Matters to me, big time. Worse, it matters that there are -- evidently -- many Americans for whom lies don't matter. You know: "Everybody lies!"
Actually, no. Not everybody lies. Lies are not minor breaches. Maybe, as Steve Benen suggests, Mitt Romney, a serial and serious liar, has told the lies so often he has come to believe them. On the other hand, his campaign staff don't think lies are bad.
... When pressed, Romney and his aides have freely admitted, more than once, that niceties such as facts, evidence, and reason just aren’t that important to them. Dishonest “propaganda” should simply be excepted and accepted, they’ve said. ... Steve Benen
But we don't accept them, guys, and we don't make exceptions for candidates to use them deliberately and frequently. "I’ve been watching national campaigns for quite a while," Benen writes, "and I can’t think of any comparable major-party campaigns acting this way, especially this far from the election."
Benen has been following Daniel Larison's posts about Romney. Daniel Larison is a conservative and he's an editor and writer at American Conservative. Larison focuses on one of Romney's Big Lies: the business, oft repeated, about Obama going on an "apology tour" of the world, a dig at Obama's foreign policy. Larison writes:
Obama has largely continued Bush’s national security policies, and he has not made very many departures from Bush’s foreign policy, except on Russia (where the departure has been fairly successful) and to a much lesser extent on Israel (where he has nothing to show for it). There isn’t very much that Obama has actually done abroad in the last two and a half years that clashes with what Romney thinks the U.S. ought to be doing, which is why he has to exaggerate the few differences that exist and otherwise repeat nonsense about Obama’s non-existent apologies. ...Daniel Larison, American Conservative
True enough. The point has been to create a false Obama -- "they were opportunities for the people making these charges to wrap themselves in the mantle of American nationalism, define belief in American exceptionalism in such a way that it could only apply to people who agreed with them, and to impute anti-Americanism to anyone else."
But, as Larison points out, it tells us more about a group of Republicans and Romney himself than it does about Obama and Democrats.
The entire exercise is clearly fraudulent, but it is also one that many Republicans find quite satisfying. Romney can reconcile his habit of saying whatever people want to hear with his need to satisfy partisans during the nomination contest: who better to make an absurd falsehood into the core of his campaign than Romney? Looked at this way, Romney’s shameless willingness to say anything could be more of an advantage in securing the nomination than anyone thought possible. ... Daniel Larison
Larison might back off in horror at the thought that the Republican lying problem goes beyond Romney. But lying doesn't begin or end with Romney. The lie-culture has gone beyond the pale -- and been beyond the pale for thirty whole years. Reagan's staff did it in spades. Gingrich turned the House into a cheap imitation of itself in the mid '90's. Bush and Cheney lied us into war and then lied untold thousands of people to death, and some of those deaths were very, very nasty, in "black sites" around the world.
The Republican party has so much to answer for -- so much it has covered up shamelessly -- that we have to wonder whether the grabs for power over the three branches of government isn't so much ideological as it is a move meant to save their literal skins. If everything their cherished leaders have done over the past three decades actually came out in a series of Democratic administrations and with Democratic leaders of investigative Congressional committees, we'd see a perp march like nothing this nation has ever seen. For many Republicans and their corporate backers, having power means being able to sit on evidence of malfeasance.
Now that's worth lying for, don'cha think? But the real question is, does it matter to voters?
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NB: Some commenters at Steve Benen's site point to the media who allow Romney (among many others) to get away with it. That raises a whole separate question about why the media both abet lies and lie. We know the answer. We know who owns the media. We pay the media to lie to us. What we haven't fully absorbed is that no one is rushing in to save us. We have to do it ourselves.
