Dull human anagram Reince Priebus on last Sunday’s George Stephanopoulos Muppet Hour:

PRIEBUS: George, here’s what I think. I think this president has got a problem with the American dream. You know, when I grew up — and I know that both Republicans and Democrats listening to this right now agree with this — when I grew up, in a great place called Kenosha, Wisconsin, my dad was a union electrician, my mom was a realtor. We drove around town, and when my parents and we drove past a beautiful house on the corner, my parents didn’t point at the house and say, hey, look at this lousy people in this beautiful house. Look at this guy and his new Corvette. My dad did probably the same thing your dad did and a lot of dads out there. He turned around, and he said, listen, pal, if you work hard and you go to school, mom and dad, we hope you live in that house. We hope it’s two times bigger than that house. That’s the American dream. And this idea that we’re spending all of our time just killing people because they live the American dream and made something out of nothing and made money — I mean, this is crazy talk. And I just think we need to get back to the issues.

Duller android cypher Mitt Romney playing back a tape-loop of what future hired help Marco Rubio supposedly once told him:

“[Rubio] said something that will stay with me a long time,” Romney said at a recent rally in Council Bluffs, Iowa. “He said when I was a boy living poor in this country with my family, we saw some other homes, great big homes and fancy cars. He said, ‘I never heard my parents say why can’t we have what they have. Instead my parents said aren’t we lucky to live in a country where with education and hard work, there’s a shot we have of earning that ourselves.’ That’s the nature of America. We’re the land of opportunity.”

Remarkably similar stories, dont’cha think? Brothers from another talking point mother?

Yeah, actually my dad didn’t do that.

When I was a kid, my dad and his brothers had a dry cleaning business and, back in those days, they actually used to deliver dry cleaning to their customers homes. It sounds weird now but it’s true. My dad, being the youngest, used to make most of the deliveries (in fact, we were so poor that the delivery panel truck was also the family car) and he used to tell us how, when he went to deliver dry cleaning to the swells up the hill in La Jolla, often people would leave a note on the door or the gate asking him to leave their clothes because they wouldn’t be home. In those days most people would pay upon delivery, so my dad would knock on the door or ring the house anyway in an attempt to get paid which, at the time, was probably a couple of bucks tops back in those golden days when dimes and nickels weren’t just useless pocket weight. After getting no answer, my dad would leave the clothes to avoid a call to the shop wondering why they hadn’t been delivered which could only mean yet another trip back up the hill. More than a few times, after getting back in the truck, he would look back at the house only to see the curtains move because the occupants were checking to see if he had gone and whether it was safe to come out and collect their belongings.

All of this, of course, to get out of paying a $1.50 for services rendered which, by the way, the customer would invariably dispute the next time they dropped their clothes off if they weren’t outright trying get out of paying because of too much starch or maybe a missing button.

He used to tell us all about it over dinner.

But what my dad didn’t tell us was that those rich people who lived in those nice houses were the real hard workers in the world (unlike himself and his brothers) and if we worked as hard as those wealthy folks we could be just like them and live in a nice house, and not a $35 a month apartment, and we could drive a big car that we actually owned and maybe even someday have a color TV. Because, even at a very young age and before we had the appropriate words to describe them, he didn’t need to tell us what we instinctively knew about these people and how they got where they were.

They were assholes.

The kind of assholes who would try to screw some guy out of a couple of bucks because he was just a common working man with a family and he didn’t make his money the old fashioned way.

By inheriting it.

So Reince Preibus and Marco Rubio can take their remarkably similar Dreams My Father Sold Me stories and blow it out their asses. That starry-eyed pie in the sky bullshit doesn’t sell any better now than it did back then. Save it for the rubes at the Americans For Prosperity and Freedomworks rallies.

Those dumbasses will believe anything for the price of a balloon…