"That's What You Do"

U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham may have a future as a fiction writer.

He's being accused of fabricating a Senate debate and sending it to the U.S. Supreme Court, which didn't think much of the work. The high court dismissed it.

At issue is an account of an exchange that Sens. Graham, R-S.C., and Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., wrote last year to be inserted into the Congressional Record.

It details what the two lawmakers purported was part of the Senate's debate over why terror detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, should not be tried in civilian U.S. courts.

The actual discussion Graham and Kyl inserted in the Record never took place.

But their comments, written more than a month after the actual debate, became part of the terror case filing that went to the Supreme Court.

Reached Tuesday in Washington, Graham said he did nothing improper, contending that senators file amended speeches in debates all the time.

"That's what you do," he said. "You enter it on the record as if it were part of the debate."

Critics, meanwhile, called the Graham-Kyl account unethical.

Well, he's right about one thing: that is what they do, what they've done for the last six years. When reality doesn't suit them, they make it the fuck up. As with:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

At least the press is calling them on it now. (Even if it is only the Charlotte Observer. Ah, well. Baby steps.