Arne, to some here, truth is not an objective absolute (a fact, obvious to all, easily verified by anyone who cares to look), it is politically relative. If it does not support the Bush administration and the Right Wing agenda, it cannot be true.

When something is presented here that the Bush apologists find an unwelcome intrusion on their feelings of righteousness, they will take any of several approaches in an attempt to bury the disturbance to their tranquility. Direct denial is usually attempted first. Then quoting anything they can find on Fox News and Rush Limbaugh that can possibly be construed to indicate the contrary. When these sources are debunked (not difficult for a rational person to see the obvious extreme bias, but some cling like grim death), it may go in a couple of directions and probably over time, both. One direction is to attempt to divert the discussion to something else. Bringing up Clinton's dalliance with Monica is a favorite. Or introducing something—anything—else which is completely irrelevant to the point. Another direction (quite popular—this is the Karl Rove method) is to attack the veracity, honesty, sanity, or sexual prowess of the person presenting the unwelcome news. Or to similarly attack the source of the information. This, is the time-honored argumentum ad hominem, debunked well over two millennia ago by Aristotle. This could also be called the "kill the messenger" attempt at refutation, which, of course, in no way invalidates the message. Yet another is to attempt to bury the discussion in vast quantities of cut-and-paste material only vaguely related (if at all), often containing long recitations of statistics, or data from long before the matter under discussion in the hope that it will bog down in irrelevant minutiae. They will even go so far as to attack a person's spelling or typing abilities.

These are a few things to look out for, but it is far from an exhaustive list.

Don Firth