The "Truth"

For a long time, I've held the view that if an organization puts "truth" in its name, you should be extremely wary.

I started thinking this way back when the anti-tobacco group thetruth.com first came on the scene, and they basically put out a lot of rubbish information (along with their scare tactics) that they couldn't back up. I even e-mailed them asking for them to back up some of their claims, and they couldn't: they simple pointed to some long papers mentioned on their "resources" page and said "it's in there."

Examples like this come and go all the time, and Barack Obama's "Truth Team" is no exception. Some of their current lies:

• They say Mitt Romney said rich people should pay a lower tax rate than middle-class people. It never happened. What he did say is that investment income (which many middle class people receive) should be taxed at a lower rate than wage income (which many rich people get).
• They say Mitt Romney plans to tax Social Security benefits. No, he doesn't, and didn't even hint at it. They make this one up by saying that the only way Romney's stated plan makes sense is if he taxed Social Security benefits. By the exact same logic, I can say that Obama's stated goals of fiscal sanity can only happen if he sells Alaska to Russia, so therefore, he plans to sell Alaska to Russia.

Meh. I could go on, but it's boring. Pretty much every claim they make is a lie, and I'm not using hyperbole. And don't think they don't know they are telling lies: they just know they won't be held accountable for it. There's no serious downside to lying for them, because the people who might vote for them either don't know, or don't care (and that, of course, includes most of the news media).