Once the presidential campaign has ended and Mr. and Mrs. Romney, who as best I can tell have lacked the opportunity to experience the “dignity of work” outside the home for well over a decade now may wish to consider opening an Academy of Prevarication, private of course and with no dirty federal education money naturally. With the Romney paterfamilias living off investments year upon year, and with his spouse seemingly done with the martyrdom of raising sons only with the help of chefs and nannies, perhaps it will be the opportune time for a fresh line of work.

Mr. Romney has astonished jaded and seen-it-all political observers this year with his ability to proffer a brazen lie as effortlessly as he chews food, and about as regularly. Politifact has dinged Romney statements so many times for Pants on Fire falseness Smokey the Bear may barricade him in a cave for the safety of our vulnerable woodland areas, what with the climate overheating for some mysterious reason.

But apparently the Romney missus Ann has the same knack for stark dissimulation, in the course of revealing over the weekend how not so deeply wounded she was by the comments of the heretofore all but obscure Hilary Rosen, referred to them thusly: “It was my early birthday present for someone to be critical of me as a mother.” One may critique the accuracy and wisdom of Rosen’s statement: “His wife has actually never worked a day in her life,” from any number of angles perhaps; but one still will fail to uncover any criticism of Mrs. Romney’s mothering. Girdle on fire, Ann.

When Mrs. Romney described the famously outrageous Rosen comments and her reaction to them, Ann Romney revealed, “That was a really defining moment, and I loved it,” one could note the novel emotional response to a putatively crippling verbal blow: loving it. Rich people really are different.

What of course was less amusing and in fact thoroughly gag-inducing was the clip of Mr. Romney pompously condescending to the working poor, bragging that in Massachusetts his policies had boldly shoved poor women receiving assistance out of the home and away from not so sacrosanct child-rearing, these mothers only able to attain the dignity of work outside of the home…the reverse of the case of the sainted Ann.

This nauseating tidbit evinced another classically odious Republican double standard regarding America’s poor, and is well-packaged with the Republican war on the nation’s weakest citizens with the Reagan era’s mythically pervasive and insidious welfare queens, as well as the estimation of the working poor by Paul Ryan’s Goddess of Materialism Ayn Rand as moochers, parasites and looters.

The brilliant economist and incisive wit John Kenneth Galbraith, commenting upon the atrociousness of Reagan-era trickle down economic policies noted, “We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had too much.”

Nothing has changed.