April 28 - Living in a Fact-Free Political World

Community Bridge opens this week with a look at lying as normative political discourse. Political lying has always been with us, but what the GOP and some Democrats have done is akin to carpet-bombing the truth. Mother Jones Magazine turns its investigative eyes on this reality in its May/June edition entitled: You Lie! Inside the GOP’s Fact Free Nation. We hear from Rick Perlstien whose article “Fact-Free Nation from Nixon’s Dirty Tricksters to James O’Keefe’s Video Smears: How political lying became the new normal," opens the topic.

Perlstien is the author of two noteworthy books: Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, and  Before The Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, which won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for history.  From the summer of 2003 until 2005 he covered the presidential campaigns as chief national political correspondent for the Village Voice. He has also published The Stock Ticker and the Superjumbo: How the Democrats Can Once Again Become America's Dominant Political Party, an essay with responses from commentators including Robert Reich, Elaine Kamarck, and Ruy Teixeira. In 2006 and 2007 he wrote a biweekly column for The New Republic Online. Perlstein was a senior fellow at the Campaign for America's Future, for whom he wrote the blog The Big Con.

The hour closes out with Josh McGinn, Flint Hills Human Rights Project, discussing the what’s happening with the Manhattan City Commission and the efforts by the right-wing extremists Matta and Butler to repeal the city’s recently passed Anti-discrimination Ordinance.

Related Articles:
Bullied Pulpit: Why the White House couldn't fight the Obamacare lie, David Corn, Mother Jones.

The Hackers and the Hockey Stick - How climate science became the target of "the best-funded, best-organized smear campaign by the wealthiest industry that the Earth has ever known, Kate Sheppard, Mother Jones.

We Can't Handle the Truth - A journey into the science of self-delusion, Chris Mooney, Mother Jones

Policy in an age of post-truth politics, David Roberts, GRIST



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