True Lies: the best recent memoir from Republican Washington is a hoax. That should tell you something.

• Author: Green, Joshua
• Position: I Am Martin Eisenstadt: One Man's (Wildly Inappropriate - Book review

I Am Martin Eisenstadt: One Man's (Wildly Inappropriate) Adventures with the Last Republicans

by Martin Eisenstadt

Faber & Faber, 336 pp.

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The 2008 presidential election will be remembered for a lot of things, but moments of levity aren't one of them. The highlight may have come in the days just after Obama's victory, when bitter McCain staffers launched a torrent of anonymous criticism at Sarah Palin that painted her as selfish, venal, arrogant, and, above all, criminally stupid. For many of us, what erased the last shred of doubt about Palin--what seared in our cerebral cortex the unshakable conviction that Tina Fey was channeling the real person--was a Fox News report in which anonymous McCain staffers revealed that Palin had thought Africa was a country.

Not long afterward, a McCain staffer named Martin Eisenstadt came forward to take responsibility for leaking the Africa stuff. At first blush, Eisenstadt seemed exactly the sort you'd expect to cruelly betray his candidate: a vaguely familiar, middle-tier neocon hack affiliated with an outfit called the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy--a guy whose natural place in the universe is on the third block of Hardball, his command of the latest GOP talking points and lapel-pin flag both obnoxiously on display. That was enough for MSNBC, the Los Angeles Times, and a host of other media outlets to run with the story that the culprit had been found.

The only trouble was that Martin Eisenstadt was not a McCain adviser or even a real person. He was a hoax perpetrated by two filmmakers, Dan Mirvish and Eitan Gorlin (who played Eisenstadt on television). The Harding Institute didn't exist, nor did the Eisenstadt Group political consulting firm, though phony evidence of both can be found online. It was all an elaborate ruse that worked to perfection. The media made the obligatory hiccup of remorse and hurried on. But the hoax was worth savoring because it was funny on so many levels. Not only did it embarrass a facile media--which is not, let's be honest, like putting a man on the moon--but it slyly mocked American political culture in a way that barely registered. The joke was not that an imposter could infiltrate cable news for as long as Martin Eisenstadt did. It was that our entire system of politics has become so mindlessly rote, and campaigns such stage-managed shams, that it didn't really matter whether the guy spouting talking points on Hardball was the real...