(Optional Video Accompaniment To This Post)

Let us take one more tour of the battlefield before we retire to the gift shoppe at Ronnieworld to pick up some Fawn Hall Authorized Confetti (Guaranteed 100 percent Genuine Secret Government Documents!) or, perhaps, for the kids, a Junior TOW Missile Commander suit complete with Iranian flags on the sleeves. What we saw last night, and I stayed awake for the whole damn thing so I now know all I care to know about Chris Christie's secret crush on Abigail Adams, was the triumph of fiction over fact, of fantasy over reality. In other words, what we saw was the most fitting tribute to Ronald Reagan ever produced. Congratulations, one and all. The final fealty of the Republican Party to total and complete bullshit has been sworn.

The first time I ever noticed Chris Hayes was because of a terrific piece he wrote for The Nation regarding something called The NAFTA Superhighway. This was a planned project that would be built up through the middle of the North America roughly from El Paso to, I don't know, Winnipeg, I guess, so as to ease the transportation of cheap Mexican goods—and of undocumented immigrants!—around the continent. This, of course, would be done largely for the benefit of the hidden corporate masters of the New World Order. Hayes noticed that the issue had particular political salience, particularly in where-the-fck-else? Kansas. He also noticed that its political salience was not diminished by the fact that the NAFTA Superhighway did…not…exist. (There was a smaller project underway that Hayes correctly pointed out was bad enough.) This was an example of having something exist purely as an issue despite the fact that there was no empirical reality to the problem around which the issue was supposed to center. It was exactly the same as getting elected to the city council of Emporia based on your four-point plan to keep unicorns from grazing on the library lawn. This, of course, occasioned a book on which, if Wednesday night's extended exercises are any indication, I wasted two years of my life. The whole debate was contested on the NAFTA Superhighway and, on that track, Carly Fiorina was Jimmie Johnson in that No. 48 Chevrolet, Bubba.

She was steely-eyed in her prevarication. She was relentless in her determination to launch pure crapola into the stratosphere. She smiled rarely. She glowered effectively. The woman stares daggers better than anyone I've ever seen. And, on many occasions, she lied her ass off with a formidable brand of armored certitude. If you eliminate "telling the truth" from the assessment, Carly Fiorina was every bit the winner she is universally acclaimed to be this morning.

By far, her most effective falsehood was her thunderous denunciation of what she allegedly "saw" in those phony videos involving Planned Parenthood. Here it is, in its gloriously fact-free entirety:

As regards Planned Parenthood, anyone who has watched this videotape, I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to watch these tapes. Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain. This is about the character of our nation, and if we will not stand up in and force President Obama to veto this bill, shame on us.

OK, let's just state for the record that the scene described by Fiorina in her Grand Guignol palaver does…not…exist, not even in the creatively edited version of the videotapes released by the charlatans at the Center For Medical Progress.

(And, as Sarah Kliff points out, Fiorina's sticking by her grisly fiction even when called on it by George Stephanopoulos on Thursday morning. She saw that kicking infant, dammit. Who the hell are you to ask, anyway?)

Now, it is important to remember that those phony videos were accepted as being genuine by everyone on the stage in both debates. They all stated their belief that Planned Parenthood is shopping baby parts for profit, which a number of state investigations, and almost every bit of common sense, have determined is not true. At this point, the CMP could create a video of PP doctors eating a baby's liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti, and these people would swear to its authenticity. But Carly Fiorina would be the only one claiming to have a copy of the menu for that particular evening. Read on.

There is a monumental question facing political journalists this morning. How do you cover a campaign in which 15 candidates are running on the basis of things that simply are not true, on the basis of things that simply do not exist? There are two choices: call bullshit for what it is, or just surrender to the unceasing barrage of truthless performance art. Here's Ezra Klein, pretty much running up the white flag.

This is the second debate Fiorina won. She dominated the JV stage in the Fox News debate, forcing CNN to change the rules to ensure she made the main stage in their event. She validated their decision tonight. She had the crispest answers, received the biggest cheers, and proved the only candidate on the stage capable of standing against Trump. She made everyone else on the stage — especially Trump — look unprepared. But she did it in part by playing fast and loose with the facts. Her barrage of specifics often obscured a curious detachment from reality.

If a cop sees someone on the sidewalk evincing a "curious detachment to reality," he will run that person in for medical observation, but read on, and Klein correctly points out that Fiorina doesn't really know what she's talking about. On foreign policy, and on immigration, and on a host of other issues, she simply asserts that which is not true.

This has become something of a habit for Fiorina, who has a notable facility for delivering answers that thrill conservatives but fall apart under close examination. In a recent interview with Katie Couric, for instance, Fiorina delivered a four-minute riff on climate change that the National Review enthused "shows how to address the left on climate change." The only problem, as David Roberts pointed out, was that every single thing she said in it was wrong. But if presidential campaigns were decided by fact checkers, Al Gore would have won in a landslide.

Were I young Ezra, I would not use the events surrounding the Gore candidacy as precedent for how political reporters should cover presidential campaigns, and Gore did win by half-a-million votes nationwide. If the elite political press is going to treat fiction as fact as long as the fiction is delivered in a compelling, dramatic manner, then the country truly is lost. If Carly Fiorina is adjudged to be the winner of a debate simply because of how "crisply" she delivered lies about Planned Parenthood, or how "forcefully" she responded to a cartoon like Donald Trump, or how "sharply" she presented her nonsense about reining in Vladimir Putin with "aggressive military maneuvers" on his borders, then there is a problem in the political process that is metastasizing by the hour. Ronald Reagan was the index patient for that problem. They truly are his children now.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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