Mike Daisey has been roundly and justly castigated for selling his bullshit stories about visiting the Foxconn complex in Shenzhen, China, to This American Life. But even some of his harshest critics are buying into the idea that, in some contexts—just not "journalistic ones"—it's OK to tell little lies in service of a "larger truth."

Black lawmakers claim protesters shouted racial epithets as they walked to the Capitol to vote for health care reform last month. Andrew Breitbart published a video conclusively proving that this didn't happen, even though it was filmed an hour later.

What is truth? How do we know what we know? Philosophers have struggled with these questions for centuries, but Republicans have found an answer: if it wasn't filmed and uploaded to YouTube by a Teabagger, it didn't happen. Period.