Get the transcript: Mitt Romney and the Republican Party's antipathy toward reality

MR. ROMNEY: I ' I ' I want to make sure we get that for the record, because it took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Get the transcript.

MS. CROWLEY: It ' he did in fact, sir.

So let me ' let me call it an act of terrorism ' (inaudible) '

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Can you say that a little louder, Candy? (Laughter, applause.)

MS. CROWLEY: He did call it an act of terror.

That Mitt Romney got caught telling a falsehood, in real time, in front of tens of millions of live viewers, was not the big surprise. Romney tells lies, all the time, in front of everyone. What was so shocking about Romney getting caught lying about President Obama's reaction to the horrors of the terror attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya was that it was a member of the traditional media who called him out. Usually, members of the traditional media don't bother with real time fact-checking, and debate moderator Candy Crowley never has been known as overly friendly to Democrats, but this Romney falsehood was just too big and too ugly, with facts too obvious to ignore. And Republicans have reacted to this unexpected interlude into the realm of reality with accustomed derangement.

When Romney got all excited, and wanted everyone to note that Obama at the debate had called the Benghazi terror attack a terror attack, so he could make the false point that the president had waited two weeks before first calling the terror attack a terror attack, you could almost see Crowley scowling and thinking, "Oh, bullshit!" But the most interesting aspect of that defining political moment was the expression on Romney's face. The lifelong petty little bully seemed to think he had a gotcha moment, just as he seemed to think he had a gotcha moment the day of the attack, when he smirkingly tried to score cheap and sleazy political points off a still developing story that was really about horror and sadness and irreparable loss. To anyone with a basic sense of humanity. But if you watch the video of Romney during that seminal moment of the second presidential debate, what is most striking isn't his juvenile demeanor, it's the confidence that was fueling that demeanor. And that's where we get to the real story.

Romney tells lies as naturally as he breathes, and Steve Benen has compiled a weekly tally' 38 pages of lists of Romney's lies, adding up to hundreds, if not more than a thousand, individual Romney lies. It's a truly impressive achievement by Romney, and perhaps in his honor we will in the future refer to all political lies as Romneys, but in this instance he seemed actually to believe what he was saying. And that's where we start to get to the real story. Romney's mendacity is so complete, so total, so absolute, that even he no longer knows when he is lying. He lives in an alternate reality. But Romney is just one among a crowd of mendacious Republicans, while the larger and more disturbing reality is that the entire Republican Party now lives in an alternate reality, a collective delusion that increasingly bears little relation at all to even demonstrable facts and verified scientific truths. Romney and Republicans do consciously tell lies, and they do it often and without conscience, but they accord no negative value to lying because they accord no positive value to even the existence of truths. As noted by Jonathan Bernstein, in the Washington Post:

This was the night in which the conservative closed information feedback loop and its close cousin, lazy mendacity, caught up with Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney ' in a big way.

Romney got caught in a sleazy blatant falsehood, in real time, in front of a massive live audience, and the reason for it was that he is so used to speaking to reality-challenged right-wing audiences that he no longer knows what is real and what is not. Because the Republican Party could not exist in its modern form if it and its propagandists had any relationship with the truth. Its entire agenda depends on the creation, the promotion, and the inculcation of fictive narratives.

Romney has been doing this for, literally, years now. His main platform on foreign policy, after all, is to reject an 'apology tour' that never happened and that people have been correcting him on for years. He's come up with the new one, 'unraveling,' recently, but hasn't bothered to fill in anything ' at all ' about what is unraveling, or how. Nor is it just foreign policy. His tax plan doesn't come close to adding up, and his jobs plan doesn't, either. He repeats flat-out lies again and again, no matter how many times they've been shot down. As I said, lazy mendacity ' even where the facts would do well for him, as in trillion-dollar deficits, he chooses instead to constantly claim that Obama doubled the deficit, which isn't true. Sure, every candidate exaggerates and stretches and spins, but Romney's complete apparent indifference to bother to get things right is unusual.

The question is: Why shouldn't he do it? Republican-aligned media surely aren't going to call him on it. Indeed, within the GOP political loop, there's no one who is even going to realize that they have a basic factual thing wrong; that's what happens when you convince yourself that the neutral press is out to get you, and you've trained your supporters to only pay attention to what they hear on Fox News and the Rush Limbaugh program, so you had better stay tuned to them yourself or else you won't be able to talk the way you need to. Of course, that's how a candidate winds up insulting half of America, because that's what high-level party donors expect to hear.

Romney and the Republicans live in an alternate reality, where demonstrable facts are ignored, where lies can be repeated so many times that even those telling them forget they are lies, and where no one is allowed to interject the truth, even when the truth is as easy to prove as quoting a transcript or viewing a video. The Republican Party has so many problems right now, but none is bigger than its willful disregard and even disdain for factual truths.

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