Watch This Daily Show CLIP with Jon Stewart on The Obama-Hating Republican Party Being Run by Liars Then Read Krugman and DEAL WITH IT!

… Mitch McConnell, the new Senate majority leader, says that [our economic] growth [reflects] “the expectation of a new Republican Congress”… Republicans know many things that aren’t so, and no amount of contrary evidence will get them to change their minds… At least Mr. McConnell didn’t do what many of his colleagues have done when faced with inconvenient facts: resort to conspiracy theories.

…Before Obamacare went into effect, [the Republicans] overwhelmingly insisted that it would be a disaster, that more people would lose insurance than would gain it. They were, of course, delighted by the technical problems that initially crippled the program’s website. But those problems were fixed, and enrollment soared. Their response? “They are cooking the books,” declared Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, who now leads the Senate Republican Policy Committee.

But that was then. At this point we have multiple independent confirmations — most recently from Gallup — that Obamacare has dramatically expanded insurance coverage. So what do they say now? The law “will collapse under its own weight,” says Representative Paul Ryan, the new chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

Speaking of Mr. Ryan: Almost four years have passed since he and many others in his party lambasted Ben Bernanke, then the chairman of the Federal Reserve, for policies that they claimed would lead to high inflation and “debase the dollar.” The inflation never materialized, and the dollar proceeded to strengthen, but Mr. Ryan gave no sign of having been chastened — and many conservatives, including favorite intellectuals like Niall Ferguson of Harvard, became “inflation truthers,” insisting that the government is hiding price rises.

Oh, and Europe — whose central bank, unlike the Fed under Bernanke’s leadership, took those inflation warnings to heart and raised interest rates in 2011 — is now experiencing outright deflation, with terrifying implications for its economic and political outlook.

Then there’s climate change. It appears that 2014 was the hottest year yet, which should close the door on silly claims that global warming has stopped. But it won’t matter to Senator James Inhofe, who now leads a crucial environmental committee and has long insisted that all the science in this field is a liberal hoax.

…Congress is now controlled by men who never acknowledge error, let alone learn from their mistakes…  we’re looking at a political subculture in which ideological tenets are simply not to be questioned, no matter what.

…You sometimes hear claims that the old-fashioned Republican establishment is making a comeback, that Tea Party extremists are on the run and we can get back to bipartisan cooperation. But that is a fantasy. We can’t have meaningful cooperation when we can’t agree on reality, when even establishment figures in the Republican Party essentially believe that facts have a liberal bias.

(for the full text go to the New York Times opinion page)

Frank Schaeffer is a writer. His latest book —WHY I AM AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD: How to give love, create beauty and find peace