Ted Cruz (T-TX) calls himself a Southern Baptist, so he should know the Ninth Commandment.

A full 54 percent of Ted Cruz's statements have been rated "false" or "pants on fire" by PolitiFact. Another 20 percent are only "half true." That's 74 percent of Cruz's statements failing the truth test.

We're used to politicians lying to us, of course. But the frequency of Cruz's lies is actually staggering. Compare Cruz's 74 percent lying rate with Rick Perry's 48 percent and John Cornyn's 56 percent. Cruz is in rarified with Michele Bachmann as one of this country's biggest political liars. Whenever Ted Cruz opens his mouth, there's a 3/4 chance he's lying.

Cruz, you may remember, says he has a secret list of communists at Harvard Law School, and bravely exposed a Democratic plot to shutter Catholic charities and hospitals.

Guess you could say he's lying for Jesus.

It seems fitting to look back on the election from a distance and see someone besides bloggers tell the tale of how the mainstream media completely missed the boat on their Election 2012 reporting. Fortunately, Dan Froomkin has done exactly that.

Sparing no one, Froomkin interviews Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann, personas non grata on Sunday shows since they spoke of Republican lunacy aloud. They call out the ridiculous reporting that passed for election coverage by the mainstream while pretending the emperor had clothes.

But according to longtime political observers Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, campaign coverage in 2012 was a particularly calamitous failure, almost entirely missing the single biggest story of the race: Namely, the radical right-wing, off-the-rails lurch of the Republican Party, both in terms of its agenda and its relationship to the truth.

[...]

The 2012 campaign further proved their point, they both said in recent interviews. It also exposed how fabulists and liars can exploit the elite media's fear of being seen as taking sides.

"The mainstream press really has such a difficult time trying to cope with asymmetry between the two parties' agendas and connections to facts and truth," said Mann, who has spent nearly three decades as a congressional scholar at the centrist Brookings Institution.

"I saw some journalists struggling to avoid the trap of balance and I knew they were struggling with it -- and with their editors," said Mann. "But in general, I think overall it was a pretty disappointing performance."

"I can't recall a campaign where I've seen more lying going on -- and it wasn't symmetric," said Ornstein, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who's been tracking Congress with Mann since 1978. Democrats were hardly innocent, he said, "but it seemed pretty clear to me that the Republican campaign was just far more over the top."

The indictment is pretty severe:

So, Ornstein concluded: "If you looked at where the scales should have been, and where they were, they were weighted. And they weren't weighted for ideological bias. They were weighted to avoid being charged with ideological bias."

The backlash was even more swift.

"It's awkward. I can no longer be a source in a news story in the Wall Street Journal or the Times or the Post because people now think I've made the case for the Democrats and therefore I'll have to be balanced with a Republican," Mann said.

Neither Mann nor Ornstein have been guests on any of the main Sunday public affairs shows since their book came out. Nor has anyone else on those shows talked about the concerns they raised.

Why am I not surprised? They're right. Let you doubt, have a look at the dive we're all taking into Wonderland this week over Medicare eligibility. What part of winning do Democrats have so much difficulty with?

Here's a perfect example: They won't put Mann and Ornstein on these shows but in one single day they have Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich on? Because they now represent mainstream Republican thought? Not only have they missed the boat, they jumped into the harbor and are swimming away from it.

So I guess we grind on and on and on, waiting for the next act of wingnuttery for the Village to neutralize so we can live forever and ever in ignorant bliss. Or something.

Let me know when you find that liberal media bias, would you?

After a frustratingly dull debate, the mainstream media eagerly goes to the spin room, looking for any little soundbyte from a proxy that will help drag out this horse race.

But you need to be a pretty savvy proxy to go up against the best and brightest of MSNBC's debate coverage: Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow. Rudy Giuliani, frankly, isn't that savvy. Those pesky facts about Mitt Romney's tax policy require Mr. "A Noun, a Verb and 9/11" to get quite testy, especially when it comes to his own returns:

After Giuliani stressed the need to stop "feeding the beast" of federal spending, Hayes, the host of MSNBC's Up with Chris Hayes, asked Giuliani point-blank about federal contracts he said Giuliani's firm holds with the Department of Homeland Security.

"Does the Department of Homeland Security and related spending through contracts on say, private consulting firms like yourself, does that count as feeding the beast or not?"

Giuliani denied that his firm held such contracts.

You really want to go with that post-fact response, Rudy? Because there's ample proof you're talking out of your posterior:

But in his various roles, Mr. Giuliani does not hesitate to work closely with government officials abroad and at home. As a consultant, he attended two meetings in 2002 to discuss OxyContin with Purdue executives and Mr. Hutchinson, the D.E.A. administrator at the time. As a law enforcement icon who once was one of the top three officials in the Department of Justice, he also stood next to Mr. Hutchinson that same year in Washington at a ribbon-cutting for a new Drug Enforcement Museum exhibit, an event that included a luncheon where the former mayor helped the agency's museum raise $25,000.

About 10 months after Mr. Giuliani's firm began its work for Purdue, it also won a $1.1 million contract from the Department of Justice to look for ways to improve the effectiveness of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. The force's duties included helping investigate OxyContin abuse, and Purdue officials had appealed to its director, Karen Tandy, for help, a Justice Department official said.

There's many more where that came from. But hey, when did truth matter to a Republican?

Steve Benen has truly done yeoman's work this campaign season in documenting the astonishing onslaught of Romney's lies, and Fred Clark helpfully compiled them.

Click those links. Read the lists. List after list of lie after lie. Hundreds of them — 533, to be exact, although Benen does not make any claim to providing a comprehensive chronicle.

This is unprecedented. “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” Romney’s pollster, Neil Newhouse, said.

While the sheer number of Romney's lies are indeed unprecedented for a presidential campaign, his fact-free campaigning is simply the logical continuation of a trend that started in the George W. Bush administration, when Republicans literally walled themselves from reality.

The [Bush] aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

So this has been going on for a while. Right-wingers just don't have to confront facts they don't like any longer. They no longer have to watch to Edward R. Murrow dress down Joe McCarthy for his un-American demagoguery. They don't have to listen Walter Cronkite telling them the Vietnam War is lost. Those days are over -- they can simply switch the channel.

Now, they are tightly cocooned in the cozy world of FOX News, right-wing radio, conservative newspapers and wingnut blogs where high taxes and burdensome regulations are crushing the American dream, inflation is running rampant, businesses are suffering, global warming is a joke, homosexuality is a choice, illegal immigration is at all-time high, our scary Muslim enemies are on the march -- and if only Republicans could take power over the entire federal government again, those problems would all magically disappear.

Because of this highly-profitable right-wing media infrastructure so willing to deceive its consumers, and because conservative dogma has replaced fact-based analysis on the right, Republican candidates don't have an incentive to tell the truth. Quite the opposite.

It's going to get worse before it gets better.