Mehlman's lie about Hastert

It is very insulting to be lied to so blatantly. Greewald:

As Think Progress documented, at some point during the day on Friday, the GOP decided to go on television and tell an outright lie -- namely, that when Denny Hastert learned the previous Friday about the IMs exchanged between Mark Foley and Congressional pages (as a result of the ABC story), Hastert delivered an ultimatum to Foley: either resign or be expelled. Thereafter, so the new GOP mythology claimed, Foley resigned.

This story is complete fiction. It never happened. It was just made up by Republican operatives in order to defend Denny Hastert and make him look like some sort of hard-nosed, no-nonsense tough guy who took extraordinary steps against Mark Foley. But there is no doubt that this never happened, and anyone who is saying that it did is, by definition, lying -- and is lying clearly and demonstrably.

A lot of journalism in this country seems to be broken. I remember a college friend of mine who was doing extremely well as a reporter, writing front page stories for national newspapers at a very young age (just out of college). But this friend gave up reporting because she was tired of taking notes while people lied to her. What is wrong with things that people can lie to reporters and reporters can't/won't/don't call them on their crap?

I read somewhere that people actually don't deal well with blatant liars. In normal human interaction no one could get away with it, so our social intelligence modules are not designed to deal with lying on such a scale. It's too unbelievable. But national politics and media manipulation didn't exist in the ancestral condition, so we have to use our wonderfully adaptive brains to help us realize what's going on.