Somewhere in an attic room of Rachel Maddow’s home there must be a painting where her expression is cynical, her eyes have no twinkle, her smile is ghastly and her greed has turned her once beautiful face into something that looks like a goblin. But on her MSNBC television show her expression is genuine, her eyes twinkle with goodness, her smile is endearing and her still beautiful face shines with sincerity and humor.

Or maybe in a hidden room, of which only she has the key, is a secret laboratory where she brews up in a test tube a secret formula that with a gulp of its bitter gall she feels her conscience fade into nothingness and her ethics shrivel up into dust as she feels her lower desires for fame and fortune grow into a monster. Then she can go on her MSNBC television show and distort the truth without any shame. Meanwhile, thanks to that painting up in the attic, she doesn’t look like a monster. She look just like the woman I used to admire and trust. But she isn’t. Like Darth Vader, when she turned to the Dark Side in a sense she killed the good woman she used to be.

Tonight she reported on Obama’s appointment of Jack Lew as his new chief of staff. Here’s his biography according to Dr. Maddow. He’s been an advisor to President Clinton, worked for Secretary State Hillary Clinton as a deputy director and was Obama’s director of the office of management and budget. That’s it!

Oh wait. There’s more.

Eric Cantor, a supposed enemy of Obama, had good things to say about Mr. Lew. He praised him right in the midst of the brinksmanship of the debt ceiling fiasco last summer. Rachel gave us the money quote where Cantor praised Lew saying no one was more prepared or more in tune with numbers that he was.

Rachel Maddow then turned up her twinkle to an eleven and beamed at us to comment on the ultimate goodness of Obama appointing this hard working civil servant, why it might bring back civility to Washington. Imagine that. End of story.

Up in that attic room the painting must have changed. A new level of corruption must suddenly have been apparent in the picture. Any one gazing on it must realize it portrays a women who has sold her soul, a woman who has no problem lying to a nation through omission, a woman who would spend hours explaining how terrible a crime is and then stand behind the one way mirror and lie through her teeth that she doesn’t see the culprit who committed the crime when she knows exactly that he is the one on the end as she fingers the pay off check hidden in her pocket.

For she did spend hours explaining the crime. Over and over on her show a few years back she used various props and metaphors to explain to her audience how Wall Street banks, like Citigroup, defrauded investors with toxic derivatives they knew were junk, making billions off this fraud. She lamented how they got away with it after being bailed out by TARP. Oh, yes, Dr. Maddow understood the crime. She was eloquent in explaining it.

But now she describes Jack Lew and just conveniently forgets he was the Chief Operating Officer of Citigroup’s Alternate Investments from 2006 until Secretary Clinton recruited him. She doesn’t recall that during his tenure Citigroup’s investors went from holding a wealth of over 200 billion dollars to under 20 billion. She has amnesia that part of those alternative investments was a hedge fund that made billions by betting against the housing market while Citigroup convinced those investors who lost hundreds of billions to bet on the same market, the very crime she so eloquently reported once upon a time. She just doesn’t know that while Jack Lew was at Citgroup that he lobbied and got a bailout from TARP.

No. She may have sold her soul, but she hasn’t lost her mind. She knows all of this. She is completely aware that she is editing the truth, leaving out the most important part of the truth, so the remaining truth becomes a lie. Dr. Maddow is now a liar.

Ah, but her task isn’t done. It’s not enough that she manipulates the truth so that her audience will continue to believe that Obama is a man of the people and not a toady of Wall Street. Now she has to join in the frenzy of bringing down Mitt Romney as, well, as someone like…, like Jack Lew. The Republicans who despise Romney are doing it because they want to keep him from getting the nomination. But Dr. Maddow knows Romney will get the nomination. So she’s prepping her audience for the big lie next fall: Obama is on our side and Romney is on Wall Street’s side and we better support Obama or we’ll get this villain Romney. How delightful to instill this propaganda in her audience’s consciousness while using clips of Republicans themselves.

A sane person watching this wants to yell at her over and over as she describes how bad Romney is due to his disaster capitalism, “You mean like Jack Lew?”

Then finally along comes Dylan Rattigan. How creative this is! Bring on a man who has created a reputation for calling out the financial crimes of our system to talk about Romney with her. Well, Rattigan has to speak more truth than Rachel. He has to point out it’s not just Romney. He has to point out it’s standard operating procedure. He has to point out all those dratted Republicans support the same stuff.

But he stops short of saying, “Just like Jack Lew.” No, you won’t hear that on Dr. Maddow’s show on MSNBC.

No if you say that on MSNBC you will be fired. You might have your integrity but you won’t have fame and fortune anymore. You might be able to speak the truth on Current TV, but it will not be high def, it won’t have good graphics, and your audience share will drop drastically. You will no longer have assistants fawning all over you and plush limos picking you up from first class seats to drive you to high class hotels filled with expensive gift baskets when you want to report on things somewhere else than your regular studio.

But in this strange case of Dr. Maddow and Mr. Lew she doesn’t need her integrity anymore. She’s got that magic painting and that secret formula so she can be a lying monster and never look like one.