The Best Explanation Of Mitt Romney's Lies That I Have Read

This essay is well worth the time it takes to read it.  It makes the point that there is a strategic alliance between snake oil vendors and conservative true believers.  The snake oil venders view the conservative true believers as gullible marks.  They are predators who earn a living by scaring them with conspiracies, or offering them a way to get rich, or find a secret cure for a dread disease that doctors don't want them to know about.  In the past they used direct mail.  Today they use the Internet.  They publish right wing conspiracy crap on their websites and they request  a small donation that will be used to make the world safe from liberals.  Anyone who responds is identified as a mark.  The predators can sell the names and they take all of the money that is donated from themselves.

Fox News operates in a similar way.  They frighten conservatives with stories about liberal plots to take their money and give it to minorities, and a wide variety of other scare tactics.  They also teach then not to trust other sources of information.  They all have a liberal bias. Its audience is a great source of marks for the predators who feed on them.

Its important to understand this as a business.  It many have little to do with the ideology of the predators.  They are in the business of taking money from the marks.  For example, Karl Rove has raised lots of money from rich and poor marks who have poured millions into his PAC's.  He gets 10% of the revenue that he raised and gets a fee as a broker for placing all of the ads.  He will get rich from his business  even if the lies that he tells don't enable Romney to win the election.

It took Romney a while to learn this game.  He had to reconstruct his persona to appeal to the gullible marks but he has done it well.  The marks don't really care whether they are now seeing the true Romney.  They are comfortable with those who are good at telling them the the familiar lies with which they are comfortable.

The author of this essay writes for the Washington Post.  It is a well researched essay that violates the unwritten rule in journalism that insists that both political parties tell lies.  We all tell lies at times but this essay describes the business of lying that has linked predators with conservative marks.  Many of the Post's readers would be classified as marks.