Opinion – Bill Straub: As shutdown drags on, GOP refuses to let truth get in the way of good story

Let’s talk about lying of the political kind.

Fabrications, if you’re being fancy, have long held a prominent role in the American story, save, of course, for George Washington who legendarily confessed to his father that it was he who chopped down that doggone cherry tree, leading Mark Twain to assert he was morally superior to the father of our country because “Washington could not tell a lie, I can but I won’t.’’

History is full if grandiloquent liars, even the universally admired President Dwight David Eisenhower lied about Francis Gary Powers — a Jenkins native, by the way — and the U2 spy plane. Richard Nixon set new standards during Watergate and, just to prove fibbing is a bipartisan predilection, Bill Clinton may have uttered the presidential lie to top all presidential lies – “