'Liar Liar, Pants on Fire'

Anthony Weiner has rightly taken a beating for bald-faced lying. But he's hardly corned the market on this commodity in DC. On MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” this morning, longtime Republican strategist Fred Malek looked his host straight in the eyes and said of the contenders in last night’s GOP debate, “Anyone one of them would make a better president than Barack Obama.” Mitchell blinked incredulously. She even gave the old warhorse a sporting chance to revise his comment (and thereby salvage his credibility). Malek simply repeated his words a second time. Malek, a former big gun in the 2008 McCain campaign, is a smart, sober, rational operator not given to crazy talk. Even I don’t believe he believes what he said. The notion that loons like Herman Cain or Michele Bachmann would be more competent than Obama is simply absurd on its face. And Malek knows it. Yet, he deemed it proper to sit there, on national TV, and flat-out lie. Weiner is a two-bit piker compared to this guy. In his notable 1991 book, “Why Americans Hate Politics,” E.J. Dionne wrote that “game-playing, sound-bite mongering, and just plain foolishness” are killing public interest in our election processes. Malek, a charter member of the game-playing set, is living proof of Dionne’s thesis.