This is a column about intellectual

honesty.

My opinions generally run to

the conservative, and I hate dishonesty in politics and, even more, the

response one often hears when someone's favorite politician is caught

in dishonesty: "Oh yeah? Well what about Iran/Contra?"

And clearly I'm happier when

a liberal politician is caught with his or her hand in the cookie jar

than when it happens to be a conservative.

But intellectual honesty compels

me to condemn it in either case.

Just for the record, when Iran/Contra

did happen, in spite of the fact that I completely agreed with what Col.

North and his band of merry men were doing in the White House basement,

I condemned it because they were doing it illegally.

Congress had specifically ordered

them not to do it, and no matter how strongly one might feel that Congress

was wrong, when military and intelligence people start sneaking around

and doing things contrary to what the civilian government has ordered,

we're just a hop and a skip away from a military coup.

I also loudly denounced the

actions of a congressman from these here parts, Republican Pat Swindell,

when he got caught doing some shady things back in the '80s. I liked the

guy, agreed with him politically. But he had to go.

I could give several more examples,

but that's not where I'm going with this.

Where I'm going is to the Internet.

What a wonderful tool it is

with its instant links to expert knowledge on any topic you can think

of, not to mention its helpful sites for communication and education of

people involved in literally thousands of special interests and pursuits.

But it is also a very efficient

tool for the rapid dissemination of completely false information, especially

political charges, countercharges and "facts" to support various

arguments.

Any of you out there who have

access to the Internet know what I'm talking about... all those e-mails

that get forwarded all over the place. You usually get the more popular

ones two or three times at least.

Take this as a general rule,

folks: If you haven't verified it, it isn't true.

The best known legend about

Al Gore this go-round was the story about him allegedly trading his vote

on the Gulf War to whichever party would give him the most air time to

talk about it.

I never was able to verify

whether this one was true or not, but I'm guessing not. It was attributed

to Sen. Alan Simpson, supposedly in a column written Sept. 3 for the "Denver

Rocky News." I searched for such a publication and found only the

Rocky Mountain News in Denver.

So I searched for the alleged

column without success. I e-mailed the paper and asked for verification,

with no answer. They did, however, use my email as a letter to the editor,

which I learned about when a reader e-mailed me to ask what I had found

out. Weird.

I really enjoyed one recent

message that was circulated extremely widely, at least among conservatives.

It gave several interesting "facts" supposedly compiled by statisticians

and political scientists about the counties across the nation that voted

for George Bush and the ones that voted for Al Gore in the recent election.

Supposedly, the people in the

counties for Bush had more education, more income, ad infinitum, than

the counties for Gore.

I didn't have time to check

them all out, but I was curious about one item in particular... the contention

that the murder rate in the Gore counties was about a billion times higher

than in the Bush counties.

This was attributed to a Professor

Joseph Olson at the Hamline University School of Law. I never heard of

such a university, but went online and found it. And Prof. Olson does

exist.

"Now I'm getting somewhere,"

I thought.

But in response to my e-mail,

Olson said the "research" was attributed to him erroneously.

He said it came from a Sheriff Jay Printz in Montana. I e-mailed Sheriff

Printz, and guess what? He didn't do the research either, and didn't remember

who had e-mailed it to him.

In other words, he got the

same legend e-mailed to him and passed it on to Olson without checking

it out, and when Olson passed it on, someone thought it sounded better

if a law professor had done the research, and so it grew.

Who knows where it originally

came from, but it's just not true.

All of which leads me to a

very simple plea. Conservatives, libertarians and Republicans, it doesn't

help the cause when we use false information to support an otherwise logical

argument. It hurts it.

Don't pass this stuff along

unless it comes from a verifiable source.

Oh, and by the way, Hamline

University houses George Bush Sr.'s presidential library. And that's a

fact.