Digby: Tell Me Lies

As we hurtle forward into GOP smear season, this article in this week-end's NY Times magazine may help us explain how these character assassinations damage Democrats so successfully:

...To determine the veracity of a given statement, we often look to society’s collective assessment of it. But it is difficult to measure social consensus very precisely, and our brains rely, instead, upon a sensation of familiarity with an idea. You use a rule of thumb: if something seems familiar, you must have heard it before, and if you’ve heard it before, it must be true.