When I was a kid, I would tell my dad things that I hoped would keep me out of trouble. He never called me a liar, he’d say “that’s a likely story”. It took me a while to figure out how that worked: I’d offer a plausible story about how it wasn’t me and I didn’t do it, and maybe it didn’t even happen and why don’t you trust me, but he never fell for it. In order to buy my story, he’d have had to set aside everything he knew about people, about life, about physics, mechanics, and time...and his ability to cut through bullshit...*and* care more about buying my story than he did about making sure I learned not to try to get away with stupid childish bullshit.
By the Reagan era, it was easy to spot the paper-thin ‘cover stories’ provided by political bad actors; by the Shrub era, it was obvious that only ONE party was doing this...and they weren’t just *good* at it, it was a major source of entertainment for them...because Dems (used to) get tanglefoot trying to take the GOP horseshit seriously enough to dispel it. Trump, of course, has completely shredded the notion that their denials are in any way plausible, or will outweigh facts and evidence. If we’re to survive as anything *like* a free nation, we can’t allow their deliberate dishonesty to serve them any longer.
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