Substance-free Republicans default to lazy mendacity

Substance-free Republicans default to lazy mendacity

Romney's criticisms of Obama -- on full display during the debates -- don't even make sense. Does it matter?

The hallmark of Republican thinking these days, especially as expressed in Romney/Ryan rhetoric, is just the sheer laziness of it. That’s presumably a consequence of having developed an amazingly efficient partisan press. There’s just very little incentive remaining to develop actual policies or even a real critique of Barack Obama’s administration. After all, if the president is a Kenyan socialist intent on destroying the United States, it’s hardly necessary to explain exactly where his policies are going wrong or why.

That often shows up in the way that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan dissemble. Every presidential campaign lies, but what distinguishes this crowd is a lazy mendacity in which there’s not even an attempt to make their falsehoods plausible (here’s another recent, excellent example).

But it also shows up in their basic rhetoric. Why put together a critique of Barack Obama’s foreign policy when they can just refer to unspecified disasters and know that anyone watching Fox News will nod in agreement? And thus we get Paul Ryan’s astonishingly substance-free line that “What we are witnessing, as we turn on our television screens these days, is the absolute unraveling of the Obama foreign policy.”

Ryan trotted out “unraveling” three times in the vice-presidential debate.

The first one was at the end of a scattershot answer that was mostly about Libya:

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http://www.salon.com/2012/10/12/gops_lazy_mendacity/