"Denial in Depth": A familiar tune

Here's a good Paul Krugman blog post from over the weekend about the American Enterprise Institute's fundamentally dishonest counter-study on income inequality:

What's striking is the way AEI doesn't even resort to the usual practice of concocting misleading numbers; it just flat-out lies about what various other peoples' research, like Robert Gordon's work, actually says.

He then goes on to say:

What I found myself thinking about, however, is the way the inequality debate illustrates some typical features of many debates these days: the way the right has a sort of multi-layer defense in depth, which involves not only denying facts but then, in a pinch, denying the fact that you denied those facts.

Which in turn reminded me of a wonderful bit from the fake news pages of the long-ago National Lampoon, which I paraphrase from memory. This is a quote from the attorney for Sid Vicious, then accused of having stabbed and killed his girlfriend, Nancy Spungeon:

My client never even knew the victim, and if my client did know the victim, they were never friends, and if my client was her friend, they certainly weren't romantically involved, and if my client was romantically involved with her, they weren't together on the night of her death, and if my client was with her on the night of her death, he certainly didn't stab her, and if my client did stab her, then she was a yak and not entitled to the protections of the law.

The eternal verities of the heartless do not perish, or even go out of style.