Possibly the greatest comment thread ever.

This amazing story came through my feed this morning from talking points memo entitled GOP Focus Group: Undecided Voters Give Obama Benefit Of The Doubt and I nearly fell out of my chair when I came across these commentors' translations of the findings. (emphasis mine)

So, basically, Republican strategists and polling experts have, through extensive polling and focus grouping, discovered that when the candidate behaves like a total sociopath and runs the most pathologically dishonest campaign in living memory, it causes people to doubt the veracity of the candidate's lies and distortions?

And the sad part of it is that I'm sure they're just absolutely stunned by this utterly unexpected and counter-intuitive result and not really sure what to make of it.
 

Exactly. They say it is "a little bit unfair" that when their candidate repeatedly lies and invents context around quotes and obfuscates inconvenient facts and refuses to deal openly with the public, that same public tends to be less willing to accept the next lie as given.

I don't know what world these sociopaths live in, but the basic principles at play here should have been hammered home in Kindergarten if not earlier. I mean, even their erstwhile revered leader said, "Fool me once, shame on .. shame on you. Fool me ... You can't get fooled again!"

"a little bit unfair." Are you kidding me.....we have an entire political Party spend 4 years doing nothing but obstructing progress, and bashing the President for every word coming out of his mouth, and Voters expressing the opinion that Romney and the GOP SUCK!! And "it a little bit unfair".....Y'all are lucky your not in prison for Treason.
 

 And to be thorough, Bob Cesca added this on his blog. "They know [Romney's] lying to them, and yet they are still 'undecided'?"

It’s my theory that Romney and the Republicans have always included this in their calculus. It’s the height of cynicism to assume that voters know you’re lying but to push forward with more lies anyway as a means of energizing the base, leaning on a dog-whistle or underscoring the “liberal media fact-checker” myth.
 

Somehow, that push just doesn't have the same "zing" it had during bushhell. Simply asserting through force of will that whatever the dear leader says is real only works when the opposition cowers in fear. Creating reality (read: myths) by assertion loses leverage when you're out of power and your base is shrinking. For whatever reason, rove & co was able to manufacture the perception that the bush administration was backed by a huge majority, but it was then and is now all smoke and mirrors. More accurately, a handful of very rich white men bought themselves a smoke machine and everyone assumes there is fire.

It is refreshing to see a few people, even if only in a comments section, call out the liars for being liars and laugh at them.