Fudging the facts.

Fudging the facts.

O.K., now I've repeatedly received that email claiming my taxes will be lower under John McCain if he's elected so I'm finally snapping and refuting that. Sure, if you're making $250,000+ your taxes will be lower ... but me and mine are nowhere near that income bracket.

Anyway, you've probably seen the same email, and I don't expect you to blindly take my word for it, so check out this point by point refutation

In fact, look over this whole site since it goes through and rates the truthfulness of each candidate, and seems pretty non-partisan (Obama and the Dems get quite a few thwacks for distorting the truth too).

This election has been driven by a lot of false information, and much of that has been in the form of forwarded emails that most folks seem to just take at face value. This stuns me, but I guess if you get an email forwarded to you by a friend your first instinct is to accept its claims. In fact this week's On The Media had a really good interview about this phenomenon and contained this head-bending little exchange:

BOB GARFIELD: Well, that’s interesting that you should observe that. Do you have any reason to think that people are sort of catching up to the dynamic of political emails and learning to discount them as much as they would discount, say, a political ad?

BILL ADAIR: Not yet, in fact, to the contrary. Originally we were seeing a lot of these chain emails from the right criticizing the Democrats. And what we've seen in the last two weeks is that the left is using the same tactic. I don't think we've reached the point yet where people are that savvy about these things.

And if you look at the polls, the percentage of people who believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim has actually increased, and I would attribute that largely to the chain emails. So I think we in the media really have an obligation to tell people what’s true and what’s not.

I would take that one step forward and point out that I think it's also people's responsibility to verify claims they're going to make on behalf of one candidate or another. This goes as much for the Republican touting incorrect tax figures as it does the Democrat falsely accusing Sarah Palin of banning books.