'Politics is a luxury, Marc'

"I don't have time for it, and it has no impact on my life"

Having spent seven months living outside of Washington, D.C., I'm still getting used to a couple of things. One of them is having friends for whom politics, American politics, simply does not exist. I drove a friend to the airport last night, and we happened to be flipping through the satellite radio channels, when my friend asked me, rather nonchalantly, "so when is the government going to start collecting the guns?" My friend is a liberal who has no exposure whatsoever to right-wing talk radio. But he hasn't read a newspaper in years, by his own admission. He doesn't have the time or inclination to engage in politics. It is simply an "other" to him. It took him a week to hear about the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings.

So I was surprised to hear him ask a question whose premise is absurd. I told him as much. "It's just what I heard," he said, not remembering precisely where the hearing had taken place. "Politics is a luxury, Marc. I don't have time for it, and it has no impact on my life." Being a pundit, it's easy to generalize from one example, so here goes: It never really occurred to me that a consequence of deliberate lying by one side in politics could be a truth virus that spreads way, way, way behind the orbit of anyone who follows politics.

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There's no way to respond to this sort of an argument. It is not an argument about whether limiting access to high capacity magazines will work toward a particular end. It is not an argument about whether gun trafficking properly belongs to a particular set of prosecutors. It is not an argument about the distinctions among semi-automatic assault rifles. It says nothing about ammunition. It is not an argument, actually. It is a set of words designed to make people afraid. Republicans got their butts handed to them in the last election for this type of thing, and even though liberals can't resist the same easy fearmongering, Republicans do it more and do more damage with it.

They do it to such effect that my poor friend, who knows nothing about politics, would hear somehow that what is really true is something that is preposterous. I was stuck in the Beltway for far too long, not really thinking too much about how unreality memes spread. But I guess, in hindsight, the same thing has happened with climate change. It makes me wonder about the news delivery system in America, which is supposedly quite liberal. The way we arrive at facts is often as stubborn as the facts themselves.

Marc Ambinder is TheWeek.com's editor-at-large. He is the author, with D.B. Grady, of The Command and Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry. Marc is also a contributing editor for The Atlantic and GQ. Formerly, he served as White House correspondent for National Journal, chief political consultant for CBS News, and politics editor at The Atlantic. Marc is a 2001 graduate of Harvard. He is married to Michael Park, a corporate strategy consultant, and lives in Los Angeles.