The acceptance speeches by Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney at the GOP convention were only slightly more grounded in reality than Clint Eastwood\u2019s conversation with an empty chair. Ryan is infamous for his pack of lies, from the attempt to blame President Obama for the closing of a Wisconsin GM factory that began shutting down during the Bush presidency, to the fantasy that Ryan\u2019s austerity agenda is about something other than gutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in order to enrich Wall Street speculators and the insurance industry.<\/p>\n
Romney was just as bad, with a rambling rumination on how much he wished Barack Obama\u2019s presidency had \u201csucceeded.\u201d Coming from the man who tried to scuttle Obama\u2019s successful interventions to save GM and Chrysler, and who spent the rest of the president\u2019s first term organizing a campaign to displace him, Romney\u2019s line wasn\u2019t remotely believable.<\/p>\n
The Republican Party is not fretting about fact-checkers. Far from it; the GOP has now fully entered the netherworld of post-truth politics, from the wholesale denial of climate change to spreading fairy tales about Obama\u2019s welfare policy (see Betsy Reed, page 4). Romney and Ryan know they\u2019re going to need big lies to win. That\u2019s pathetic, but it could work\u2014especially if the mainstream media continue to evade their basic duty to call the GOP on these whoppers (see Eric Alterman, page 10).<\/p>\n
This poses a real challenge for the Democrats, who can\u2019t get bogged down in the minutiae of every Republican lie\u2014there are just too many of them.<\/p>\n