“Being born rich is Mitt Romney’s greatest accomplishment.”

We can thank Stephen Colbert for that one. Colbert had a brilliant bit on Fox News’ Steve Doocy doing something inconceivable for a cable news host, particularly one on Fox News: Doocy made some shit up.

(As an aside to the people who seem to genuinely believe that Colbert is really a conservative punking the rest of us: the National Institute of Standards and Technology recently recalibrated the average American penis length to 2.5 inches. Congratulations on your newfound virility.)

Back to Doocy: yup, he asked Mitt Romney about a slur against Mittens’ wealth, uttered by Obama, that Obama never actually uttered.

I guess it’s okay to do that because the oppression of the obscenely wealthy is a national scourge that must be rooted out, right?

Sarcasm aside, the Dooce realized the error of his ways and issued a heartfelt, honest apology. Except for the fact that he did not do that. Here’s what he said:

Last week President Obama talked about not being born with a silver spoon in his mouth. That was interpreted as a big dig at Mitt Romney. When I was interviewing Governor Romney on this show I asked him about it. However, I did some paraphrasing that seemed to misquote the president. So to be clear, the president’s exact quote was, ‘I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth.’ And I hope that clears up any confusion.

Here’s what The Raw Story had to say about the clarity of the confusion:

Actually, Dooce, that does not clear up all the confusion. You clearly reached for a piece of paper on-air in your interview with Romney in order to read this fabricated quote. Who wrote the material you were reading? What was the source for that version of the quote? Were you reading from internally produced material or from a third-party source? From how high up in the Fox News universe did this fabrication originate?

It doesn’t surprise me that the Dooce lied about something so easily debunkable, or that he would play the coward and insult the collective intelligence of the human race when called out on it. I will also not be surprised when this cheeseburger I am eating causes me to fart. It’s just a force of nature, the same as the Dooce’s mendacity.

I don’t think Steve Doocy can help lying. I don’t think he even realizes that he is lying anymore. More than a few people will accept his non-apology and continue to believe that Obama said exactly what the Dooce just said Obama didn’t say. Life goes on, and some people are idiots. That’s been true since the first person picked up a brush and painted a butt on the wall of a cave. The Dooce, and the people who pay attention to him, are just perpetuating an ageless line of morons.

My concern is for the perversion of yet another word. Fox News has already stripped quite a few words of all comprehensible meaning. “Socialism,” for example, now means “anything Obama is doing,” in the absence of any meaningful distinction between the policies of, say, Chairman Mao and modern-day Western European socialist parties. Now, they are going after the word “paraphrase.”

Paraphrasing is a very useful tool for a writer. It allows a writer to express the thoughts of another in the writer’s voice, but it requires extremely careful attention to the original text. I apologize in advance to the Dooce and any other Fox News fans out there, because I know that dictionaries are the work of pompous, elite academics (i.e. liberals), but a definition might be helpful here:

par·a·phrase: a restatement of a text or passage giving the meaning in another form, as for clearness; rewording

A paraphrase is a “restatement” that preserves the “meaning” of the original. Go back and look at what Doocy did. He took the president’s words verbatim and added a clause to it. There was no restating, only appending.

So not only has the Dooce once again savaged the basic notions of truth and fundamental human honesty, now he’s going after our rules of honest scholarship.

I’m going to finish this cheeseburger, and I want the Dooce to know that the farts I will emit later this evening will have greater truth value than anything he will ever say using his words.

Photo credits: ‘Steve Doocy,’ U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate Airman Anthony Riddle [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons; ‘SantaCruz-CuevaManos-P2210651b’ by Mariano (Own work) [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC-BY-SA-2.5], via Wikimedia Commons