The morning after public impeachment hearings came to an apparent close, the biggest names in conservative punditry were happy to call the ballgame.
At the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan declared that the case against Donald Trump had “been so clearly made you wonder what exactly the Senate will be left doing”.
“On the substance,” wrote Rich Lowry over at the National Review, “Democrats have won.”
But the color of the sky was different on Capitol Hill, where elected Republicans insisted Democrats had produced no evidence of wrongdoing and Trump had been summarily vindicated.
“I’ve just focused on the facts and it is clear as every day that goes by [sic] that Democrats’ case for impeachment is crumbling,” the New York representative Elise Stefanik, who participated in the hearings, told Fox News on Thursday night.
How can inhabitants of the same ideological ecosystem disagree so sharply? It appears that getting into the bunker with Trump, as the politicians have, requires embracing falsehoods too plain or painful for the pundits to bear.
Here is a list of major falsehoods in the air – or in the recycled air of the bunker, at least: