Our political candidates push the envelope to show themselves in the best light, and their opponents in the worst. Their campaign arsenals include selective use of opponents’ words, cherry-picking facts, and sometimes even sandpapering of the truth.

Voters have learned to sift this political hyperbole through a filter that includes other information sources and a dose of common sense.

But journalists seem to think we’re incapable of evaluating candidates’ claims on our own. They’ve set themselves up as the new umpires of politics. We now get a “fact check” from these guardians of the truth after every speech and debate.

But are we getting the straight scoop from a profession that struggles to conceal its own political biases?

James Taranto, writing in the Wall Street Journal, is not convinced. He thinks fact checking is yet another example of the new advocacy journalism:

The ‘fact check’ is opinion journalism or criticism, masquerading as straight news. The object is not merely to report facts but to pass a judgment.

Like movie reviewing, the ‘fact check’ is a highly subjective process. If a politician makes a statement that is flatly false, it does not need to be
fact checked. The facts themselves are sufficient.

‘Fact checks’ end up dealing in murkier areas of context and emphasis, making it very easy for the journalist to make up standards as he goes along, applying them more rigorously to the candidate he disfavors (which usually means the Republican).

Tarranto provides this example:

USA Today has a ‘reality check’ of a McCain ad whose script runs as follows:

Narrator: “Who is Barack Obama? He says our troops in Afghanistan are . . .

                Obama: “. . . just air-raiding villages and killing civilians.”

Narrator: “How dishonorable. Congressional liberals voted repeatedly to cut off funding to our active troops, increasing the risk on their lives. How dangerous. Obama and congressional liberals: too risky for America.”

The USA Today headline reads ‘Quote From Obama Taken Out of Context.’ In a way this is a tautology, since a quotation by definition is taken out of its original context (and placed in a new one). But of course the phrase out of context usually connotes ‘used in a misleading way.’ Is that the case here? Here is a longer version of the Obama quote, per USA Today:

“We’ve got to get the job done there, and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.”

On the one hand, Obama was making a broader argument, which the McCain ad ignores: that America should send more troops to Afghanistan. On the other hand, Obama clearly did assert that America is “air-raiding villages and killing civilians” (the subsequent clause makes that undeniable), though one could argue about whether he was asserting or merely worrying that we are “just” doing so.

Sometimes the bias is as plain as day. Here, Tarranto quotes some “fact checking” by the Associated Press on an author critical of Obama:

Corsi’s book claims the Illinois senator is a dangerous, radical candidate for president and includes innuendoes and false rumors–that he was raised a Muslim and attended a radical black church.

Obama is a Christian who attended Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, and his campaign picks apart the book’s claims on the Web site FightTheSmears.com.

It is a ‘false rumor’ that Trinity United is a ‘radical black church’? It’s hard to see how anyone could believe this even as a matter of opinion, but for the AP to present it as fact makes a mockery of journalism.

“Fact checking” is only necessary if we, the consumers of political discourse, lack sources of straight information from which to judge a candidate’s claims for ourselves.

If this is really a problem, are journalists themselves contributing to it?

Fingers are pointing in all directions as we search for the villains behind the mortgage and financial market crises.

Many of us focus on traditional whipping boys — the Wall Street fat cats blamed for every financial fainting spell. Democrats point at Republicans, and Republicans accuse Democrats.

But none of this is where the rubber really meets the road. The real source of our economic chaos, like so many modern troubles, is that most cherished and maligned possession — the automobile.

In 1909, Henry Ford created the Model T, offering mobility, convenience and liberation beyond Americans’ wildest dreams. Everybody wanted one. But even after production improvements brought the price down, the Model T cost $345 — a budget-breaker for most Americans.

Ford had manufactured, for the first time, “a mass-produced consumer’s item that cost between 10 and 20 percent of a family’s annual income,” writes historian Daniel Boorstin in “The Americans: The Democratic Experience.”

Ford was a staunch advocate of frugality and prudence. He maintained that folks should scrimp and save until they had enough cash to buy a car. But other business operators had bolder, if not better, ideas. They quickly concocted the consumer “installment plan” — a form of financing previously used only to purchase real estate.

In 1923, U.S. manufacturers sold more than 3.5 million passenger cars, according to Boorstin. About 80 percent were purchased on some kind of time-payment plan.

Installment plans spread quickly in the decades that followed, enabling Americans to acquire desirable items from refrigerators to power boats.

“It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the American standard of living was bought on the installment plan,” writes Boorstin. In the process, he adds, Americans developed “a habit of enjoying things before they were paid for.”

The credit card — a new invention — made this financial revolution possible. It too was tied to the automobile. As more Americans acquired cars, gasoline companies began to issue cards that customers could use at thousands of gas stations across the country. Soon these cards morphed into all-purpose credit instruments.

The first was Diner’s Club, in 1950, and then Carte Blanche and American Express. As profits grew, banks started to issue their own cards.

This vast expansion of credit had many positive effects. Credit cards “democratized the world of business,” in Boorstin’s words, and helped to usher in unprecedented affluence.

Yet as affluence grew, Americans found it increasingly difficult to delay gratification. Credit terms became looser, and a culture of debt arose.

