Warm warns Newt: Social Security a bomb

By Luke Warm

Professor of Mendacity

University of Munchausen

It has been very difficult for me to remain on track for this semester’s lecture series on “Deceit, Deception, Duplicity and Backstabbing in the Newsroom and Beyond.”

Wonderful things have happened in the wide world of Mendacity.

In the state of Michigan, for instance, one family and their bridge held the entire state Legislature and by extension its 9,935,823 inhabitants hostage to their narrow and greed-pocked interest.

Their chief means of achieving their twisted and perverse goals?

Deceit, deception and duplicity piled onto a tall mound of cash.

My Master Liar’s cap is off to the Moroun family, although I would caution them that despite their dramatic demonstration of just how much clout a billionaire can exert in a single state Capitol, the last act has not been written. The finale in this play founded on the brainwashing art has not been written, and the Morouns will need help from an expert at public subversion whose services do not come cheap.

Which is to say me, Professor of Mendacity Luke Warm.

Students, I hope you understand how difficult it has been for me to stay the course, so to speak. While the local scene has seen a rich harvest of mendacious feats, the nation at large has witnessed an unprecedented growth in the ability of politicians, almost all Republicans, to persuade voters that black is white and up is down.

Again, the GOP will need help going into the 2012 presidential election cycle, as only I, Professor of Mendacity Luke Warm, am qualified to reverse the deception and prove that down is up and white is black.

Today, I would like to heap my accolades on the head and shoulders of the former Republican Speaker of the House, Mr. Newt Gingrich.

For boldness, shrewdness and sheer temerity, Mr. Gingrich has no peer.

He has trod toward the outer reaches of audacity, albeit not without a certain risk to his credibility.

One thing Mr. Gingrich will never lose his credibility on is his ability to distort, contort and utterly ravage the truth.

But, as I say, there is a weak link in his logical train. I am prepared to help him weld those links into a formidable concatenation of conspiracy, of course, always in return for an infusion of cash for my services as a consultant.

Why do I praise Mr. Gingrich for his audacity?

Because, class, only a fool and Mr. Gingrich would dare to broach the subject of Social Security reform after the last Republican President, Mr. George W. Bush, attempted and failed to achieve a privately-funded rival to the magnificent retirement pension system known as Social Security that is the legacy of President Franklin Roosevelt.

Why did President Bush II fail to win his Social Security battle?

I assure you that if he had hired me, Professor of Mendacity Luke Warm, to manage his public relations program, the result would have been dramatically different.

President Bush II lost on Social Security because truth came out again and again.

Republicans argued that retirees would get a better deal if they invested throughout their working lives in a private retirement funding system. Stocks and bonds would, so President Bush II argued, yield more money over time than retirees would get back from Social Security.

Well, students, there was a little problem with that assertion. It was called the dot-com bubble.

When those people fortunate enough to possess portfolios saw how low the value of their investments had sunk after that bubble burst, they were wont to take President Bush II and his Republican lackeys with several huge grains of salt.

People wondered if maybe some of those Wall Street billionaires who were shoveling truckloads of currency President Bush II’s way might have something to gain if they got control over a huge potential boondoggle such as privately-funded investments.

In other words, the public is not without its highly sensitive bullshit detectors, and alarms went off all over the nation.

The plain truth is that Social Security works.

It is not true that people pay more into the system while working than they draw out of it when retired.

That is sheer Republican bullshit.

The truth being so self-evident, President Bush II was inundated by huge waves of his own self-imposed crap.

Now, Newt Gingrich has unveiled his own plan to subvert Social Security.

Audacious?

Wow! And then some.

This time around, we are struggling through the wreckage of the real estate bubble, wherein stocks and bonds have lost 40 percent of their value.

Even a child can see that if all of your eggs were invested in Wall Street, retirement would consist of sitting on a street corner selling pencils.

That, quite evidently, is what Republicans have in mind for the 99.9 percent of us who are cut out of the GOP spoils system.

Oh yes, students, despite all the high-flown rhetoric about “saving” Social Security, the real aim of the GOP is to destroy this excellent defined benefit pension system so that workers once again will live in thrall to their Republican bosses. Remember what the American major said after we bombed a Vietnam village into oblivion?  Well, Mr. Newt Gingrich is telling us that we need to destroy Social Security to save it.

A powerful concept indeed, slavery.

For that is what Republicans really have in mind for us.

Slaves in fact if not in name — that is the ultimate goal Republicans want for those unlucky enough to be rich.

I repeat: Opulent luxury for the cream of the cream and miserable serfdom for the rest of society is the ultimate goal of the Republican Party.

Unfortunately for President Bush II, his aim was all too clear.

Is there anything different about the plan for “saving” Social Security rolled out by Mr. Newt Gingrich?

No. It is the same tired old Republican effort to cheat the nation out of the only retirement income many people will have.

If Mr. Newt Gingrich had consulted me, I would have advised him not to touch Social Security with a 10-mile pole.

It is a self-inflicted wound that will fester and over the course of the campaign it will infect his entire effort at election.

But what do I care? I am a Professor of Mendacity on the Make. Pay me my fees, that is all I ask.

What’s done is done. Now, Mr. Newt Gingrich needs the services of a brilliant prevaricateur such as myself to spin out enough half-truths, semi-lies and sheer bullshit so as to scam the American public into voting for a man who aims to screw them to the wall first before cutting them apart bit by bit.

In my next lecture, I will sketch my plan for “saving” Social Security in such a way that Mr. Newt Gingrich can totally dupe presidential voters into electing a President dedicated to reducing all but a tiny elite to a pauperdom sufficient to guarantee in perpetuity a compliant work force flanked by a gigantic pool of jobless people who would be overjoyed to accept any crumbs that might fall from the Republican slop trough.