This is an expansion of a few comments I've made in some of the current posts about the sheer scale of the dishonesty coming out of the Republican Clown Convention in Tampa.
In virtually every one, several commenters are asking wtf is with the escalation of blatant falsehoods, to such an extent that Fox News of all places is calling Ryan a world record holder for lying. Some are encouraged that such reactions from the legacy media are occurring, but I am not among them.
Truth does not matter in American politics. I think most of us have accepted that much over the last decade or more.
What matters is controlling the narrative, and that is what the lies are doing. They are reframing the campaign into a referendum on president Obama, and that has been the Romney campaign's stated goal all along.
kamarvt explains why this is working below the rising orange sea surface.
"When you're explaining, you're losing"
This is a truism of American politics, and an accurate one. I visit Huffington Post just long enough to scan the headlines, then come here or to other more serious blogs to get more information.
A whole lot of people stop at the headline reading. That is how political lies take root. "I heard that
X" is a common start for many an ill-informed political rant, and it is up to the better-informed to take the time to explain the disinformation. This has a couple of drawbacks; some people will wander away from the water cooler, others discount the debunking as a partisan opinion, others simply disbelieve that such an audacious pack of lies would be told by a major party as policy, and still others turn off from the entire subject, and are left with doubt about the truth and/or a disinterest in politics generally.
All of these reactions benefit the lie and the liar; it increases the face value of the lie while devaluing the rebuttal, regardless of the level of fact coming from each. In the case of the recent avalanche of lies being told at the RNC, that level is 100% vs 0%, so there is simply no downside to ramping it up, and up, and up.
That's why birtherism is suddenly coming back, direct from the horse owner's mouth.
That's why the welfare lie is being told over and over.
That's why a dishonestly edited quote from the president, a James O'Keefe moment if there ever was one, became the centerpiece of the convention.
That's why the Romney campaign can state expressly that they won't have their efforts dictated by fact (checkers).
The blizzard of bald-faced lies that Paul Ryan told last night was designed to turn the campaign into a referendum on Obama, and it worked. All I heard on the news this morning, and the current rec list here, is consumed with debunking the dozens of flat-out lies he told.
We're explaining the president's actions as a necessary part of debunking the lies. We have to. The Swift Boat Liars showed us what happens when we don't. That means we're losing this part of the election, right here, right now. The campaign just turned into the referendum on Obama that the GOP has been openly wishing for since 2010.
I am certainly not advocating we abandon this critical part of advocating for our candidate, but I think it is important the we, as activists, understand the reason for it and spend a bit less mental energy trying to figure out what is wrong with these cretins.
It's reprehensible, it is cynical in the extreme, but it is effective. There is nothing wrong with them from a pathological standpoint. It is merely that they are ruthless, as they have always been. They're more unfettered with it now because they have to be. Their candidate sucks and they know it, and this is the final push to con the American people into giving what's left of this country to the 1%.
I'll leave you with one example; the Medicare lie Ryan told last night.
As you know, he lied about what those "cuts" are (cuts to providers, crackdown on fraud, streamlining due to changes in delivery as a function of the ACA). NPR and others discussed this, but stopped halfway; they said the cuts were the same as in the Ryan plan. True as far as it goes. What was left out was that those cuts do not affect recipients in any way, ad that the promised repeal of the ACA would make matters far, far worse, and would impact both current and future recipients. . The takeaway; Obama cut Medicare.
Naturally discussion starts from that false assumption.
Wash in acid, rinse in the tears of Ed Murrow, and repeat on a propaganda network that is the envy of every dictator in the world.