Well, remember how the Ryan budget was supposed to mark our national moment of truth, forcing us into a serious discussion of fiscal choices? Neither do I.

For now that the budget has turned out to be both cruel and ludicrous, Republicans have taken to defending it by … lying about it.

Jonathan Cohn catches Marco Rubio declaring that the Ryan plan doesn’t cut Medicare funding — when the Medicare cuts were precisely what supposedly made the plan “serious”. (We were supposed to focus on that, not on the huge tax cuts or the plan’s reliance on assuming that discretionary spending could be reduced to Calvin Coolidge levels).

So we’re now completely in black-is-white territory. The moment of truth has turned into (yet another) moment of falsehood.