DOES THIS MEAN WE HAVE TO RETURN SADDAM HUSSEIN'S CORPSE TO POWER?

This is rapidly becoming the most important story in America, apparently:

Beyonce did not sing the national anthem live at President Obama’s inauguration.

Millions of viewers around the world were stunned by the singer's spectacular rendition of the anthem but The Times has learnt that she was lip-syncing to a pre-recorded backing track....

The very mature American right is now going to inform us that this means the Obama second term is a travesty and a sham.

Of course, this is hardly the first patriotic moment of song to be lip-synced:

It was what turned a star into a superstar: Whitney Houston's mesmerizing rendition of the national anthem at the 1991 Super Bowl. Houston’s powerful "Star Spangled Banner" performance came at a poignant, patriotic time -- the U.S. had just entered the 1991 Gulf War.

But ... [w]hat the Super Bowl audience and hundreds of millions of TV viewers heard was lip-synched.

"The music was pre-recorded, and so was the vocal,” confirmed Rickey Minor, who was Houston's musical director at the time....

The Reagan presidency heralded America's right-wing backlash, but the backlash didn't take on a fully martial aspect until the Persian Gulf War -- a yellow-ribbon-bedecked war one opposed at one's peril. The Whitney Houston rendition of the national anthem was heard less than two weeks after the war began; it literally ended with F-16 fighter jets flying overhead. The performance didn't take place at a government function, but it was as much a part of the process of manufacturing consent for the war as Hitler comparisons and false stories of babies in incubators being removed and left to die.

So if Beyonce's lip-syncing is going to be held against President Obama, can we also hold Whitney lip-syncing against the Bush family, the GOP, and the entire institutional right? Can we have all the blood and treasure back? Can we ban Jeb and George P. from ever running for president?