Post-factual politics

James Bennet's post from earlier this week made an important and timely point. First he observes that a lot of political reporting has taken a turn from the destructive banality of he-said-she-said false equivalency stuff and toward playing an explicit fact-checking role. (I'm among those who welcome this enthusiastically.) 

Then he poses this somewhat chilling question: "What if it turns out that when the press calls a lie a lie, nobody cares?"

Bennet was talking about the Romney campaign's ads misrepresenting the Obama administration's policy on welfare-to-work. But his post seems all the more relevant today, in the wake of Congressman Ryan's speech at the RNC last night—a real barn burner, and one that burned some of its barns with the potent fuel of brazen deception.