What impact does serial lying have on a presidential campaign? I’m talking to you, Mitt.

By Richard K. Barry

Yes, that looks like Churchill.
Better check with Romney, he’s the expert.

When someone lies as much as Mitt Romney, people stop paying attention. Worse, they just shrug their shoulders and chalk it up to ”politics.” I suppose people have such a jaded view of the discipline that nothing matters, especially relatively trivial fabrications.

A few days ago, during his most fabulous tour of England, Romney declared he would return the bust of Winston Churchill to the White House if elected, which, he said, had been given back to the British when Obama became president. The problem, as Jennifer Epstein at Politico points out, is that there will be no need to return the bust to the White House because it never left.

Snarling right-wing pundit moron Charles Krauthammer picked up on the Romney lie on Friday and ran hard with some absurd claim about how this reflected badly on White House leadership and was disrespectful of our relationship to Great Britain, yadda, yadda. This prompted the White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer to take the unusual step of responding to a rumour by calling it “patently false”:

Though President Obama did move the bust out of the Oval Office — and replaced it with a bust of President Abraham Lincoln — it’s still in the White House, just moved to the residence, outside the Treaty Room. “News outlets have debunked this claim time and again,” Pfeiffer wrote in an unusual fact-check blog post on the White House website.

Pfeiffer then offered up a 2010 photo of the president and British Prime Minister David Cameron looking at the bust, to remove all doubt (above).

It’s a small thing, I know. But it never ends. Romney lies about everything hoping that the 6 percent of the electorate that can be persuaded one way or the other will pay just enough attention, and not a bit more, to what’s going on around them. He is hoping they will believes the lies and then fall back asleep without having sought the truth. We’ve become used to this. Steve Benen has been doing a great job cataloging the lies Mitt has been telling so I won’t repeat them here. It is a very long list.

At least as bad as the common public response is the fact that the media treat a lie as just another perspective, as if there is no such thing as truth. Mitt Romney has benefitted greatly from this kind of journalistic laziness.

The Romney campaign has hit on something, and they know it. The electoral is too lazy or cynical to care about the lies of politicians and the media, perhaps in a misguided attempt to be “fair” or because they really don’t know any better or because they are too lazy to care, give lies as much air and light to grow as the truth.

It almost begs the question, do you take the high ground and combat lies with the truth or do you combat lies with lies because it might be the only way to win? I’m not sure what I think anymore. Well, okay, I still know what I think but I’m very frustrated.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann’s Ghost.)