There are two topics taking up a great deal of the political conversation these days, both of which seem to be encouraging displays of not only radical but gleeful agnosticism. One is the identity the Republican candidate for Vice-President, which no one knows but in which everyone has a betting interest. The other is how much and how blatantly either side is lying in its ads and statements. In those cases, with one notable exception, the true stories behind the falsehoods are generally knowable—but nobody seems to care. Nobody even seems ashamed to be caught lying.

Veepstakes are fun. There are electoral maps to be put together like puzzles. Even the math is fun: see Nate Silver’s post today, which is clever and informative—the sort of thing that inspires one to, say, read up on Brian Sandoval, of Nevada. (And why not?) The problem is that it’s not always easy, at this stage, for those not privy to the choice to invest resources in what should be the most important veepstakes exercise of all: vetting. How much do even people who’ve been following politics know about Rob Portman, beyond the number of electoral votes that Ohio has? (Eighteen.)

It is the political ads and rhetoric that have become something like self-parodies, though. This week’s worst example was an ad put out by the Romney campaign—the campaign, not a Super PAC. It opens with Bill Clinton and a tribute to bipartisanship and welfare reform; and then…

But on July 12th, President Obama quietly announced a plan to gut welfare reform by dropping work requirements. Under Obama’s plan, you wouldn’t have to work and wouldn’t have to train for a job. They just send you your welfare check. And “welfare to work” goes back to being plain old welfare. Mitt Romney will restore the work requirement—because it works.

If the abandonment of welfare reform comes as a surprise, it’s because it didn’t happen. None of this is true. There was a change that allowed states to petition to use alternative measures for training and job programs; worse, that change was something that Republicans asked for, too. The problem here is not just the lying (“Pants on Fire,” according to Politifact), or the grimy reprise of the complaint, heard often in the Republican primaries, that Obama is the “Food Stamp President,” whose goal in office is just to make sure that certain people—which ones?—can sit back, not work, “and they just send you your welfare check.” The problem isn’t even just the divisiveness. It’s the sense that any action, any rule change or waiver or vote or even twitch of the elbow, by anyone in government, can and will be turned into something false. As a rhetorical vignette, it’s less an advertisement for Romney than an inducement for paralysis.

The most controversial pro-Obama ad of the week—this one is via a Super PAC, Priorities USA, rather than the campaign proper—isn’t quite that flat-out, but it is insulting in another way. It features a former steel worker talking about how Bain acquired his plant and closed it, costing him his job and insurance, and how his wife, neglecting to go to the doctor out of concern for the family’s finances, then had cancer that was caught too late and died. Those things appear to have happened, roughly, but with side alleys and bumps and interludes—CNN noted that the wife had a job of her own for a while afterward, for example, and her own insurance—that, really, voters ought to have been trusted to make sense of. (It’s more our messed-up health-care system than Bain that killed her.) Cartoons are not always more clear than complex pictures. What happened to talking to Americans like adults?

There is one complaint about the ad, though, that is harder to entertain, and that is the one about Romney not having to talk about anything that happened at Bain after 1998. As has emerged in recent weeks, this is a tricky question. But whatever the level of involvement he had—and it seems, at least, to have been greater than the absolute zero he claims—when you are the owner of something and make the sort of money that Romney did from it in that time period, you need to at least talk about it. This is yet another sort of agnosticism, and an odd one, given that Romney’s claims of utter passivity with regard to Bain were immediately followed by his outraged talk about how the owner and creator of a business was in every way responsible for everything it managed to do—to the point that he portrayed President Obama as an enemy of enterprise for even suggesting that roads and schools helped.

A Democrat who’s been accused this week of lying about Mitt Romney is Senator Harry Reid. He said that someone he trusted told him that Romney had jiggered his finances to such an extent that, for ten years, he paid no taxes. Romney says he did—but just says. Reid, given the vagueness of his sources and the foggy outlines we have of Romney’s tax situation, sounds reckless. (Politifact condemned him, too.)

There is another issue, though. Why are we being told to be agnostic about Romney’s taxes? That his returns, which he refuses, beyond one year, to release, might prove Reid to be a liar is almost incidental: even without wild charges floating around, there is basic information that voters deserve to know. How did he make his money, and to whom does it tie him? What does he owe—and, again, to whom—and how has he paid? Reid didn’t create this issue, and his exploitation of it, however cynical, does not make hiding those papers less of a problem. (This is why the tax-return question is different from, say, birtherism.) That is especially so given how central Romney’s business career is to his candidacy. May we see them?