The Republican Party has, over time, become obsessed with what I like to call "group pretend". You may remember group pretend from when you were in elementary school. I remember in sixth grade that our teacher had some people come by our class who were drama students, and they had a bunch of us kids pretending that we were frogs, then birds, then dogs. It was fun; it made us laugh, and nobody got hurt. With modern-day Republicans, their version of group pretend more resembles a group of criminals who come up with a story to justify their criminal behavior.
The world saw Republicans put their version of group pretend on display during the Nixon Administration. There were actually tapes of President Richard Nixon instructing people on how to cover things up--how to try to block investigations by trying to make certain investigators back off from investigating the Watergate Scandal by trying to make them think that they were treading upon a national security issue. Nixon. who was a pathological liar, had absolutely no problem telling others to lie or to cover up. It was the start of a Republican obsession with focusing on the end results and justifying any means to get there.
During the run-up to the Reagan Administration, Republicans first used Supply-Side Economics to create the lie that tax cuts would magically pay for themselves in order to justify gigantic federal tax cuts. Later, that Administration simply ignored federal laws in order to create a scheme that would involve selling arms to Iran and illegally using the money to fund the Contras in Nicaragua--only to create a giant lie that somehow this entire operation would be conducted without President Reagan both knowing about it and approving it. During the Reagan Administration, there were plenty of Republican voters who denied the facts staring them in the face because they started with the assumption that both Nixon and Reagan were good men, so, of course, any so-called "evidence" against them must be made up.
However, that was nothing compared to the massive group pretends that were to follow. In order to create a neverending massive group pretend among Republican voters, the Federal Communications Commission, under Reagan, obliterated the Fairness Doctrine in 1987:
The fairness doctrine of the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC), introduced in 1949, was a policy that required the holders of broadcast licenses to both present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was—in the FCC's view—honest, equitable, and balanced.
You see, Republicans had fallen in love with group pretend, and the last thing that they wanted was some federal organization telling them how they had to manage their group pretend. If they wanted to say that all Republicans were great, and that all Democrats were evil, well, by Jove, no one better prevent them from doing that.
Shortly after the FCC got rid of the Fairness Doctrine, radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh began filling the airwaves with hour after hour of lies about how Republicans were always right and Democrats were always wrong. Republicans, who had already gotten used to group pretend during the Nixon Administration and most of the Reagan administration, tuned in all over America to hear how wonderful Republicans were and how truly awful those Democrats, those dirty freaking hippies, were. The era of nationwide group pretend, also sometimes called "groupthink" or "mob psychology", had begun.
As I watched the House impeachment hearings play out on Thursday and Friday of this week, I wondered to some extent how much the House Republican members actually believed the lies that they were telling--that Donald Trump had done absolutely nothing wrong, and that the impeachment hearing was only happening because Democrats wanted to overturn the 2016 election. I decided that they all knew that what they were telling were lies, but that all of these Republican politicians by now had decided that "politics was just a game" and that they were simply playing that game.
Every once in a while, a person gets to see how Republicans justify the huge amount of lying that they do. Recently, I was reading about how one Republican had appeared on a radio show and said some things that were both outrageous and completely, and proveably, not true on that show. When someone had asked him about it, he said something to the effect of, "What people do on these shows is they exaggerate things". In other words, he had reframed lying in his mind as simply exaggeration, and he justified this lying, or "exaggeration" as being OK because--that's just what people do on these shows. In other words, that's just how the game is played.
So, if you wonder how Republicans can live with themselves while knowing full well that they are lying their asses off, I figure this is how they do it. They apparently have all convinced themselves that this is all a game, and that this is how you play the game. They have all reverted back to the days where the whole class was pretending they were frogs. The only problem was, in those days, the entire nation didn't suffer from a few kids playing group pretend.