The elephant in the room

As I've said for years, Republicans lie. They have to. Their political platform, outside of lower taxes, is unpopular, so they can't tell the truth.

The mainstream media couldn't possibly bring itself to report this truth:

"I can't recall a campaign where I've seen more lying going on -- and it wasn't symmetric," said [Norman] Ornstein, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who's been tracking Congress with Mann since 1978. Democrats were hardly innocent, he said, "but it seemed pretty clear to me that the Republican campaign was just far more over the top."

Lies from Republicans generally and standardbearer Mitt Romney in particular weren't limited to the occasional TV ads, either; the party's most central campaign principles -- that federal spending doesn't create jobs, that reducing taxes on the rich could create jobs and lower the deficit -- willfully disregarded the truth.

"It's the great unreported big story of American politics," Ornstein said.

"If voters are going to be able to hold accountable political figures, they've got to know what's going on," Ornstein said. "And if the story that you're telling repeatedly is that they're all to blame -- they're all equally to blame -- then you're really doing a disservice to voters, and not doing what journalism is supposed to do."

If the media should succumb to objectivity, the wingnuts would clamor to punish it for liberal bias in favor of reality.