Politicians are a trip, aren’t they?  They’ll say anything to get elected.  Some of them lie so often and so consistently that they end up with elaborate fantasy lives that become reality to them.

There’s a name for that.  It’s called psychosis:

“psy-cho-sis [sahy-koh-sis] a mental disorder characterized by symptoms, such as delusions or hallucinations, that indicate impaired contact with reality” —Random House Dictionary

Last week the New York Times, usually a dependable supporter of Democrats, liberals, and leftists of all stripes, pointed out some awkward facts about Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal—namely that he’s been lying like a rug about having served in Vietnam.

“We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam,” Blumenthal said to a group of veterans and senior citizens in 2008.  (You can watch and listen here.)

He’s repeated the lie for decades and he loves to evoke sympathy for the way he was treated when he came home.  “I wore the uniform in Vietnam and many came back to all kinds of disrespect,” he told a Veterans Day crowd in 2008.  “In Vietnam we had to endure taunts and insults, and no one said ‘welcome home’,” he said to a Memorial Day crowd in 2007.  In 2003 he addressed a crowd of military families gathered to support troops overseas: “When we returned, we saw nothing like this.  Let us do better by this generation of men and women.”

At the dedication of the Connecticut Vietnam Veterans Memorial in May of 2008, he was really on top of his game, bringing tears to everybody’s eyes.  “When we came back, we were spat on; we couldn’t wear our uniforms.”

Not only did Richard Blumenthal never set foot in Vietnam, he obtained numerous deferments to avoid Vietnam, so his real life is exactly the opposite of his carefully maintained fantasy.  What kind of person could do that?  Only a man devoid of conscience, utterly lacking in judgment about right and wrong, and cold-blooded in his regard for other human beings—in other words, a Democrat politician.

Blumenthal is so pathological that he has another fantasy he maintains, too.  Various biographies mention that he was captain of the swim team at Harvard, a detail which must have come from him.  In fact, he wasn’t even on the swim team.  Heck, given his record, he probably doesn’t know how to swim.

Since he’s running for the U.S. Senate to replace the retiring Chris Dodd, these revelations about his dishonesty come at an awkward time and he lashed out at evil Republicans for mischaracterizing his tendency to mischaracterize.  He claims that he simply misspoke, accidentally using the word ‘in’ where he meant ‘during’—as in “I served during Vietnam.”

Uh huh.

If he wins the election—and let’s face it, being a dishonest creep is not generally a handicap when you’re a Democrat—he’ll fit right in down there in the Senate where John Kerry won multiple Purple Hearts without ever needing medical care, and former alumni include Hillary Clinton, who dodged sniper bullets in Bosnia, Joe Biden, whose helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan, and Al Gore, who invented the Internet.

“During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet,” said Mr. Gore on March 9, 1999, while running for the Democrat nomination for president.  That was an interesting claim, since Gore wasn’t elected to Congress until 1977 and the Internet was created by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (and others) in the late 1960’s.

Hey, maybe he meant that he helped it along once he got elected but if that’s the case, why didn’t he say it that way?  When we look at Gore and his life, we see one thing clearly: a phony baloney politician with delusions of grandeur.  This is a man who thinks he understands scientific concepts, even though he is repeatedly shown to be flat-ass wrong.  (For the last time, Al, melting Arctic ice does not raise sea levels!)

This is a man who probably really does think he created the Internet.

Some politicians don’t have the necessary intelligence to sell their elaborate fantasy lives so they get caught right away.  Hillary Clinton, for example.  “I remember landing under sniper fire," she said in 2008, while speaking about visiting Bosnia in 1996. "There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport but instead we just ran with our heads down…”

She was trying to gain street cred for being a world-savvy leader with real-life war experience.  She was running for president, after all, and thought there might be people uncomfortable with a woman as Commander-In-Chief so she created a fantasy where she ran through sniper fire.  Her motivation is understandable but surely anybody with an IQ over 90 realizes that sniper fire directed at the president’s wife would make front-page headlines in every newspaper in the world.

Sure enough, journalists, wondering how they missed such an amazing story, checked the video and saw Mrs. Clinton landing peacefully and disembarking the plane with daughter Chelsea, Sinbad the comedian, and Sheryl Crow the singer, where she was greeted by an eight-year-old Bosnian girl bearing flowers.  Oops.

Hillary didn’t seem overly embarrassed by the controversy, calling the whole thing a “minor blip” and then holding a news conference where she explained her one-woman victory over the Sith in a previously unknown future battle for control of a galaxy far far away.

