Pun Salad

While the gap continues to narrow, President Obama maintains his comfortable lead with 23 days to go:

• In honor of the veep debates this past week, how is the phony matchup going there? Ask and you shall receive:

  Query String	Hit Count
  "Paul Ryan" phony	1,180,000
  "Joe Biden" phony	882,000
  "Jim Gray" phony	524,000

  It's close, but Ryan actually has the lead. I must admit that I did not expect that.

  (And now you trivia buffs know the answer to: "who is the Libertarian Party's vice-presidential nominee?")

• Thomas Sowell reflected this week on the "Phony-in-Chief".
  When President Barack Obama and others on the left are not busy admonishing the rest of us to be "civil" in our discussions of political issues, they are busy letting loose insults, accusations, and smears against those who dare to disagree with them.

  Like so many people who have been beaten in a verbal encounter, and who can think of clever things to say the next day after it is all over, President Obama, after his clear loss in his debate with Mitt Romney, called Governor Romney a "phony."

  Professor Sowell goes on to detail some embarrassing history of Obama's 2007 rabble-rousing speech at Hampton University, and how it contrasted with his actual voting record.

• Jay Nordlinger's Impromptus column this week aimed most of the phony fire at Obama. Unsurprising, but he recollects the lapel-flag controversy from the last election.
  Obama is a little funny with his lapel pin -- the American flag. Once, it was on. Then Obama took it off. He said he didn't want any of that phony patriotism. He wouldn't wear his patriotism on his sleeve, or his lapel. Others who did so were phony-baloneys. Then he put the flag pin back on. It can be so confusing, keeping track of Obama's moods and principles.

  First he's for gay marriage. Then he's not. "The union of a man and a woman, only." Then he's back on again.

  Anyway, my question: If Obama loses the election this year, will he ever wear an American-flag pin again? Or will he be free of it? Is the pin just "boob bait for Bubbas," to use a once-famous phrase of Senator Moynihan?

  My bet is: he won't wear the flag pin whether he wins or loses. Because, as he noted to the Russian president back in March: "After my election, I have more flexibility."

• Via Matt Welch at Reason, we also have a Jack Shafer column as a must-read: "Why we vote for liars". It's very much a plague-on-all-your-houses column, noting truth behind the no-longer-funny joke "How can you tell when a politician is lying? His lips move."

  Shafer's a little too tough on Romney, not tough enough on Obama. But his main point is on target and relates to a different saying, the one about when you point your finger, there are three pointing back at you:

  The pervasiveness of campaign lies tells us something we'd rather not acknowledge, at least not publicly: On many issues, voters prefer lies to the truth. That's because the truth about the economy, the future of Social Security and Medicare, immigration, the war in Afghanistan, taxes, the budget, the deficit, and the national debt is too dismal to contemplate. As long as voters cast their votes for candidates who make them feel better, candidates will continue to lie. And to win.