A is A in the 21st century 

There are so many things about Ayn Rand that make me cringe that I never like to admit I enjoy reading Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

But. I've been considering lately how Hillary Clinton and most politicians spend most of their time pretending things aren't as they are, and asking us to help them pretend. In Atlas Shrugged, Dagny Taggert, once she got it, was continually saying "I'm not going to help you pretend [whatever it was somebody was trying to con her into]."

Yesterday's NewsGang podcast with David Sanborn and Richard Belzer paved the synaptic path for me. Sanborn riffed on the theme of telling the truth about the sad state of affairs in the country. Stay with him. It's a little rambly but from the heart.

Pretending is two or three degrees higher than mere spin on the prevarication thermometer, and calling people on their penchant for spinning fantasies packs an evocative punch while stopping short of crying the more charged "liar, liar."

I think Obama has used the word in referring to some of Clinton's more fantasic arguments; I wish he would say it 10 times a day. Andrea Mitchell said it in commentary over some video of Hillary speaking to a victory rally in Florida just after its outlaw primary. "What's happening there, Andrea?" Chris Matthews asked her. "She's pretending she won something," Andrea explained.

Rand railed against liberals, for her own dubious (partly biographical) reasons, casting them as the players who couldn't or chose not to admit that A is A. I'm thinking 60 years later we can comfortably say the same thing about not just conservatives, but any politician or bureaucrat entrenched in the system (which could be a definition of small "C" conservative).

No idea what I'm trying to say? Well, I have only a sketchy idea myself, but I'm going to start making a chart of Pretendings. Maybe we'll figure it out together.