While Democrats and some of the media (http://video.msnbc.msn.com/...) are finally waking up to the use of lies as a propaganda technique among Republicans, one needs to look deeper to understand the underlying foundations of the Republican strategists. The fact that the Republicans are not concerned with the facts, is much like how Marxists of the Frankfurt School addressed the issue of "facts" and knowledge. This is not a substantial diversion from the Leninist approach concerning lying to enemies as a tool to disrupt attachment of the masses to opposing political groups, but it furthers the struggle (see Voline, The Unknown Revolution, 1947). Republicans are becoming more like Marxists every day. While the Marxists' state products in the 20th century created dictatorships where a small elite controlled the wealth of communists states, Republicans are creating states where a small minority controls the wealth of capitalist states.
The dialogue Karl Rove has introduced in the past 20 years is organized to obfuscate the truth and gain political ends. Reading Rove's book one is struck by the lack of concern for the facts or knowledge. Max Cleland's analysis of Rove's logic is telling (his book, Heart of a Patriot), as is Craig Unger's Boss Rove. But these focus on Rove as a manipulator. Moore and Slater's, The Architect: Karl Rove and the Dream of Absolute Power, provides more incite into Rove's lack of concern for the truth and his belief that outcomes is all that matters. Kellner in his article "Bush-speak and the politics of lying," in Presidential Studies Quarterly, v. 37, n. 4, Dec. 2007: 622-645, calls it "the politics of lying." This has become embedded in the Religious Right, as David Gushee found in his studies of Evangelicals and the Republican political movement, people were encouraged to slime their opponents and to spread rumors and lies which is what was done to Senator Kerry and John McCain (Evangelicals and Politics: a Rethinking," Journal of Law and Religion, v. 23, n. 1, 2007/8:1-14).
What is incredible is who similar this is to the Marxists. This is how Ernest Gellner (in his book, Postmodernism: Reason & Religion) describes the philosophy of the Frankfort School of Marism,
"Unenslaved to the positivist cult of what was, the investigation of which was but a camouflaged ratification of the status quo , a genuinely critical free spirit found himself in a good position to determine just what it was that should be, in a dialectical opposition to that which merely was. Those were the days when a 'positivist' was a man invoking facts against Marxism; nowadays, he is anyone who makes use of facts at all, or allows their existence, whatever his aim."
More on Republicans as Communists at http://www.dailykos.com/... see Eric Blair for Peace is War, more is less, Romney is Jefferson (1984).