Explain This For Me, Wouldja?

Since I was a young guy I've heard from parents, from banks, from businesses one consistent message: you've got to pay your debts. And if there's been one consistent place I've heard it from, it's been conservatives. Conservatives have always wanted to align themselves with balanced budgets. Until recently.

Yet here we have a Republican president, said to be as conservative a president as we've had in several decades, who's spending money like a drunken sailor on shore leave after a 6-month cruise.

There's a Republican majority in the senate.

There's a Republican majority in the house.

There's just no blaming this on Democrats. Remember the phrase "Tax-n-spend Democrats"? If you ever ever hear a Republican say that phrase again, stop them in mid-sentence and ask how they can possibly fault Democrats when the Republican-controlled government is spending our kids' tax dollars before they are even old enough to have a taxable wage. Do not let these folks get away with this. We need to fight when others try to spread disinformation about the way things are.

Since the explosion of talk radio, where bravado and wild, unchecked "fact-oids" are offered up as gospel, actual facts aren't too pertinent to political discourse. Consequently, right-wingers say the foulest and most wildly ridiculous things about liberals and they tend to get away with it.

Surely you've been on the receiving end of some of those e-mails that get passed around--stuff like Heinz Catsup closing down American plants and outsourcing to other countries...or one of the hundreds that circulated about either of the Clintons. When you get one of those e-mails, go here. It's a fact-checking site that's non-partisan. It debunks urban legends, and occasionally verifies them, when in fact they're true. And if the rumor that's been offered you as truth turns out not to be, do a reply to all and explain to them that in fact, that wasn't true, and include the URL from the story at the site that disproves it. Besides spreading the URL around so that people can check it out for themselves, it also tells the people spreading rumors that you'll be checking. And they can be hung out to dry by the facts.

The truth. That's what we want, right?