Apropos of Wednesday night’s Republican debates, Esquire’s Charles Pierce worried that political reporters may be treating the race for the party’s presidential nomination as if it were a Brad Thor novel rather than a highly consequential real-world event.
“How do you cover a campaign in which 15 candidates are running on the basis of things that simply are not true…that simply do not exist?” wondered Pierce. “If the elite political press is going to treat fiction as fact as long as the fiction is delivered in a compelling, dramatic manner, then the country truly is lost.”
Pierce traced the political lineage of those candidates back to the president for whom the debate venue was named: “What we saw last night…was the triumph of fiction over fact, of fantasy over reality. In other words, what we saw was the most fitting tribute to Ronald Reagan ever produced…The final fealty of the Republican Party to total and complete bullshit has been sworn.”
From Pierce’s post (bolding added):
What we saw last night…was the triumph of fiction over fact, of fantasy over reality. In other words, what we saw was the most fitting tribute to Ronald Reagan ever produced. Congratulations, one and all. The final fealty of the Republican Party to total and complete bullshit has been sworn…
[Carly Fiorina] was relentless in her determination to launch pure crapola into the stratosphere… [O]n many occasions, she lied her ass off with a formidable brand of armored certitude. If you eliminate "telling the truth" from the assessment, Carly Fiorina was every bit the winner she is universally acclaimed to be this morning.
By far, her most effective falsehood was her thunderous denunciation of what she allegedly "saw" in those phony videos involving Planned Parenthood…
Now, it is important to remember that those phony videos were accepted as being genuine by everyone on the stage in both debates. They all stated their belief that Planned Parenthood is shopping baby parts for profit, which a number of state investigations, and almost every bit of common sense, have determined is not true. At this point, the CMP could create a video of PP doctors eating a baby's liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti, and these people would swear to its authenticity…
There is a monumental question facing political journalists this morning. How do you cover a campaign in which 15 candidates are running on the basis of things that simply are not true, on the basis of things that simply do not exist?...
…If the elite political press is going to treat fiction as fact as long as the fiction is delivered in a compelling, dramatic manner, then the country truly is lost. If Carly Fiorina is adjudged to be the winner of a debate simply because of how "crisply" she delivered lies about Planned Parenthood, or how "forcefully" she responded to a cartoon like Donald Trump…then there is a problem in the political process that is metastasizing by the hour. Ronald Reagan was the index patient for that problem. They truly are his children now.
