Fantasyland: Denial Has Poisoned the GOP

(Community Matters) “The country has a larger problem—’intellectual nihilism'”

hey, not to deny Ds have their own issues, and acknowledging the probabilities were otherwise very low for any president in this economy to win reelection  . . .

“Given that Romney had about as much of a human touch with voters as an ATM, it sometimes seemed as if a hologram were running for president. . . The blogger Steve Benen, who painstakingly curated and documented Mitt’s false statements during 2012, clocked a total of 917 as Election Day arrived – “we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers”

All politicians lie, and some of them, as Bob Kerrey famously said of Bill Clinton in 1996, are “unusually good” at it. Every campaign (certainly including Obama’s) puts up ads that stretch or obliterate the truth. But Romney’s record was exceptional by any standard.

At the policy level, this is the GOP that denies climate change, that believes low tax rates drive economic growth, and that identifies voter fraud where there is none. At the loony-tunes level, this is the GOP that has given us the birthers, websites purporting that Obama was lying about Osama bin Laden’s death, and not one but two (failed) senatorial candidates who redefined rape in defiance of medical science and simple common sense.

you can’t alienate every minority group in the country (blacks, Latinos, Asian-Americans, gays)—not to mention the majority group, women—and hope to win a national election.

Frank Rich: Fantasyland:Denial has poisoned the GOP and threatens the rest of the country too.

playing so loose with the truth is epidemic. yes, yes, yes . . . there’s lots of it in all politics. but, not as brazen and brash as we just saw by the defeated party. What’s interesting, I think many of the supporters know it and embraced it. One told me, he did and that I should acknowledge I’d do the same for my side. He assumed I already was. I don’t, won’t and didn’t.

no one had any idea how strikingly and unashamedly Romney-Ryan would bring out the etch-a-sketch. what’s interesting, this wasn’t part of one party’s evolution or even a new trend for the country. In the 1994 Kennedy-Romney debate, Romney did the same thing, tacking so far to the left that Kennedy said the next thing we know Romney’s going to announce he’s voting for me