Paul Waldman on what happens when the facts just don’t matter:
History, the novelist Milan Kundera wrote, is but a thin thread stretched across the ocean of what is forgotten. This may explain why the further back you go into American history, the more consensus there tends to be about our presidents. If you wanted to come up with a revisionist view of George Washington, it would require a lot of work, since what most of us have at hand are a few images — the first president at Valley Forge, crossing the Delaware, nobly stepping down for the good of the country.
But one of the many advantages of the modern age is the ready availability of the raw materials out of which we can construct our own convincing version of contemporary political reality. Pour a foundation out of imaginary concrete, erect joists and beams of speculation, place a thousand bricks of tendentious conclusions, and before you know it, the structure is impervious to any assault by facts. You will have made your own imagined Barack Obama, in whatever shape you like.