Honesty -- A Policy?

Oh those lessons one could take from the Bible that are ignored by those who work for what "melting man" wrought and the product of multiple bed-partners drove into the ground.

Bruce Stockler, NRO Contributor, American Idiot:

I desperately want to appear in the Washington Post, given my teenage obsession with Woodward and Bernstein. (Yes, I hated Nixon as a child, but only because my boyhood pet was a field beagle named Humphrey.) In January 2004, I send the Washington Post a funny and insightful op-ed about my experience having an Iowa-style caucus at my home, suggesting that I might actually vote for Howard Dean if he would diagnose my upset stomach and make me poached eggs.

“Thank you for your submission to the editorial page,” reads the e-mail reply, three weeks later. “We will not be able to use it but we appreciate your interest in The Washington Post.”

And little Bruce goes on and on and on about all the times he has been explicitly rejected via correspondence with the Washington Post.

Oopsy, one problem:

"I desperately want to appear in The Washington Post," Bruce Stockler wrote last week in National Review Online.

Now he has -- although not in the way he intended.

The public relations man produced a funny column on all the opinion pieces he has submitted to The Post without success -- or, as the headline put it, "one writer's suffering at the hands of a major newspaper." But Stockler said yesterday he is "quite embarrassed to admit" that he didn't submit any of them.

What about those impersonal "thank you for your submission" letters he said the paper kept sending him? After first saying he had to check, Stockler acknowledged: "I guess I lied about the fact that I got a cursory rejection letter when in fact I got nothing. Humorists are liars."

But his lying is a-okay with such noted ethicists as Rich Lowry:

"This piece seems to me to be pretty obvious satire," said National Review Editor Rich Lowry. "It seems to me he's obviously making stuff up to be funny . . . not necessarily right at the top, but by the end." The second paragraph of the piece says "here are the facts"; only in the last half-dozen paragraphs does Stockler openly fantasize about disruptions to his phone and television service and an ice cream truck with Texas plates circling his block. "If a couple of things are deliberately outrageous, that signals the reader it's not serious journalism," Lowry said.

Stockler did not contend that he had produced a transparent satire. He said he merely bent some facts to suit his narrative, and that he really has tried repeatedly to get published on The Post's op-ed page -- just not in the way he wrote.

Fred Hiatt, The Post's editorial page editor, said: "It's a little strange. I guess anybody who would make stuff up, it's just as well we didn't run his op-eds."

Here's lesson one of Satire...

It is transparently outrageous.

Okay, well, it was published first in National Review, so I guess the lesson was obeyed.

Special thanks to a commenter here.