Monday Morning Read - Telling Ghost Stories

In this morning's read, Charles P. Pierce tells us that the lying "ghost stories" told by Republicans to their credulous base is nothing new:

As with so many things, this all began with Ronald Reagan. Those people who claim that Donald Trump is sui generis in this regard are very much the same as those people who find him a unique political phenomenon, instead of the logical end product of almost 40 years of conservative politics. Reagan was as full of crap as the Christmas goose, and in the same way that Trump and Carson are. Trump has dancing Muslims. Reagan had the fictitious welfare queen in Chicago. Carson had his attempt to stab a classmate. Reagan had his march into Auschwitz to liberate the death camp there. The difference is that Reagan slung his hooey with a smile and a wink. Trump has weaponized Reagan's fabulism and that seems to make a difference to some people. But nothing that has happened in this campaign, up to and including the latest spasm of outright bigotry and fear-mongering, is new in the recent history of Republican politics. It always is the person who tells the best ghost stories who wins.  [snip]

It is Trump, abetted by the initial cowardice of his fellow Republicans and by the pure bumfuzzlement of the elite political press, who has made this a campaign of competing ghost stories. American politics has been slouching toward the supernatural for three decades now, since Ronald Reagan marched into Auschwitz in his mind. The whole system is clogged now with corporate money and ectoplasm. Nothing moves. All ghosts are essentially spirits who find themselves trapped.   (our emphasis)

This is why truth and facts are of no concern to these people.  In reality, the bigger the lies, the more successful you are as a right- wing Republican politician.  That's because the Republicans' angry, frothing base likely has been living in an impenetrable right- wing post- truth bubble their entire lives.  They're been predictably susceptible to fearing any number of boogie men over the years:  unions, blacks, Hispanics, gays and lesbians, secular progressives, etc., etc. Therefore, nothing is "true" to them except their deepest gut fears and prejudices, which have been carefully nurtured by decades of right- wing misdirection and fabulism.