There's a lot to dislike on da Kos today.
No, no. Not what people are saying, or how they're saying it. Just what they're reporting of what other people are saying.
Republican people.
GrafZeppelin's diary on Dana Rohrbacher's sputtering diatribe on TV last night. Joan's front-pager about South Carolina's mysterious dead voters, so reminiscent of a certain Wisconsin senator's "list of known Communists."
Not just today. There's a common thread running through nearly every word uttered by prominent 'Pubs these days.
They're flat out lies.
"President Obama hasn't created one job."
"More illegals are crossing the border than ever before."
"This president has increased the debt more than any in history."
Lie after lie, all asserted in the most authoritative, don't-you-dare-contradict-me-boy tones. All provably, entirely false.
This rhetorical style of "I'll say anything I want to" has gone beyond amusing, beyond maddening. It's sad. And saddening.
Republicans used to have ideas. They used to have governing philosophies. They used to have programs and principles, different from ours, not always valid, but interesting and thought-provoking, stimulating complex debate and yielding policies that reflected the best all sides had to offer.
All that is gone now. There is no more honest debate across the aisle, because there is simply no honesty on one side of it.
Not to say that every Dem is the object of Diogenes' search. Our elected representatives are as likely as anyone to fudge, fib, finagle and finesse.
But Republicans--on the Hill, on the tube, on the hustings--have ascended to a plane of mendacity I've never seen in public life. They remind me of certain people I have known who were acknowledged by all who knew them as having "a problem," people who would spin a transparent falsehood even when the truth would have better served.
It's possible that I have been naive or paying insufficient attention, but this seems a new, and terribly sad, development in our national life.