The death of shame

Geez, I wasn't going to write anything about the story with the Hannah Montana tickets but the follow-up drives me up a wall:

The mother who wrote a fictional essay that won her 6-year-old daughter tickets to a Hannah Montana concert said she never claimed the story she wrote about the child's father dying in Iraq was true.

"We never said anything like this was a true story - never," the mother, Priscilla Ceballos, insisted. "It was just an essay. We do essays all the time. It did not say that it had to be true."

"We did the essay and that's what we did to win," Ceballos said in an interview with Dallas TV station KDFW. "We did whatever we could do to win."

Indeed you did, miss. Wait a second. Didn't I hear a similar sentiment expressed about a week ago?

"I left Flick to certain annihilation. But BB gun mania knows no loyalty."

I'll be the Old Man used the "son in an iron lung" ploy to get his Major Award, too. Bastards.