Some things really are true or false

Is there any truth in America anymore?

Is there anything, anything at all that the left and the right can agree on, that the elites and the teabaggers see as common ground?

I'm really not sure. When we've reached the point where a third of the country doesn't believe in basic scientific truths like the evolution of species or the age of the planet, I'm not sure if there is anything we can agree on.

If you put Al FrankenAl Franken and Rush LimbaughRush Limbaugh in the same room, would they argue everything, or would there be some points of view they would share?

I ask this because there are some things that are factual. When Glenn BeckGlenn Beck held his 912 rally in Washington last week, most sources stated that there were about 70,000 people there. Some conservatives said there were at least 1 million.

The odds are pretty good that one of those is right, or at least closer to the mark than the other. I'm assuming that there weren't 535,000, which would be splitting the difference.

When people call President Barack ObamaBarack Obama a socialist and a fascist, do they realize those two are mutally exclusive? It doesn't help that Rush Limbaugh tries to tell his listeners that the Nazis were leftists because they had "socialist" as part of their name. That's like saying all those communist countries were actually democracies because they called themselves "people's democratic republics."

I don't really care about the political part of this when it comes to this issue. Arguments aren't facts, and when conservatives deny climate change even though there hasn't been one peer-reviewed piece of research that says it isn't happening.

Facts become subordinate to one's political agenda, and that isn't right.

There were either weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or there weren't. George W. BushGeorge W. Bush said there were, so he attacked. It turns out he was wrong. That's a fact.

Forty-seven million Americans are without health insurance. For whatever reason, that's a fact.

Not everything can be argued.

Not everything is he said she said, and the loudest voice isn't automatically the one telling the truth.

Seems to me we'd be better off if we remembered that.