I'm trying to keep myself from scoreboard watching as UW seems to want to go down at home to a mediocre Purdue team (who shot an inexplicable 65% in the first half. We're gonna lose at home to Purdue? Say it ain't so!)

The Bush administration, as we all know, have have reveled in deception the last seven years. They accused Clinton of tearing up the White House. Lie. Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Still looking. They've also employed what is commonly called "Orwellian language." That is, calling something one thing when it is really it's opposite. For example, The Clean Sky Act actually rolled back environment protection. The No Child Left Behind Act will result in public schools receiving funding <i>cuts</i>, not increases. The media, acting as much as an enable as possible, has never said a thing about these bizarre occurrences, and, in fact, never says a bad thing about Bush, despite his lying and just plain being wrong about almost everything. Yet, members of his administration receive high paying media jobs despite constant falsehoods or, to be overly generous, mistakes. The reactions to these nincompoops are far, far different than those of the common mistake-maker slash liar. They continue to be paid.

In the world of sports, this week, there <a href="http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/columns/story?columnist=wojciechowski_gene&id=3236039"><u>was a story</u></a> of a kid who told his high school coach, his parents, and the local newspaper that he was being heavily recruited by several Division I schools. He even held a press conference, with a University of Oregon hat and a Cal hat before him, and dramatically picked up the Cal hat and put it on his head. "I'm going to Cal," he announced.

Suddenly, the University of Nevada, just down the road from this kid, was wondering how they could have ignored recruiting a kid from less than 30 minutes away. After a shockingly quick amount of research and a couple phone calls, they discovered that Cal had "never heard of him" and that Oregon knew about him (he went to their camp) but they didn't think he was scholarship worthy. No scholarship had been offered him, not only from Cal or Oregon, but from ANY D-I school.

What happens? It was front page news on <a href="http://www.espn.go.com></u>espn.com</u></a>. Here he was, a kid lying about something as monumental as being given a scholarship to Cal, and he had the whole town duped. When he found the media surrounding him he saved himself a few days' embarrassment by telling the cops to look for a "fake recruiter." Needless to say, that only put <i>more</i> trouble on his back. According to the story:<blockquote>"I wanted to play D-I ball more than anything," he said in the statement. "When I realized that wasn't going to happen, I made up what I wanted to be reality."

You've got to at least give Hart credit for facing the truth. Not that he had any choice.</blockquote>Flash back, now, to November 2006. Karl Rove, in an NPR interview, has <a href="http://www.npr.org/about/press/061024_rove.html"><u>this exchange</u></a>:<blockquote>SIEGEL: We are in the home stretch though and many would consider you on the optimistic end of realism about...

ROVE: Not that you would exhibit a bias, you just making a comment.

SIEGEL: I'm looking at all the same polls that you are looking at.

ROVE: No, you are not. I'm looking at 68 polls a week for candidates for the US House and US Senate, and Governor and you may be looking at 4-5 public polls a week that talk attitudes nationally.

SIEGEL: I don't want to have you to call races...

ROVE: I'm looking at all of these Robert and adding them up. I add up to a Republican Senate and Republican House. You may end up with a different math but you are entitled to your math and I'm entitled to THE math.</blockquote>First, he accuses Siegel of bias, then he insists that THE MATH totals up to a Republican Senate and a Republican House.

He was, of course, infamously incorrect. Bush, his president, is not polling higher than the mid-30's in approval rating, and 25% of the country currently thinks we're heading in the right direction. He is the brainstormer behind a statistically evident failure of a president. What happens? He gets a job on Fox News.

The other night, <a href="http://mediamatters.org/items/200802080009?f=h_latest"><u>he said that, in national polls</u></a>, "McCain is beating [Democratic presidential candidates Barack] Obama and [Hillary Rodham] Clinton." This is, of course, made up bullshit, just like the nonsense he was spewing before election '06. Obama, as <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2008/president/national.html"><u>this site clearly shows</u></a>, is polling much better than McCain (though he is averaging better than Clinton).

Will Rove have to apologize like the aspiring D-I footballer and hang his head in shame, dodging embarrassing questions from devoted journalists? Hardly. He never has. Like W, like McCain, like Giuliani, like Romney's non-dog related activities, he receives a free pass. He'll keep his job, and unlike the kid who, the sheriff tells us, "It sounds like he learned his lesson," Rove will just keep lying and lying, making stuff up that he wants to be true in the hopes that the media (as they always do) will repeat it, and thereby give it a chance of being true. He has no honesty or integrity or truth to him. Rove takes the media and tries to get them to make it true. Is it any surprise a high school football player would do something similar?