The results are spelled out in a report titled “For a New Thrift: Confronting the Debt Culture.” Released in May, it is a project of the New York-based Institute on American Values and six other think tanks and national groups.

The report documents where living beyond our means has led us. One in seven families now reports that at some point they have experienced a debt burden “serious enough to have caused them to file for bankruptcy or to use a credit consolidator.” In 2004, the average family devoted more than 18 percent of its income to debt payments. Fifty-six percent of college seniors carry four or more credit cards.

Government has also contributed to financial irresponsibility. For years, the federal government has sought to expand home ownership, pushing mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to fund mortgages — including subprime and adjustable rate loans — for large numbers of people who, in retrospect, couldn’t afford them. The Community Reinvestment Act, first passed in 1977, prompted traditional banks to do the same.

State government has also encouraged our spendthrift ways. Lotteries — once outlawed in every state — now fuel a “get rich quick” mentality among those who can least afford it.

Today, 20 percent of Americans are frequent lottery players, according to the report. “Players with lower incomes tend to spend more on the lottery than those with higher incomes,” it notes. In 2006, households making under $12,400 a year spent, on average, $645 on lottery tickets — 5 percent of their income. If such a household invested the same amount in stocks for 40 years, it could expect to have $87,000 in 2006 dollars, according to the Tax Foundation.

There’s plenty of blame to go around for the current credit crisis. But some of it belongs to the average guy or gal who has listened to the siren call of easy money, and thrown frugality and prudence out the window. That guy or gal may be staring back at us in the mirror.

Thrift counted as a virtue to our grandparents. To us, it’s a relic of bygone days.

Boorstin summed up the change this way: “Credit, once closely tied to the character, honor and reputation of a particular person, one of a man’s most precious possessions” has become “a flimsy, plasticized, universal gadget.”

In this year’s election, Sarah Palin is the candidate best known for lacing her public policy views with religious conviction. It’s no surprise — we’ve come to expect that from Republicans.

But religious references are now common among Democrats too, as they seek to close a perceived “religion gap.” In a recent speech, Joe Biden – Palin’s Democratic counterpart – asserted that his views on tax policy are rooted in “Catholic social doctrine.”

Many secularized opinion-makers cringe when they hear religion intrude into American public life. They promote the European model, in which religion is banished from the public square and confined to the private sphere. They ask: “Didn’t our nation’s founders demand that religion and politics go separate ways?”

To answer, we must dig deeper than one-liners about the separation of church and state, writes Richard John Neuhaus. We should return, he says, to the man who, among this country’s founders, wrote the most compelling work on religion and government:  Thomas Jefferson. 

More than he wanted to be remembered for having been president, Mr. Jefferson wanted to be remembered as the author of the Virginia ‘Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom.’ In the text of the bill he underlined this sentence: ‘The opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction.’ In a republic of free citizens, every opinion, every prejudice, every aspiration, every moral argument has access to the public square in which we deliberate the ordering of our life together.

In Jefferson’s view, public opinion—whatever its source—is the bedrock of America’s experiment in ordered liberty. An opinion based on religious principles cannot be favored more or less favored than any other:

In a democracy that is free and robust, an opinion is no more disqualified for being religious than for being atheistic, or psychoanalytic, or Marxist, or just plain dumb. There is, or at least there ought to be, no legal or constitutional question about the admission of religion to the public square; there is only a question about the free and equal participation of citizens in our public business. Religion is not a reified thing that threatens to intrude upon our common life. Religion in public is but the public opinion of those citizens who appeal to religion in public.

The fact is, our policy positions – whether we’re Republicans or Democrats – often grow directly from religious foundations.

Civil rights laws are a good example. The idea of human equality is rooted in the Judeo/Christian view of man, and has no solid philosophical foundation outside it. 

Secular reason alone could not win the battle for “equal rights.” Success there sprang from transcendent principle—a view of each individual’s relationship with God.

This view holds that we are equal because we are made “in the image and likeness of God.” Our Declaration of Independence states it clearly: “All men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

It’s no accident that many of our important civil rights leaders were also religious leaders. The concept of “unalienable rights” has given birth – not only to the civil rights movement for racial minorities — but also to the women’s rights movement, the right-to-life movement, and others.

Surely it was appropriate for our equal rights pioneers to contend for those rights on the basis that they were “endowed” by our “Creator.”

And surely we are entitled to continue the debate on the same basis.

Remember the old one-room schoolhouse? We’ve moved far beyond it with our multimillion-dollar school facilities and our high-tech computer labs, right?

So began Chesterton Academy — a school that may point the way to an educational renaissance to match the Renaissance man whose name it bears.

The academy, which opened in September, is a private, Catholic high school that will expand from ninth and 10th to 12th grade in the next two years. It is named after G.K. Chesterton, an English social commentator, theologian and man of letters who was one of the 20th century’s greatest minds and most prolific authors.

Chesterton Academy’s “countercultural” identity doesn’t spring from theories found in the latest education journals. Nor is the school breaking new ground in Chinese immersion pedagogy or robotics.Instead, this place exemplifies the real avant-garde.

