Pity This Busy Monster Delicate Flower Democracy

This is the major power of that tape. The disorienting effect of all the lying over a very long period of time is such that when there’s a record that speaks the opposite of a just-issued denial…. https://t.co/rRmvurlSQt

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) April 22, 2022

I've heard an anecdote which may be true, and may be apocryphal. The story goes that LBJ told an aide to release a story about an political opponent, a particularly scurrilous and scandalous charge (what it was is irrelevant).

"But sir!," the aide responds in shock, "That't not true!"

"I know it isn't," LBJ responds.  "I just wanna seem him deny it!"

"Disorienting effect of lying all the time?"  Ted Cruz took office warning Texans the UN was going to take away their golf.  You could look it up. Republicans for half-a-century, at least, have denounced government spending as the original sin which saps the will, impurifies the purity of our national essence, leads to sloth and sin among the non-white people of America, and causes all manner of economic (and therefore spiritual) evil, becuase God wants the rich to be rich and the poor to cleanse themselves of their moral turpitude (which makes them poor) by hard, hard work and unceasing effort to get rich and thus be among the elect and morally upright.

Or, at the very least, that government spending sends money to the place where the socks in the dryer go, and business spending is good for America because it channels money to the people most suited to have it; even if most government spending is far more equitably distributed in the economy than business spending is, which tends to go to the wealthy like they had a vacuum cleaner sucking it up.  And as we have seen in recent history.

Mostly the sham story is aimed at Democrats who spend money on people (LBJ, even though he dropped billions down the rathole of Vietnam), while Republicans understand that the business of American business is business, and government should act accordingly.  When Trump ran up the deficit, it was good.  When Biden took office, suddenly the deficit was all his fault and the reason we were all going to die.  Again.

Disorienting effect of all the lying?  What, because you just noticed people lie?  Or because Trump was so clumsy at it?  Give it six months, even the tapes won't prove anything against McCarthy.  I remember the Watergate tapes.  There are people who are still convinced Nixon did no wrong.  There were people convinced of that even after the tapes were transcribed and published and became, briefly, a national best-seller.

Go and please the world.