Thursday, September 27, 2012

In an era of post-truth politics, credibility is like a rainbow

David Roberts wrote in Grist, In an era of post-truth politics, credibility is like a rainbow "What he missed — again and again, until the debt-ceiling fiasco — is that conservatives are not compelled by substantive policy concessions to grant him anything. There are no referees to compel them, nothing to stop them from calling him a job-killing socialist no matter what he does. And in this age of zero-sum politics, it’s in their electoral interests to do so. To grant him credibility would be to strengthen his hand, which would weaken theirs. So they don’t, no matter how many border guards he hires, no matter how closely his healthcare plan hews to Mitt Romney’s, no matter how many coal subsidies are written into the cap-and-trade bill. They just don’t."

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