Joe Biden must have thought Hillary’s attempt to invent war experience was a nifty idea because he trotted out a similar tale a few months later.  “If you want to know where Al Qaeda lives, you want to know where Bin Laden is, come back to Afghanistan with me.  Come back to the area where my helicopter was forced down, with a three-star general and three senators at 10,500 feet in the middle of those mountains.  I can tell you where they are.”

Biden is a little better at lying.  Notice how he didn’t come right out and say they were forced down by gunfire or that anybody actually spotted an honest-to-God Al Qaeda.  He just left that assumption available to his listeners and, if they imagined him braving terrorist gunfire, well, that’s what he was hoping.  In the world of reality Biden’s helicopter landed to avoid a snow storm because the pilot didn’t want to risk his VIP passengers.

Promotions for pilots who kill senators and three-star generals are rare, so it’s best to be careful.

Bill Richardson, current governor of New Mexico, candidate for president in 2008, and presumably a future candidate for president, exemplifies the way these people end up believing their own crap.  For four decades he told everybody he was drafted by the Kansas City Athletics (now in Oakland) baseball team and bragged about it in campaign literature from the first time he ran for Congress in 1982.  When the Albuquerque Journal investigated the claim in 2005 and found it false, Richardson seemed genuinely mystified.

After forty years, he believed the fantasy himself.  (Remember, there’s a name for that.)

“After being notified of the situation and after researching the matter... I came to the conclusion that I was not drafted by the A's,” he said.

Oh really?  You “came to the conclusion?”

Even in the midst of what should have been ignoble shame, Richardson couldn’t admit that he was lying.  The Journal found a faded program from the 1967 Cape Cod league that said “Drafted by K.C.” next to his name, and he jumped on the chance to excuse himself.  “When I saw that program in 1967, I was convinced I was drafted,” Richardson said.  “And it stayed with me all these years.”

That’s more crap.  Then-general manager Arnold Mycock said the biographical information was supplied by the players themselves.  When fantasy is created to excuse fantasy, is that like a double negative?  Has Richardson’s psychotic dishonesty been cured by another round of dishonesty?

I don’t know the answer to that question.  That’s a question for professional philosophers, or political science analysts, or people with proven expertise in the art of lying… like Barney Frank.  In my opinion, Bill Richardson is simply an unrepentant liar like Richard Blumenthal and the rest of these creeps.

And by “the rest of these creeps” I mean the people liberals have put in charge of our healthcare, our financial institutions, our automakers, the food we are allowed to eat, and eventually the carbon dioxide we exhale.

By the way, I once aspired to become a philosopher but my baseball career with the Yankees kept me from studying and then I went to Vietnam where sniper fire caused my helicopter to make a forced landing in the middle of Hanoi where I earned three Purple Hearts in one afternoon trying to master chopsticks in a sushi café, and when I came home from Vietnam I turned down numerous offers to star in porn movies because I was busy inventing the silicon computer chip… so busy that I never did finish my philosophy thesis.

You can read the rest of my biography in my 2012 presidential campaign literature.  I figure with a life story like mine, I’m a shoo-in, if I run as a Democrat.


From Reno, Nevada, USA

May 29, 2010 - You went too easy on Hillary. You forgot that she also invented a stay in a bombed-out hotel in Belfast, and has repeatedly tried to take credit for the Northern Ireland peace process even though she had nothing to do with it. She's just a creepy creepy woman IMHO. - Colleen (yeah, I'm Irish), New York

J.P. replies: You’re correct about the bombed-out hotel fantasy.  It’s one of the items in my Hillary section of Crooked Democrats.  Once again she was trying to make it sound like she’s accomplished something, when in reality she’s never accomplished a single damn thing.

May 26, 2010 - All I can say is...WOW! I've heard of some of these whoppers throughout the years, but reading about so many in one page is quite comical. - Samantha, Michigan

May 26, 2010 - Hello all, Yea, it's me from Connecticut. Isn't it funny how the Democrats keep shooting themselves in the foot with their fantasy lives? By the way I'm really not a domme I just said that so I could get on this website. lol...lol..lol.. Just kidding, unlike politicians, I DON'T LIE! For anyone! I Can't wait until November when Linda McMahon brings WWE to the White House... Her chaffeur used to live at my house with her big fat double wide dually limousine that transported her larger-than-life wrestlers. Now there's a Domme I can respect!... And did you get a load of her stable? I have to admit I am a bit envious. Goooooo LINDA! - Domme Yankee, Connecticut

May 25, 2010 - Sometimes I can't stand your columns because of all the conservative crap in them, but if you ran for president I'd vote for you in a NY minute just to watch the show. I'm guessing you'd be the proverbial bull in the china shop. - Reluctant admirer, New York

May 24, 2010 - Who the hell is Aesop? - Steve, North Dakota