Post-Truth Politics, or How Republicans Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

The Post-Truth Campaign – NYTimes.com

Over all, Mr. Obama’s positions on economic policy resemble those that moderate Republicans used to espouse. Yet Mr. Romney portrays the president as the second coming of Fidel Castro and seems confident that he will pay no price for making stuff up.

Welcome to post-truth politics.

Why does Mr. Romney think he can get away with this kind of thing? Well, he has already gotten away with a series of equally fraudulent attacks. In fact, he has based pretty much his whole campaign around a strategy of attacking Mr. Obama for doing things that the president hasn’t done and believing things he doesn’t believe.

Krugman nails it again — while Mitt is the most obvious offender by dint of being the Republican front-runner and likely eventual nominee, they all lie and dissemble constantly, and the media just lets them get away with it over and over again without a word on how a significant fraction of the national political landscape has become the province of narcissistic truth-dodgers.

As much as I would love to see a lefty in the White House in this country, it won’t happen, and for anyone at all to pretend that President Obama is some kind of crypto-socialist and wannabe dictator is beyond ridiculous; the man is a centrist generally, and a consensus politician. In the European context, he’d be a fine liberal member of, say, the CDU, or a One Nation Tory, for example, but he is by no means a leftist of any kind, and to pretend otherwise is dishonest at best, and leads us to the following question; regardless of whether his policies would be good or bad (and they would almost certainly be disastrous for the country as a whole), do we really want someone as truth-impaired as Mitt Romney anywhere near the White House?

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ETA: Appropriately, the Manics: