Today's Must Reads: The Republican assault on truth

There are two great entries today in the must-read category.

Leonard Pitts:

Yes, we’re all intellectually dishonest on occasion. But no one does it like Republican conservatives. They are to intellectual dishonesty what Michael Jordan was to basketball or the Temptations to harmony: the avatar, the exemplar, the paradigm. They have elevated it beyond hypocrisy and political expedience. They have made it ... art.

Joe Klein:

Maybe I'm getting old, maybe it's that I've seen this act so often before, maybe it's that the people I talk to when I go out on the road really are having a harder time paying for things like health care, gasoline and college tuition, but I'm finding the Republican attempts to derail the conversation from the actual state of the country really depressing and disgraceful this year. They practice Orwellian politics of the crudest sort.

Youth skews left & so may the country

By Diane Silver

It's beginning to seem more and more like the nation has been sold yet another Big Lie. There's more evidence every day that we're not as conservative as, ah, conservative commentators like to claim.

Recent evidence shows that both the youth of America and the country as a whole lean far more to the left than many believe.

Here's today's New York Times poll on the attitudes of those 17 to 29.

Leonard Pitts writes about another recent study pointing to the idea that the entire nation is getting quietly more liberal.