True Lies: The best recent memoir from Republican Washington is a hoax.

[Fumesucker]

That should tell you something.

http://washingtonmonthly.com/features/2009/0911.green.html

The 2008 presidential election will be remembered for a lot of things, but moments of levity aren’t one of them. The highlight may have come in the days just after Obama’s victory, when bitter McCain staffers launched a torrent of anonymous criticism at Sarah Palin that painted her as selfish, venal, arrogant, and, above all, criminally stupid. For many of us, what erased the last shred of doubt about Palin—what seared in our cerebral cortex the unshakable conviction that Tina Fey was channeling the real person—was a Fox News report in which anonymous McCain staffers revealed that Palin had thought Africa was a country.

Not long afterward, a McCain staffer named Martin Eisenstadt came forward to take responsibility for leaking the Africa stuff. At first blush, Eisenstadt seemed exactly the sort you’d expect to cruelly betray his candidate: a vaguely familiar, middle-tier neocon hack affiliated with an outfit called the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy—a guy whose natural place in the universe is on the third block of Hardball, his command of the latest GOP talking points and lapel-pin flag both obnoxiously on display. That was enough for MSNBC, the Los Angeles Times, and a host of other media outlets to run with the story that the culprit had been found.

The only trouble was that Martin Eisenstadt was not a McCain adviser or even a real person. He was a hoax perpetrated by two filmmakers, Dan Mirvish and Eitan Gorlin (who played Eisenstadt on television). The Harding Institute didn’t exist, nor did the Eisenstadt Group political consulting firm, though phony evidence of both can be found online. It was all an elaborate ruse that worked to perfection. The media made the obligatory hiccup of remorse and hurried on. But the hoax was worth savoring because it was funny on so many levels. Not only did it embarrass a facile media—which is not, let’s be honest, like putting a man on the moon—but it slyly mocked American political culture in a way that barely registered. The joke was not that an imposter could infiltrate cable news for as long as Martin Eisenstadt did. It was that our entire system of politics has become so mindlessly rote, and campaigns such stage-managed shams, that it didn’t really matter whether the guy spouting talking points on Hardball was the real deal or a fraud. Both said exactly the same thing.

<snip>

As he zigzags between campaigns, ticking off his colleagues’ indiscretions and settling imaginary scores, Eisenstadt spins his own yarn in an attempt to explain how he mistakenly came to be thought of as a hoax. Here, the plot gets a bit zany and hard to follow because Eisenstadt weaves together outrageous and clearly fabricated anecdotes that usually involve notable Beltway personages—binge-drinking with Donna Brazile, for instance—with footnoted links to actual YouTube videos in which he appears and blog posts from real bloggers who got taken in. The book drags when it detours into descriptions of blog fights, which overwhelm the authors’ considerable comedic talents (and demonstrate once again why bloggers—even fake ones—need editors). But this is a minor gripe. The real business here is tweaking the bizarre culture of Republican Washington since Nixon, and a phony consultant turns out to be a good vehicle for the job.

<snip>

More at the link..

[leveymg]

1. Is anyone who they seem in Washington?

This is a great warning for anyone who takes the fun and games in DC too seriously, particularly the self-important talking heads on Hardball. Particularly the transparent blockhead who runs the show.

[Fumesucker]

2. Being who you seem to be is not a prudent thing in a town like DC..

Your vulnerabilities are more easily gauged the less deception you use, the best thing is to squirt ink all around like an octopus and take advantage of the resulting confusion.

[leveymg]

3. Unless, of course, you have nothing to hide. In which case, their servers commit

more and more resources to find the "real" you, the system parses into an infinite Boolean loop, ultimately crashing at the first anomaly.

Remember the last question posed by Number Six in the 17th, and final, episode of the original "Prisoner" series: "Why?"

Of course, reality is never so clean and simple or easy to escape. It just keeps blundering along until something bigger blunders it into extinction.

[Fumesucker]

4. Everybody's got something to hide..

Except for me and my monkey.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBOUZT_5ODc

[Gabi Hayes]

5. this isn't new, btw

those guys were unveiled like a year ago, weren't they?

[eppur_se_muova]

6. The Harding Institute?

I wondered what she was up to these days.