that lying is what makes you sound the way a conservative is supposed to sound, in pretty much the same way that curlicuing all around the note makes you sound like a contestant on American Idol is supposed to sound.In part the New York Times had it right, for as much as its worth: Romneys prevarications are evidence of simple political hucksterismshort, utterly false sound bites, repeated so often that millions of Americans believe them to be the truth. But the Times misses the bigger picture. Each constituent lie is an instance pointing to a larger, elaborately constructed truth, the one central to the right-wing appeal for generations: that liberalism is a species of madnessan esoteric cult of out-of-touch, Europe-besotted ivory tower elitesand conservatism is the creed of regular Americans and vouchsafes the eternal prosperity, security, and moral excellence of Gods chosen nation, which was doing just fine before Bolsheviks started gumming up the works.A Romney lie in this vein is a pure Ronald Reagan imitationas in this utterance from 2007: In France, Romney announced on the campaign trail, Im told that marriage is now frequently contracted in seven-year terms where either party may move on when their term is up. And just as Reagan was found to be reciting film dialogue and jump-cutting anecdotes from his on-screen career into his pseudobiographical reminiscences on the stump, so it turns out that Romney picked up the marriage canard from the Homecoming Saga, a science fiction series written by Mormon author Orson Scott Card. (Another reason for students of Romneys intellectual development to queasily recall that he told interviewers during that same 2008 presidential run that his favorite work of fiction was Battlefield Earth, the sci-fi opus by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, a consummate shakedown artist in his own right.)Either deliberately or through some Reaganesque slip of the unconscious, Romneys stump confabulations worked the same way that those legendary Viguerie direct-mail appeals did: since reality is never Manichean enough, fables have to do the requisite ideological heavy liftingto frighten the target audience to do the fabulists will. Thats the logic of the pitch for the quivering conservative masses.Once, I gave a speech to a marquee assemblage of true members of the conservative elite, from William Bennett to Midge Decter to Alf Regnery, at the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, a conservative think tank that rich donors convinced Princeton University to house under its auspices. (Karl Rove made a cameo appearance, during which he bragged about making a Republican congressman cry.) In my remarks, I laid out what I took to be a disturbing moral pattern, what I naively thought would stir these folks into something like shame. Why was it, I asked, that whenever Richard Nixon needed someone to brazen out some patently immoral, illegal, or dishonest act, he frequently and explicitly sought out a veteran of the conservative movementthe same conservatives whose ideology in policy contexts he usually derided? Because, I said, Nixon knew that if you had a dirty job to get done, you got people who answered