We are living in interesting times. We are living in a time when elected officials can make the most outlandish completely untrue statements and bear little or no repercussions. We are witnessing the death of facts in our public discourse.

A U.S Congressman can falsely claim that 80 Congressional Democrats are members of the Communist party.

A U.S. Senator can assert that over 90% of Planned Parenthood’s budget goes to funding abortions, when it’s actually closer to 3%. That was bad enough. The topper was when one of the senator’s staffers defended him by explaining that “his remark was not intended to be a factual statement”!

Or how about when at-the-time contender for the Republican presidential nomination, Herman Cain, accused the Obama administration as being behind the Occupy Wall Street protests, but then added: “I don’t have facts to back this up.”

President Obama has often characterized by his critics as a “Socialist” — despite the fact that no actual Socialists (or anyone who is the least bit rational in assessing Obama’s positions) believe he is anywhere close to one.

The problem isn’t merely that people in authority continue to make such obviously false statements. The bigger problem is that they get away with it. By this I mean they receive little or no condemnation — other than by those of the opposing party, who are dismissed as “politically motivated.” The lying politicians don’t get booted out of office. To the contrary, their lies often improve their re-election odds, by appealing to their party’s “extreme base.”

Why do they do this? Because no matter how ridiculous the claim, a significant portion of the public winds up believing it. For example, at least in several Southern states, a majority of Republicans still believe that Obama is a Muslim. Many still doubt that he was born in the United States. And don’t even get me started on the public’s willingness to embrace the false attacks on evolution and climate change.

In today’s political landscape, “facts” are defined as something that confirms your pre-existing bias. Anything else is dismissed as “just someone’s wrong opinion.” There is no longer an agreed upon set of facts whose interpretation is debated. Each side in a debate now has their own set of “facts” — with little attention being paid to how true they are.

Mainstream media are of little help in sorting this out. They tend to fall in one of two camps. On the one hand, you have organizations such as Fox News and MSNBC that take such a unilateral and extreme view that they don’t even offer a pretense of being unbiased. On the other side, you have most of the rest of the media. They refuse to even hint that truth may reside more with one side of a controversy than another, lest they be accused of being biased.

Swiftboating

I am reminded of the “swiftboating” of John Kerry in 2004. Concerned about the political advantage of Kerry’s status as a Vietnam War hero, Republicans decided that the best defense was a good offense. So they created the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (SBVT). According to Wikipedia: “SBVT asserted that Kerry was ‘unfit to serve’ as President based upon his alleged ‘willful distortion of the conduct’ of American servicemen during that war, and his alleged ‘withholding and/or distortion of material facts’ as to his own conduct during that war.”

According to a Times survey “about one-third of viewers believed there was at least ‘some truth’ to the allegations.” The claims, in fact, were largely if not entirely untrue. Again, as noted in Wikipedia, “The first SBVT ad was contradicted by the statements of several other veterans who observed the incidents, by the Navy’s official records, and, in some instances, by the contemporaneous statements of SBVT members themselves.” ABC News’s The Note opined, “the Swift Boat ad and their primary charges about Kerry’s medals are personal, negative, extremely suspect, or false.” [See also this snopes.com page.]

The truth didn’t matter. The SBVT ads created enough doubt to swing a significant number of voters. Some believe it was sufficient to have altered the outcome of the election.

One result of all of this is that the word swiftboating became a verb, used to describe the deliberate use of a “harsh, unfair or untrue political attack” in order to discredit an opponent. In other words, a smear campaign.

Sadly, with the 2012 presidential campaign moving into high gear, we can expect to see sort of thing happening again — especially from Republicans who have been very effective at drawing from this well. I expect this season to set new records in negative attacks and false claims. Why? Because they work. And with the new super PACs, there is more money and opportunity to use these attacks than ever before. We’ve already seen this in action, as noted in today’s San Francisco Chronicle: “The super PAC supporting Romney outspent the super PACs supporting Gingrich and Santorum by 20 to 1 over that period, and much of the pro-Romney super PAC trafficked in ‘deceptive’ statements, the nonpartisan Annenberg Public Policy Center found.”