The bright room in Eliot Community Center is hung with icons and medieval art, and lined with such books as Cicero’s “Orations” and Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales.” Students sit around a table, engrossed in Latin verbs. One wall displays calligraphy exercises, which include this revealing Chesterton quote: “A dead thing goes with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”

In future years, the kids will study calculus and chemistry, and immerse themselves in great thinkers from Homer to T.S. Eliot. They will also explore once-celebrated arts such as oil painting and Gregorian chant, which few pursue today.

The educational “robbery” that Chesterton Academy is striving to halt has two components, says DeJak, the school’s headmaster. First, schools are depriving students by failing to pass on the 3,000-year-old body of knowledge — literature, philosophy, theology, history, art, music, drama — that is their greatest heritage as human beings, he says. The greatest flaw of modern education is that it is based on a succession of fads, he adds.

As a result, our young people may be “eco-aware” or have great self-esteem, but they often can’t explain the passions that sparked the Civil War or why “David Copperfield” is a great novel.

At Chesterton Academy, “We start with the premise that — in Chesterton’s words — ‘the oldest things ought to be taught to the youngest people,’” says Ahlquist, one of the academy’s founders, who is also president of the Bloomington-based American Chesterton Society.

Do you want evidence that our kids can’t think clearly? he asks. Just listen to them talk.

A typical ninth-grader’s response to just about anything runs like this: “So I’m like, wow, that’s, like, awesome.”

“Kids today can’t speak in complete sentences because they can’t think in complete sentences,” Ahlquist explains. He’s not kidding. At Chesterton Academy, there’s a rule against saying “like.” Contemporary education robs young people in a second way, observes DeJak. Our schools teach moral relativism — the notion that there is no truth, and that we all must choose our own “values,” our own right and wrong. No wonder our kids’ favorite word is, like, “whatever.”

“We believe that there is a larger truth, which every other truth relates to — and that is God,” says DeJak. “For us, education is not just about job training, but about seeking the truth and training the soul.”

In line with its revival of lost arts, Chesterton Academy will place special emphasis on public speaking — once the crowning glory of a high school education. Not long ago, every ninth-grader could recite the Gettysburg Address. At the moment, students at the school are learning how to introduce themselves, and working on posture, articulation and presentation.

Later, they will deliver two-minute speeches — “you learn how long two minutes really is,” jokes DeJak — and will then move on to poetry recitation and debate. Chesterton Academy’s ambitions extend beyond academics, as you’d expect from a school that seeks to “train the soul.”

“We’ll work on getting rid of unfortunate cultural habits,” says DeJak, such as the sense of entitlement so common among young people.

In November, for example, the boys from the school will travel to the University of Notre Dame to see a football game.

“The guys have to pay $65 each for their tickets,” explains DeJak. “I told them, ‘Don’t run to Mom for the money. You’ll enjoy it more if you work for it.’ So they’re having bake sales and raking leaves.” How are the kids at Chesterton Academy responding? “The first week was the toughest of their lives,” says DeJak. “But now it’s beginning to gel.”

When I ask, the students acknowledge that they will miss the football games and proms that bigger schools offer. But they are enthusiastic about their new school’s small size, and about teachers who “bring the people of other times alive for us.”

As 10th-grader Paul Cummings begins to answer my question, a renegade “like” intrudes in his first sentence. Shaking his head, he starts again.

Last night’s vice-presidential debate included polar disagreements on almost every issue, with one notable exception. That point of agreement happened to be on what many describe as the most volatile issue on earth. The question posed by moderator Gwen Ifill was whether the two candidates favored legally redefining one woman/one man marriage. 

Here are excerpts from CNN’s transcript:

PALIN: [N]o one would ever propose, not in a McCain-Palin administration, to do anything to prohibit, say, visitations in a hospital or contracts being signed, negotiated between parties.

But I will tell Americans straight up that I don’t support defining marriage as anything but between one man and one woman, and I think through nuances we can go round and round about what that actually means.
But I’m being as straight up with Americans as I can in my non-support for anything but a traditional definition of marriage.

IFILL: Let’s try to avoid nuance, Senator. Do you support gay marriage?

BIDEN: No. Barack Obama nor I support redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage. We do not support that. That is basically the decision to be able to be able to be left to faiths and people who practice their faiths the determination what you call it.

The bottom line though is, and I’m glad to hear the governor, I take her at her word, obviously, that she thinks there should be no civil rights distinction, none whatsoever, between a committed gay couple and a committed heterosexual couple. If that’s the case, we really don’t have a difference.

IFILL: Is that what you said?

PALIN: Your question to him was whether he supported gay marriage and my answer is the same as his and it is that I do not.

IFILL: Wonderful. You agree. On that note, let’s move to foreign policy.

Could it be that our most liberal and conservative politicians are reaching an agreement on this point — That opposition to gay marriage is not a civil rights’ issue, and that there are important consequences in distinguishing marriage from, say, hospital visitation rights?

What are those stakes?
Perhaps they involve a recognition that — whatever government programs politicians might promote — nothing can compare with traditional marriage: the greatest source of social security, child welfare, and general well-being known to man.