All politicians gild the lily when talking about themselves and their accomplishments, but they usually try to avoid outright lies.
Not Scott Walker -- he lies so often and so casually that it must be second nature, whether it's about his trips to the Reagan Library and No. 10 Downing Street, or his repeated promises not to push for and sign a right-to-work law, or, second-naturally, whether he was responsible for trying to eliminate the "search for truth" from the "Wisconsin Idea" mission statement for higher education.
So many lies, it's hard to keep up.
A couple of this weekend's lies come from Walker's appearance at the Western Conservative Summit in Denver.
More, below.
Walker always goes on about his tremendous courage in standing up to teachers at these wingnut gatherings -- it makes him sound like a fearless, unintimidated leader, and the wingnuts eat it up.
So Saturday, he added this bit of mendacious puffery to his ever-lengthening list of lies told in public:
He said thousands of protesters arrived at his home, and that was the origination of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
"My apologies for starting that," he said.
News to me, and probably to the original organizers of the Occupy movement, which
according to the wiki was inspired by European anti-austerity protests.
And he's now also claiming, when he got off-script, that the massive protests at the Capitol in Madison and the alleged death threats he loves to bring up both happened in front of his house:
Walker was interrupted by a protester who shouted "Gov. Walker, talk about immigration!" The protester continued to shout, but Walker brushed it off and went on with his answer.
"I'm used to protesters, so this is not uncommon," he remarked. "Probably exported in from Wisconsin."
He said it was nothing, "When you've had 100,000 protesters and death threats in front of your house."
Anyone who knows anything (which does not include many in these wingnut audiences) about the Act 10 protests knows that there were never 100,000 people in front of Walker's home, and neither were any of his phony death threats made there.
But i'll betcha that lie was a big applause line.
And that's what pretty much Walker does with all of his lies -- puffs himself up as bigger and better than he is, the real heir of St. Ronald Reagan, who was no slouch when it came to telling lies that his audiences wanted to believe
Reagan rarely suffered any political consequences for doing so, and so far Walker hasn't either.
That will surely change if he wins the GOP nomination.