Heiress apparent

Here's the Sarah Palin quote:

"You need to know that both Levi and Bristol are working their butts off to parent and going to school and working at the same time," Palin told PEOPLE in a phone message Wednesday. "They are certainly not high school dropouts."

Here's the truth: Levi has dropped out of high school for an unspecified apprenticeship as an electrician. Is that a glorified way of saying that he's a gofer for an electrician? Doesn't Alaska have vo-tech high schools? Bristol has dropped out of high school to have her baby. She plans to complete her diploma by correspondence. Huh? What's wrong with going back to school next year?

I understand that Palin loves her daughter. I understand that she's defensive about her trailer trash mothering. But can't she just say, "We love them, and we'll help them work out the problems they face in their lives"? I realize that she'd be much more censorious about my daughter getting knocked up even though Palin herself got knocked up before marriage, too, but I'll just let the hypocrisy go.

Palin, like Duhbya and many other Republicans before him, describes the world the wishful way she wants it to be, rather than the way it is. That's what leads them to useless abstinence-only sex ed. That's why they claim that waterboarding is not torture - if they do it. That's why they rely on dozens of other claims that are wildly at variance with reality - but popular nonetheless.

This propensity for bullshit is, of course, not limited to Republicans, but Republicans lie like this to us as a matter of course, almost as if they were no less superficial than the average ad campaign. They do this so much that's it's not even news any more, while a venal and self-serving Democratic bullshitter like Rod Blagojevich is front-page material for weeks.