I don't think Ezra Klein is that impartial, but it is a disturbing phenomenon.
Everyone knows Romney's accusation about Obama gutting welfare reform has no truth to it, and yet he repeats it. He is doing it for effect alone. Strange times.
I am fully convinced that the Republicans (and to a lesser extent the Democrates) are painfully aware of just how uninformed and unengaged the American public is, as well as how docile and non-confrontational the press corps is. They have made a cynical and calulated decision to simply lie their asses off. They know full well that the number of people that swallow it wholesale will be far greater than the ones who see what's going on, and of the ones that call them on their bullshit, most of those will be from the opposing camp anyway, and therefore not a potential vote, so it doesn't matter. Just lie to us. It works. If we are on your side we won't hold it against you, -we'll probably just praise you for your boldness and 'winner take all' strategy. Your 'guts'. Besides, what is Truth anyway? American politics increasingly operates in the religious paradigm where Truth is not something that exists independently, but rather is pronounced by the authority you swear your allegiance to. You don't observe it, you have it told to you. It's sickening. Part of me just gets mad and thinks we deserve what we get, but another part of me knows that's not really fair when the press is so completely an organ of the corporations and both parties. The public (as an aggragate entity) doesn't really have much of a chance. Now both parties each have their own 24 cable news channel, so we can choose our propaganda...or go somewhere else for the corporate alternative.
I agree with your assessment, but there is one saving grace, and that's that this strategy can't be sustainable. Eventually the mountain of lies has to cave in on itself. It happened to the Soviet bloc and it will happen here. When your entire policy is based around lying and heightened military spending, you will fail in due course; that seems to be a truth of governments around the world. This has gotten so bad that even Fox News, in an editorial last week, said this:
Again, that's from Fox News. When they're calling bullshit on Republicans, we know its gotten bad. Of course, the Romney camp responded by saying:
...to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to facts, Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech. On this measure, while it was Romney who ran the Olympics, Ryan earned the gold.
We're not going let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.
That must be (one of the) the worst political statement(s) of the year. If the same statement were to be made here, the guy who said it would be lynched. Even Wilders has the decency to not openly lie (even though I don't know what is worse, him lying or the fact that he speaks the truth...)We're not going let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.
Maybe the highly regarded free speech thingy? Or maybe the fact that the Americans just don't care...