Ah, GOP

One of my concerns of late is the sense that facts are malleable. I understand spin, and don't like it, but there is a difference between making an argument about how much something will cost (speculation) and asserting something like death panels (simply not in the bill). There is a funny irony that many of my conservative friends often miss. After years of pillorying liberals as under the spell of post-modern thought where "there was no truth," to see conservatives essentially present this kind of take on the truth is odd, to say the least.

As I have noted here, I hear conservatives now saying that it was Republicans who pushed Civil Rights through, and Dick Armey has recently argued that Alexander Hamilton was the proper model for the anti-government Tea Party. When challenged on that point, he dismissed intellectuals and noted that the questioner had heard the opposite from some uninformed political science professor.

The past is what you want it to be. The founders all saw the Christian faith as you do, not the way they did. In your viewpoint, they would have no problem with non-denominational preachers and Mormons leading the fight for "Christian Nation."

If this isn't bad enough, we also see that the conservatives have learned the Bush lessons from the previous administration. When Clinton was found in a lie, (and we all know that happened) it usually resulted in some kind of "tail between the legs" retreat. Bush and Rove realized that they didn't have to do that and could simply act as if the truth had not been discovered. Their lesson was that when your lie is exposed, keep repeating the lie, and even repeat it with more conviction. Just as Newt Gingrich has decided to do with the 16,000 IRS agents. Much like Palin's "death panels," the specter of IRS agents busting into your house to see if you have health coverage is too ridiculous to believe, but also too compelling for a right wing already addled by Fox News. So, you don't retreat from that kind of goodness. You just keep repeating the lie. After all, you have spent the last 20 years telling the right wing faithful to not believe the media, so they will not mind some fact-checking.

Colbert was more brilliant than we knew:

And reality has a well-known liberal bias.

Sigh.