Times Have Changed, It's Okay to Lie

By Kevin Drum, Mother Jones
Tue Jun. 12, 2012 10:08 AM PDT

Last month David Corn noted that Mitt Romney was claiming that "government" would control half the economy once Obamacare was up and running. He's still saying it, and today Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post gives it a score of four Pinocchios and says Romney should drop it. "No amount of tweaking will get it right," he says.

That's true: this particular claim is untweakable. Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom twists himself in knots trying to justify it, but it doesn't do any good. There's just no way to pretend there's any real basis for Romney's claim.

It also doesn't matter. Politicians have increasingly discovered over the past couple of decades that even on a national stage you can lie pretty blatantly and pay no price since the mainstream media, trapped in its culture of objectivity, won't really call you on it, limiting themselves to fact checking pieces like Kessler's buried on an inside page. And because virtually nobody except political junkies ever sees this stuff, it doesn't hurt their campaigns at all.

(More here.)