Krugman: Why bad ideas won't die

Krugman on Repugnantan denials and media false equivalencies.

"If you have been following Republican arguments over the years […] what you see are multiple levels of denial combined  with a refusal ever to give up an argument no matter how completely it has been discredited. […] In each case those making denialist arguments, while they may invoke evidence, don’t actually care what the evidence says; at a fundamental level, they aren’t interested in the truth. Their goal, instead, is to serve a predetermined agenda."

"Reporting about these debates typically frames them as disputes about the facts and what they mean, when the reality is that one side isn’t interested in the facts. I understand the pressures that often lead to false equivalence. Calling out dishonesty and bad faith can seem like partisan bias when, to put it bluntly, one side of the political spectrum lies all the time, while the other side doesn’t.

"But pretending that good faith exists when it doesn’t is unfair to readers. The public deserves to know that the big debates in modern U.S. politics aren’t a conventional clash of rival ideas. They’re a war in which one side’s forces consist mainly of intellectual zombies."