Who will stop Republicans from making their showdown at the corner of Deception Street and Ridiculousness Avenue?
Over the weekend Newt Gingrich went on the airwaves to start the knock-down of soon-to-be Minnesota Senate candidate Walter Mondale. And this makes sense, you have to admit, in a moment of grief since Newt is so smooth-tongued and sort of a comforter. In his comments he said one of the terrible things about Mondale is that 
“Walter Mondale chaired a commission that was for the privatization of Social Security worldwide.”
Yes, we’re back to the ‘privatization’ ridiculousness. And you’ll remember this is the case where Republicans tend to support something called ‘privatization’ but then realized it wasn’t popular so they renamed what they want as ‘not privatization’ and renamed the Democrats’s opposition to privatization as actually being privatization. You still with me? Good.
You know, it’s like how everybody used to think that Republicans were opposed to choice on abortion and that Democrats were pro-choice. Remember that? Oh, you didn’t hear? You’re really not up-to-date. See, Republicans are pro-choice on abortion since they favor letting state legislatures decide whether or not abortion should be legal. And Democrats, surprisingly enough, are actually anti-choice since they deny state legislatures the freedom to choose. It’s amazing how confused about this we all used to be. And for so long.
So anyway, back to Walter Mondale and his support for “the privatization of Social Security worldwide.”
Now when I heard this, I didn’t even know what commission Gingrich was talking about. But I realized that it must be some mix of the standard Republican Social Security word games or perhaps a straight out lie, something just 
short of accusing Mondale of conspiring with aliens to privatize Social Security.
It turns out that Mondale did actually co-chair a commission organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies which did endorse moving “social protection schemes from pay-as-you-go to market-based financing.” That was the majority report. But Mondale, the report’s executive summary says, “and six co-signers also released a separate statement dissenting from the Commission’s pension recommendations as they applied to Social Security in the United States.” So, in other words, Mondale specifically said the opposite of what Gingrich said he said.
So Gingrich lied when he attacked Mondale for supporting Social Security privatization — a policy which Gingrich himself, of course, supports but which he refuses to acknowledge by name.
When will the ridiculousness end?
