A Mile Wide, An Inch Deep

A response in two parts.  Part One.  There is a Republican equivalent of Hillary Clinton and it’s not Donald Trump. It’s Mitt Romney.  Most of what shapes your opinion of Clinton isn’t true. Rather, it’s truthy , and the direct result of a 30-year-long smear campaign, very little of which has ever turned out to be true. It’s the way that many Democrats still think George W. Bush went AWOL during Vietnam even though the documents alleging it were almost immediately debunked and the way some liberals think Romney paid $0 in federal taxes because Harry Reid said so. Accusations get a lot of coverage, particularly in partisan media; debunking gets almost none. T his is what I do for a living, so I end up hav ing to read everything. I don’t design jet engines or treat patients or program software or fill cavities five days a week. I do this.* I like to joke that I read more National Review and American Spectator in any given week than most of my Republican ...

From his first year in office on, stories have circulated here in DC about just how widely loathed Ted Cruz is. Now, following his first place finish in Iowa, the rest of the country has been brought up to speed with a host of press outlets covering quotes like this: Sen. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, who recently endorsed former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush after ending his presidential bid in December, was asked whether he preferred Trump or Cruz as the nominee during a news conference on Capitol Hill. “It’s like being shot or poisoned,” Graham told reporters Thursday in response. “What does it really matter?” And this: When ["Face The Nation" host John] Dickerson asked whether Cruz was a one of the "false prophets" to whom Boehner had referred, the speaker smiled and referred to comments he made at a fundraiser in Colorado earlier this summer. There, he reportedly dismissed Cruz as a "jackass."  And my personal favorite: Senator Mi...