What can politicians do?

One of the most difficult decisions a political campaign faces is what to do when attacked by false statements. They have several choices, none of them ideal (that’s what make these attacks so effective).

• Ignore the attacks. Take the high road. Avoid responding to the attacks on the grounds that any response only lends credibility to the accusations. Data show that repeating a lie can increase its perceived veracity, even if you repeat a lie only to deny it. Over time, many people will recall the lie more than your denial. Even worse, your reply can alert people to an attack that they did not know about before.

This all sounds nice. But the other side is that ignoring an attack lets your opponent control the message. If all the public hears is what your opponent is saying, you lose the debate by default. If public interest in a story dies quickly, you might get away with ignoring it. Otherwise, you have to rebut the attack. And soon. The longer you wait, the more you get hurt.

• Deny the attacks. Deny the truth of the attacks. Do it often, as long as it remains a hot topic. And it isn’t enough to make a simple denial. That’s too weak. You you have to assert your denial vigorously and indignantly. You are “appalled” that such false accusations could even be asserted.

The problem here is that this lends itself to a “he said, she said” situation — where people may wind up unsure who to believe. It helps if you have clear evidence to back up your claim, but don’t get bogged down in a long detailed intellectual presentation. Keep things brief and simple. Sadly, emotional reactions often play a bigger role in these conflicts than evidence.

• Accuse the opposition. Go beyond denial. Accuse your attackers for being unconscionable liars. If possible, show how your opponents have repeatedly lied, not only in this case but in many other situations. The idea is to shift the focus from your opponents’ false claims to your opponents’ ethics, ideally putting them on the defensive.

This can be effective. But there is a risk that your “negative” ratings with the public will go up as a result, even if you take your opponents with you. You can’t spend all your time on accusations. You need to shift back to a positive message at some point.

• Attack the opposition. Fight fire with fire. Instead of responding to your opponents’ false claims, find something even worse about your opponents actions and attack them with it. Again, this can take you off the hot seat and force your opponent to defend against your attacks.

The risk here is that you may be tempted to make dubious attacks, ones that may not be entirely true. If so, you wind up stooping to your opponents’ level. Sometimes this may seem unavoidable (“it’s how hardball politics is played these days; everyone does it”). And, as I’ve said, it can be successful. However, it may lead to the public throwing up their hands and shouting “a pox on both your houses.”

In the end, a politician will likely be required to employ some combination of all of these methods. Exactly what to do will depend upon the specifics of the opponents’ attack, how much media attention it is generating, and what arrows you have in your own quiver to attack back.

What can citizens do?

For starters, don’t limit yourself to soundbites and attack ads for determining how you will vote. Assume these are often misleading at best, and untrue at worst.

Go to the web and do some checking. Two great places to start are FactCheck and PolitoFact.

Check on the record of all candidates you support. If you find that their record for honesty is poor, write them and let them know you are disappointed. Tell them that if they keep on making blatantly false statements, they will lose your support. And mean it.

I know. It’s a bit naive to think this can be very effective. In the end, most people will not be willing to change their vote based on a candidate’s honesty — especially when nearly all candidates are dishonest to some extent. A Tea Party member would never vote for a Democrat, even if he was convinced that the Republican candidate was a chronic liar and the Democratic opponent was a beacon of truth (assuming the member could ever be convinced that such was the case). But there are independents, and even some partisans, out there who might really shift their vote based on such considerations. At least I hope so. In the end, the only way to stop this assault on truth is if politicians come to believe it will not help them get elected.

In the wake of the uproar over Rush Limbaugh’s unwarranted personal attack on Sandra Fluke (and his subsequent so-called apology), the response from some on the right has been to say: “People on the left do the same thing.” This has led to articles, such as one by David Frum, attempting to show why what Rush did is more extreme than the norm — and why the criticism of him is “fair.” While there is much overlap between my viewpoint and that of Frum, there are a few differences as well. I’d like to go on record with my own take. Here it is:

1. I distinctly remember the incident regarding David Letterman and his jokes about Sarah Palin’s daughter(s). My first reaction to hearing Letterman was to cringe. I felt this was unacceptable, beyond the bounds of decency. And I was a David Letterman fan. So you get no argument from me on the point that there can be excesses on the left as well as the right.

