Did you see what I did there with the title? I said I’ll explain how to win a political argument, but I’m not really going to, because, well, you can’t. And the reason why is in part why we are in such a dark place politically.

Way back in the before time – you know, before the November 2016 election – I was having a conversation with a person whom I like and with whom I share very few opinions regarding politics. In that discussion, in which this person was excoriating then-President Obama, I turned to the subject of unemployment. Surely, I said, while we might disagree on who gets the credit, we can at least agree that the unemployment rate has gone down during the Obama years? After all, the government statistics from the career bureaucrats at the Department of Labor show that unemployment hit 10 percent at the height of the Great Recession, and that rate dropped to 4.7 percent when Obama’s time in office ended. No, my friend argued, unemployment has actually gone up under Obama! But… the stats…? No. Nope. Well then, at least we can agree, I hoped, that the stock market more than doubled (almost tripled, in fact) under Obama? Nope, the market went down, only went back up when Trump was elected. I felt like saying, can we at least agree that it’s daytime outside today? Nope, it’s night.

How do you argue the issues, when we can’t even agree on the facts?

I am sometimes asked why I am a Democrat. My boilerplate response is that I’m a Dem because it takes less hypocrisy than it takes to be a Republican. Note I didn’t say no hypocrisy, just less. We are all of us fallible humans, after all. But at least I’m willing to agree that the stock market has gone up dramatically since Mr. Trump was elected (though I insist you also accept it went up even more under Obama). See? Less hypocrisy.

This problem of a failure of intellectual consistency leads to some rather remarkable mental gymnastics. Remember the now-president calling on Russia to “find” the “missing” Hillary emails? Yet this week, the now-president yowled about his transition team’s emails being “found” by the special counsel. Helpful tip for the readers out there: if your email ends in .gov, your emails are NOT private.

This remarkable willingness to be inconsistent is seen in other GOP areas. The women accusing Bill Clinton or Al Franken should be listened to and their word accepted. But those women accusing Donald Trump or Roy Moore are just making things up and should be ignored. Obamacare was a bad bill because it was long and congressional members hadn’t time to read it, but the new GOP tax cut bill, while long and mostly unread, is just fine. When it was investigating Hillary, the FBI was a fine and upstanding organization. Now that it (may be) investigating Mr. Trump, the FBI is “disgraceful,” according to the president.

Democrats have their faults, to be sure. Al Franken needed to resign and the idiot FBI agents who called the president an idiot need to be gone too. But for goodness sake, can we talk a bit about the scale of things? Even the president’s closest supporters admit that he has some challenges in telling the truth. A recent New York Times (gasp!) article documented Mr. Trump’s remarkable achievement of telling more demonstrable falsehoods in 10 months than Mr. Obama did in his entire eight years. And those attacking the Times are taking an interesting approach. They do not deny Mr. Trump is a profoundly dishonest liar, but they insist that the Times didn’t count enough of Mr. Obama’s “additional lies.” If we don’t accept “he did it first” as an excuse for bad behavior from our children, why in the world would we accept it from our president?

Which brings me back to where I started – how to win a political argument. Unfortunately, the answer can only be to give up all hope, all who venture here. In 1976, two good men – Ford and Carter – agreed on the basic facts of the U.S. economy and differed on how to repair it. In 2018, all too often, the debate will not be about agreed facts, but rather, on whose “facts” will be accepted. I’d only offer this: if someone says “good morning” to you at midnight, he’s wrong. But in the White House, it’s morning in America again, and that darn moon up there is “fake news.”