Jan Brewer is really, really upset at some of the criticism she has received since she cheerfully signed Arizona’s draconian anti-immigrant law for personal political gain:

“The Nazi comments . . . they are awful,” she said, her voice dropping. “Knowing that my father died fighting the Nazi regime in Germany, that I lost him when I was 11 because of that . . . and then to have them call me Hitler’s daughter. It hurts. It’s ugliness beyond anything I’ve ever experienced.”

Guess what? Them tears was crocodile tears. Totally fake. As fake as the script she made up for that performance:

Gov. Jan Brewer said in a recent interview that her father died fighting Nazis in Germany. In fact, the death of Wilford Drinkwine came 10 years after World War II had ended.

During the war, Drinkwine worked as a civilian supervisor for a naval munitions depot in Hawthorne, Nev. He died of lung disease in 1955 in California.

So her father wasn’t a soldier, never fought in Germany, and died in California long after the war ended. How did the governor respond when she was confronted with these facts?

Surprise, surprise!

Officials with the governor’s administration said her statement should not be taken to mean that she was claiming her father was a soldier in Germany during the Nazi regime.
[...]
“She wasn’t embellishing the story at all,” (spokesman Paul) Senseman said Tuesday. “You’re reading something into this that isn’t there.”

(When I wrote this post last night, I had to stop here, because at this point I was literally speechless. But this morning I have managed to recover.)

Brewer and her spokespeople have been treated to howls of derision over this incident. But once they decided that their basic stand was going to be that Brewer had not misrepresented her father’s war record, they had only two choices.

Go with the statement they put out, or offer some Ph.D. level parsing, along the lines of:

When Governor Brewer said “my father died fighting the Nazi regime in Germany”, it should have been perfectly clear to everyone that she meant “My father, who never served in the military, died ten years after the war due to health issues arising from the toxic fumes he inhaled at the ammunition factory he worked in during the war that we fought against the Nazi regime, which, just in case anyone is confused about the issue, was the regime in Germany (and not Italy or Japan, or anywhere else, for that matter).”

I guess they felt that might lead to even more derision than they are facing now.