One of the great dangers of the seemingly never-ending media coverage of the Republican presidential circus is that it facilitates the steady drip into the popular consciousness of a set of problematic conservative assertions that any serious progressive politics needs to question and refute. This media-induced steady slippage of Republican cliché into received truth was evident even before the current election season kicked into high gear: hence an earlier posting calling into question Republican explanations of the scale and persistence of poverty in this country.