Discredit where discredit is due

Yesterday I heard a news report stating that the Washington Post had uncovered an attempt by a woman to spread false stories about Judge Roy Moore by accusing him of rape when she was an underaged girl.  The story didn't check out so the WaPo refused to run the story, then they announced that this attempt had been made and followed the woman back to Project Veritas.  This is the project that has tried so many times to "discredit" so called liberal media efforts with "sting" operations.  They set up meetings with left leaning organizations, spin some story sounding like a parody of everything that liberals are supposedly supporting, like late term on demand abortions, cheating welfare, or any number of things that the right wing hyperventilates about, and they secretly record these sessions.  Then Project Veritas' modus operandi is to selectively edit the video in ways that amplify or totally mischaracterize the point and results of the meeting.  (Remember the Acorn "scandal"?)  just about everything that this organization does shades the truth, takes things out of context or just plain lies.  It seems as if they are going for an ironic interpretation of the name "Veritas".

So, why?  Why do people on the right (and it seems to happen mostly on the right) feel the need to lie or distort when it comes to political discourse.  Why does Fox News run anything that Project Veritas give them, every time, when each and every time they do it is shown to be at best out of context and at worst outright lies?  Why do they think that scoring political points is more important than being truthful?  This proclivity to shade the truth, or lie, or mislead, permeates the entire right wing conservative thought leadership.  For example, they want tax cuts.  And when they defend their need for tax cuts they use pseudo economic arguments that not only don't stand up to empirical evidence but also don't really make a lot of common sense.  If they said "I don't think it's fair that I, as a rich person, should pay a higher percentage of my income in taxes than poor people," then we could have an intelligent fact based argument about progressive vs. regressive taxation.  Or, they could say that taxation itself is an authoritarian forced redistribution of wealth under threat of violence and is therefore no different than highway robbery.  Then we could have a thoughtful argument about anarcho-capitalist political philosophy vs. everybody else.

But that isn't what they do.  They, instead, launch into a discussion of how a rising tide lifts all boats and the invisible hand of supply side economics will lead to the rich and corporate leaders investing the windfall of slashed taxes into capital investment that will open up factories making widgets right here in America and the money will magically (maybe like Voodoo?) cascade down to the poor and middle class just like it did when Saint Ronald Reagan was President.  OK.  It won't, and it didn't.  It's a lie and it always has been, and there was a time when even people in the Republican party knew it.  (Democrats didn't coin the phrase Voodoo Economics)  But it helped them convince gullible people that they could get a tax cut, not have to reduce government spending and the economy would grow.  It's like saying they could drink all the beer they wanted and the effort of lifting the glass to their mouths would burn all the calories so they'd lose weight too!  The perpetual motion machine of economic theories.  The best part is, they guy who convinced Reagan that it was a good idea, was lying to him too. 

So it's not a surprise that sites like Breitbart (where Project Veritas got it's real start) and InfoWars tend to traffic in a lot of deceitful, slanted and verifiably false so called news time and time again.  But how is it that they keep our uncles and cousins coming back for more each time even though they have been continuously debunked? 

There are at least two things at play here.  One is, much of bullshit these sites traffic in is designed to discredit mainstream media.  By doing this they can better position themselves as arbiters of truth.  The other, and maybe related element, is that this is all just a game to them that they have to win at any cost.  So telling a lie to push their agenda is just the cost of the game.  The scoring of political points is the thing and the Veritas was never really the intent. 

The bottom line is, if you have to lie to win a political argument then stop pretending it's about doing what is right for the country and its people.  This is about you and your ego.  It's about you getting your tax cut.  It's about you and your political party winning the game of politics.  And it's disgusting.