I'm not prepared to answer Glenn Greenwald, in part because doing so would require a book's worth of prep, but a bit of introspection into one of the finer points of the debate won't hurt anyone, right?
So why are some voters inured to charges of deceit? How do mendacious politicos get away with it?
A few theories:
One: partisans are lost causes, but enough independent, undecided voters have been exposed for years and years to the press corps' doctrine of equivalence, which holds that charges are simply one possible account of the truth and are always paired with a countercharge. He said, she said.
Two: perhaps these voters are political postmodernists and don't put much faith in truth claims.
Three: perhaps the media -- hereby defined as a single entity consisting of the collective mindset of reporters, editors, producers, writers and pundits working for broadcast nets, cable news nets, TV News magazines, radio news nets, entertainment news mags, online nonpartisan news media, online partisan news media, print magazines, national newspapers like the USA Today, online newspapers like the Politico, Matt Drudge, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, local TV news, local talk radio, national talk radio, the Netroots, Belo, Hearst-Argyle, Clear Channel, the Rightroots, the nutroots, hyperlocal citizen journalists and corporate news executives -- has failed to create a coherent narrative about the truth that -- I hasten to add -- neatly fits with an ideological worldview.
A thinner claim here is that the media has failed to be advocates for the truth, particularly when the truth is discernable.
Perhaps it's the Republicans who lie more and the media fails to note this; perhaps it's the Democrats who lie more and the media fails to note this. (Has anyone figured out how to figure out whether Democrats lie more often or more consequentially than Republicans? Republicans more often or more consequentially than Democrats?)
Perhaps both sides distort the truth, but the media is afraid to expose the side that, given the situation, distorts more. Left-wing activists don't like Mark Halperin, but Halperin, as ABC News's Political Director, urged the news division in 2004 to pay more attention to the Bush campaign's distortions of John Kerry's record because those distortions were, in Halperin's view, more egregious and more fundamentally influential on how people viewed Kerry.
Perhaps campaign advertising about factual claims, as opposed to characterological traits, no longer works; perhaps voters have been so supersaturated with the standard scripts that they no longer expect politicians to be honest, or they hear ads and don't pay attention; even non-partisan truthsquadding falls victim here, and straightforward attempts to say who is right and who is wrong go in one ear and out the other.
Perhaps faith in institutions is so anemic that non-partisan truth-squadding simply isn't believed. (Partisans on both sides have attacked truth squadders, with the right generally endeavoring to decredentialize the media and the left generally endeavoring to lecture the media about its duties.)
All these explanations have a ring of truth to them.
| 
