The Press Can't Handle the Truth
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What actual good is a press which treats folks they call liars as legitimate and credible?
There are plenty of good articles about the campaign of lies that the Romney campaign has adopted as its primary strategy against President Obama. In them, Romney's deliberate lies, half-truths, and other mendacious statements are detailed and confirmed. Yet, there isn't any real or obvious penalty in the press for lying to them. If anything, the prevaricating candidate is rewarded by even more coverage; more exposure, until the lies either fall from their promoted interest or the candidate is just allowed to move on to their next subject.
Romney and Ryan have found that politics creates its own reality for candidates which is directly related to the number of folks they're able to convince to go along with their distortions of the truth. If you can accept the lie, for whatever reason, that Barack Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya, you can help the liar perpetuate it by providing a bubble of support to lift them up and away from any accountability their opponents or detractors might provide.
That is why it is so important for their opponent to work as hard as they're able to convince a larger number of supporters to elevate their perspective and challenge of those lies by supporting a candidate who will represent their point of view in their campaign for office. Sadly, it's not always the truth which wins the day.
We saw George Bush buoyed by his Iraq lies, into reelection over the truth-telling John Kerry. Bush's lies didn't become true when he was elected, but, they were rendered operable; the elected official was able to carry those lies further -- into actual policy and practice.
As the press has found, it's not nearly enough to point out that a candidate is a liar; they need to actually convince someone to call them that for the liar to experience or suffer any sort of consequence. There is simply no mechanism to actually call these candidates on their lies, outside of voting them down with a majority of ballots. The electoral college makes that public accountability even less certain.
That's all a very real measure of the daunting task for President Obama and VP Biden in this race against two practiced and professional prevaricators; two republican, political liars looking for a voting public pass to continue their mendacious representations of their policy and initiatives into office. That's the next obvious step. The press can holler till they're blue that the emperor has no clothes, but until the public puts their scorn into the form of some kind of political action, the pretenders have room and incentive to carry on.
So, here's a hope that the VP, tonight, and the President, in the subsequent debates, convinces enough voting Americans that Romney and Ryan are inveterate liars; enough folks to vote them down. That's the challenge for our Democratic candidates in the remaining moments of this election. That's the only real accountability and consequence these candidates will actually experience for the way they handle the truth.
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