As a minor aside, I doubt that my cringing is matched by the typical person listening to Rush’s comments — ever. But that’s another story.

2. Letterman apologized two nights later. It did not appear to me that the apology was given to stem the tide of advertisers who were abandoning ship. And his words were not chosen to sound like “I still think I’m right about what I said although I could have said it a bit more politely” — which is how Rush’s so-called apology came off.

3. Letterman is a comedian, not a political commentator. Dave’s job is to make people laugh. While listening to Rush may also make people laugh, his “job” is to espouse a political viewpoint and influence people. Republicans in Congress worry about what Rush says; the same is not true for Democrats and Letterman. Although this does not absolve comedians from their excesses (see point #1 above), it does give them more latitude in my book.

For that matter, I don’t think of Dave as having a unilaterally left wing slant. In a given week, he may poke fun at a left wing political figure as well as a right wing one.

In contrast, Rush is always on the extreme right wing and wants you to take his statements seriously. He wants you to believe that he really hates whoever he is attacking and that you should hate that person too. If Rush had made his comments as part of a skit on Saturday Night Live, for example, I would have been less appalled — although still upset.

4. For a closer left-wing match to Rush Limbaugh, I would look to Bill Maher. I readily admit that Maher too often goes off the rails. And when he does, I am critical of Bill, just as I am of Rush. I admit that I often agree with Bill’s criticisms and I find him funny. These lessen my negative reaction. But I still would not defend his excesses.

5. I give people more latitude when they comment on public figures, such as politicians and entertainers. Public figures are legitimate targets of satire and ridicule, much more so than “private” citizens. That’s part of what upset me about what Letterman said. At the time, I felt that Palin’s children should have been “out of bounds” as a target. The same is true for what Rush did regarding Sandra Fluke. I say this because comparing what Rush did to leftist insults of President Bush (or other politicians) doesn’t work at all for me. It’s not nearly the same thing.

6. It’s interesting that those on the right apparently needed to go back to something that David Letterman said almost three years ago to offer a counter-example to Rush. If David Letterman was regularly saying things like this, you’d think they could find an example from last week. From the times I’ve listened to Rush, he says outrageous and extreme things every single day. This is his raison d’etre. Left wing blogs seem to critically cite quotes from Limbaugh on an almost daily basis. I don’t see this happening with right-wing blogs and Letterman. The current uproar stems from the fact that Rush went beyond his usual extremes to something almost no one could support, not because what he said was an exception to his general tone.

7. Finally, I emphatically agree with Frum that whatever Letterman or Maher or others on the left may or may not have done is irrelevant to the current situation with Limbaugh. When I criticize Limbaugh, I never add: “…and no one on the left would ever do anything like that.”

To me, pointing out the excesses of the left as a rebuttal to what Rush did is a diversion, a smoke-and-mirrors trick to shift the direction of the discussion and put the left on the defensive. Instead of discussing the appropriateness (or lack thereof) of what Rush said, the argument becomes about whether or not those on the left may or may not sometimes be equally at fault. Great tactic. This is a much better debating position for conservatives than having to defend (or not) Rush. But it’s irrelevant.

To me, this would be as if a right-wing response to news that a conservative talk show host had murdered his wife was: “And so? There are liberals who have also murdered their wives.” Who cares? Anyone who murders anyone should go to jail. One murder should not be seen as an excuse to let the another off the hook. And the same is true for Rush’s obnoxious comments.

If conservatives want to attack a left-wing commentator for some beyond-the-pale statement he made, go for it. But it will have no effect on the fact that Rush’s comments regarding Fluke were inexcusable — and that whatever negative fallout results is well deserved.