A twofold complication

The Post's Matt Miller broods on the double whammy of our "debauched democracy":

[Republicans] think the press is too docile and stenographic to expose the con [of their own fiscal extravagance].

And that the public is too dumb or tuned out to care, even if the press does its duty.

Bingo.

Notwithstanding my metronomic outrage at the press' perpetuation of Republican Big Lies through its complicity of jadedness and thus silence, this is the twofold complication that serves to excuse, all too often, the press' laziness: Jesus, people, even when we blast from the town towers the latest in GOP swindling, you ignore it, you dismiss it, or you promptly forget it, and then you just as promptly go out and vote for the very pols we just so vividly warned you about. You've done it time and again, with 2010 being just the latest instance of swindle-reward. Evidently there is no level of journalistic enlightenment that will ever convert into public enlightenment.

That's the GOP's hole card. While lounging in plush leather wingchairs and sipping 30-year-old brandy, Republican politicos assuredly chuckle at the fourth estate's actual attempts, whenever they erupt, at electoral education. The information is there, it's out there, it's there to be had and read and absorbed, but ... wait, who was it who got bumped from "Dancing with the Stars" this week?

Before closing, one minor correction to Miller's own excellent commentary. He writes:

The new GOP mantra is to define what the president must agree to in spending cuts to get the debt-limit increase "he has asked for".... It’s apparently just the president who wants to add more debt. Republicans were just sitting there, minding their own business, and the guy just comes up and asks if he can borrow trillions more!

Raising the debt ceiling, it should be noted by journalists and commentators alike with tedious repetition (as though that'll make a difference), is not equivalent to "add[ing] more debt." Raising the debt ceiling is merely a statutory acknowledgement of past debt incurred, and that we do indeed pay our (largely GOP) debts.