A brief study of their skills reveals the key ingredient is the ability to sidestep, without missing a beat, when put on the spot. Conway has mastered the craft of seamlessly mixing evasions with outright falsehoods, and changing the subject with an aggrieved accusation of the questioner.

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Spicer displayed an impressive rapid-fire recital of talking points, but left an opening with his frenetic belligerence that Melissa McCarthy drove a satirical ramrod through. Unfortunately, it’s not enough to gum up the messenger.

This is not a reality TV contest. And just as “reality TV” is the name given to TV programming that isn’t real in any way, now we have an administration intent on seeing whether fake facts can be an ideology that you can run a whole country on. They must have read that bad money drives out good, and are seeing whether the same holds true for bad facts.

And now we have yet another new wrinkle. White House official Sebastian Gorka asserted that the administration will deliberately label real media reports as fake news until the press starts being nicer to it. This is essentially admitting that in addition to muddying the water about what is real, it is merely a tactic whose content these officials don’t really believe in.

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And we have yet to get to the biggest stakes in this erosion-of-truth war. Trump has stationed fact-devouring vultures all over his administration regarding the most important fact-based question the world faces right now, climate change.

This is shaping up to be as direct and consequential an assault on truth as you can fathom. If the administration does what it is all set up to do, and abandons the fight on climate change, it will be an attack on the very basis of science itself, in effect saying that hard data, produced by trained, professional scientists, is nothing more than a hoax, and need not be considered as the basis for policy.