You can’t have an argument with right wing deaf to facts

impeachment, how can anyone really believe there is “no evidence” Trump did wrong?

Anderson Cooper might feel my pain. You may have caught the CNN anchor recently watching in mounting disbelief as Trump surrogate Jeffrey Lord stumbled through one of his transparently disingenuous defenses of the president’s misbehavior. Finally, Cooper had had enough. “If he took a dump on his desk, you would defend it,” he said.

It was a coarse thing to say, yes. Cooper promptly apologized for it, as he should have. But one tends to empathize all the same. Because while the words might have been inappropriate, they were not incorrect.

Not that they will make a bit of difference. That’s the great frustration of political discourse in this era. Nothing seems to mean anything anymore. The idea of principled debate got run over by the Trump Train.

In its place, we have what Lord and an increasing number of like-minded sycophants represent: a brazen repudiation not simply of the facts, but of the fact that facts matter. We are trapped in a Groucho Marx routine: “Who are you going to believe, me, or your lying eyes?”

Consider that America was already a nation of ideological silos. If this is any indication, that’s about to get worse.

One longs for an intellectually vibrant marketplace of ideas, but there is nothing intellectual or vibrant about what these days passes for conservatism. That once robust ideology has been shriveled by an intellectual dishonesty so profound that the same people who tirelessly investigated Barack Obama’s birth certificate and inveighed against his choice of mustard can look at the mountain of malfeasance rising from the White House and say with a shrug and all evident sincerity, “What evidence?”

How can you engage with that?

The good news is that facts remain factual, whether the somehow-still-employed Jeffrey Lord and people like him acknowledge that or not. Moreover, the facts in this case are already persuasive — and the investigations have miles yet to go.

Let that be enough. After all, one gets tired of wetting concrete. Better to save your water for places where there’s a chance something might actually grow.

When in the Senate chamber, Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican, sits by choice at the desk used by the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan. New York’s scholar-senator would have recognized that Sasse has published a book of political philosophy in the form of a guide to parenting.

Moynihan understood that politics is downstream from culture, which flows through families. Sasse, a Yale history Ph.D. whose well-furnished mind resembles Moynihan’s, understands this:

America is a creedal nation made not by history’s churning but by the decision of philosophic Founders. Modern America, with its enervating comforts — including cosseting