacks were subject to that reprehensible institution and the multitud enojada (angry mob) of La Raza claiming that the Southwest is really “Azteca” – their “ownership” probably would come as a great surprise to the Apache, Comanche, Havasupai, Hopi, Jemez, Kiowa, Kiowa Apache, Lipan, Maricopa, Mohave, Navaho, Paiute, Papago, Panamint, Pecos, Pima, Pueblo, Shoshoni, Sobaipuri, Tewa Pueblos, Ute, Walapai, Yavapai, Yuma and Zuñi and the Anasazi, who predated all of them.

Just like the unfounded slurs of “racism” so casually thrown at the Tea Party these days, with each illegitimate claim the true wrongs of history are diminished.

Hanson continues:

We all know what will save us and what is destroying us. But the trick is to see how the two will collide. A new tax code, simple rates, few deductions, everybody pays something; new entitlement reform, less benefits, later retirement; a smaller government, a larger private sector; a different popular culture that honors character rather than excess — all that is not, and yet is, impossible to envision. It will only transpire when the cries of the self-interested anguished are ignored. My expectation is that soon that the affluent of suddenly rich China and India will come down with the Western disease that we see endemically in Europe and among our own, even as America snaps out of it, and recommits itself to self-reliance and wealth creation. But when I look at 18th-century Venice, or 1950s Britain, or France in 1935, or 3rd-century Athens, or 5th-century AD Rome, I am worried. I don’t think we wish to live in a quiet but collapsed Greece in the age of Plutarch, forever dreaming about a far off age of past accomplishment.

Hanson is dead solid accurate when he writes that the resolution to our issues “…will only transpire when the cries of the self-interested anguished are ignored.”

To use Herman Cain’s indelicate terminology, it is time to rid Washington of the bullshit…that’s the only “shovel ready” recovery project that matters.