When engaging with your political opponents in verbal battle, it helps to have facts to throw around. They serve as powerful ammunition in debates that are ultimately supposed to win voters; in order to tune the masses in to your line of thinking, you've got to have a reasonable argument worked out based on things that are actually true. Or at least that's how it would be in a world where officials were elected on credentials rather than sensationalism. 

The New York Times recently debunked a number of claims made by GOP candidates during Wednesday's Republican presidential debate. The whole evening carried multiple levels of debacle, from facepalm-worthy soundbytes to some evident off-camera tension between certain candidates. But what's interesting is how some of the criticisms leveled at the Obama administration appear to be largely fabricated. Much of the Republican aggression against the president seems to manifest in exaggeration, rewording, and general panic regarding liberalism in general. It's either a fearful amplification of something real (death panels! evil taxes!) or fiction so absurd that only those who still think Saddam Hussein had a lot to do with 9/11 buy into it (born in Kenya! Sharia law!). 

But then you get the more dangerous type of lie: the kind that sounds just plausible enough for very few people to question, just innocuous enough not to rouse suspicion in the average viewer. You get people like Mitt Romney--a reasonable enough man if you look away from the whole Mormon business--making claims about the president that sound accurate to your average moderate-to-Republican viewer but are actually contrary to fact. Romney stated that Obama had stalled energy development by stopping offshore drilling and the construction of new coal plants. While that does sound like something a green-leaning Democrat would undertake as president, Obama's been remarkably centrist for all his promised hope and change. He slowed deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico after BP's little snafu, but quickly went back to granting drilling permits. The coast of Alaska is now seeing some attention from Shell with the administration's blessing, and there are no new federal regulations that have prohibited the building of coal plants. 

The GOP knows what its potential voters want to hear. Bringing up the mistakes of the Obama administration is a sure tactic to change away from the change--even if those mistakes were never made. So is this the kind of thing we ought to expect at political debates? Should we expect at least someone to check the candidates on their facts? These sorts of claims aren't exactly matters of opinion anymore--not even the dubious "matters of opinion" that usually concern whether or not a candidate believes in science. I'm not saying a candidate can't flub on a few points during a live debate--goodness knows I would--but if you're going to be spitting talking points about the flaws of the current administration, at least make sure they're rooted in something concrete. A little homework goes a long way. Just because Obama sounds like he would do something doesn't mean that he has.