That is just one of the many powerful lines from a brilliant op ed in tomorrow'sNew York Time by the fantastic Charles M. Blow. The piece is titled The G.O.P. Fact Vacuum and begins:
Honesty is a lost art. Facts are for losers. The truth is dead.
Pick one.
The piece has a major focus on the words of Paul Ryan from Thursday night, including the now-viral takedown on Foxnews.com by Sally Kohn (who is an unpaid op ed writer there). After quoting some from Kohn, and from other criticisms of Ryan's prevarications, Blow offers:
So much was written about this and other Republican attempts to distort and deny the truth this week. But I’m beginning to worry that many Americans are growing weary of isolating the lies, coming as they did in torrents.
Blow then switches his focus to Romney, and does a comparison between the falsities and exaggerations of the two Presidential candidates, noting of the analysis by Politifact as to ?pants on fire" statements:
Nearly 1 in 10 statements by Romney earned flaming slacks, versus 1 out of every 50 for Obama.”
Blow then challenges with two paragraphs of basic questions:
If we allow our leaders to completely abandon any semblance of honesty, what do we have left? When rancid disinformation stands in the space where actual information should be, what will grow?
And how can a party that incessantly repeats the mantra that our rights were granted by God repeatedly violate a basic tenet of almost every religion: truth-telling? What does it mean when a party that trafficks in American greatness trades in human horridness?
Read the Blow piece.
Pass it on.
Including the final paragraph:
We deserve better and should demand better. We deserve better than a weather vane candidacy that doesn’t care whether it’s being candid. We deserve better than a party and a presidential aspirant so wanton that they refuse to let facts get in the way of a fairy tale.
Or to put it more simply as I did with the quote used for the title of this post:
Propaganda is one thing; prevarication is another.