Frank Rich on Romney and the GOP
In New York Magazine, Frank Rich analyzes the systematic and ongoing flight from candor, data, truthfulness, and analysis that is crippling one of our most important political institutions, the GOP.

"All politicians lie, and some of them, as Bob Kerrey famously said of Bill Clinton in 1996, are “unusually good” at it. Every campaign (certainly including Obama’s) puts up ads that stretch or obliterate the truth. But Romney’s record was exceptional by any standard. The blogger Steve Benen, who meticulously curated and documented Mitt’s false statements during 2012, clocked a total of 917 as Election Day arrived....
 

The most histrionic indicator of the GOP Establishment’s enlistment in the post-fact alternative universe was the pillorying of Nate Silver, whose FiveThirtyEight statistical model (and accompanying blog) in the Times analyzing all major national and state surveys on a daily basis consistently found Obama a fairly prohibitive favorite in the race. Conservative commentators disgorged thousands and thousands of words to impugn Silver as a liberal hack, accusing him of slanting the facts to fit a political bias. Freud couldn’t have imagined a clearer case study in projection. For backup, the anti-Silver forces turned to the likes of Jay Cost of The Weekly Standard, whose learned, lengthy, and chart-laden explanations of why Silver and the polls were wrong could be considered scientific in the same way creation science is.

An even sadder case was Michael Barone, the once-respected co-author of The Almanac of American Politics who in 2008 compared Sarah Palin to FDR and who this year abandoned his fact-based standard for a faith-based standard underestimating minority turnout; he predicted a 315 electoral-vote victory for Romney. Like Rove, Barone called nearly every battleground state wrong. (The professional pollster most admired by the right, the GOP-leaning Rasmussen, didn’t bat much higher.) Silver got all 50 states right."

As the Dalai Lama put it, 'my religion is kindness.'  And Jesus said, 'love your neighbor as yourself.'  As a student of politics, I am not doubt odd in many ways, but for me, one of the cornerstones for being kind is to speak more honestly, to work hard to be candid and present, to reject intentional efforts to mislead, systematic campaigns designed to confuse and frustrate in order to disempower. 

In our collective efforts to find ways to live together in peace and prosperity, one foundation stone, upon which all of our problem solving and collective action depend, is the ways we communicate with each other.  It is in that arena, on that score, that we need to rediscover a capacity to be kind.