The appropriate response to someone attempting to turn you into the victim of a hoax or a swindle is anger. It’s insulting to be treated like a sucker, a chump. And yet, my conservative intellectual friends appear not to be bothered in the least.

And that I just don’t understand.

Here are three concrete examples from Tuesday’s debate of Republican candidates doing their best PT Barnum imitation.

1. More than once in the debate, Carly Fiorina proposed reducing the federal tax code — not the forms ordinary citizens use to file their taxes, but the body of laws that govern taxation in the United States — to three pages. From its current length of more than 74,000 pages. (The actual code amounts to something closer to 3,000 pages, with the rest taken up by supporting material, but let’s leave that aside.)

Now, could the tax code be shortened and simplified? I’m sure it could be! Maybe we could go back to its length in 1984 (26,300 pages). Or even to its size at the end of World War II (8,200 pages), when the population stood at 140 million people and the economy was many times smaller and vastly less complex than it is now. But no: Fiorina wants us to believe the code can be shrunk to three pages. Which is obviously, indisputably, offensively ludicrous. How can conservative intellectuals be anything but outraged by such hucksterism?