If you have an Internet account, by now you’ve probably been inundated with all manner of political propaganda from across the ideological spectrum.

Such is the nature of the hustings landscape today - a cornucopia of lies, distortions, character assassination, duplicity and misstatement’s made all the more cancerous by the ability of the unaccountable dark forces of deceit to spread their prevarications via cyberspace to potentially millions of gullible rubes.

Here’s a good example.

The other day I received a long e-mail vilifying Barack Obama, noting the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee wrote: “I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in a ugly situation.” The quote is completely taken out of context, purposefully ignoring Obama was referring to defending American Muslims against demonstrations of bigotry directed toward them.

When I wrote the sender of the e-mail back, noting he was wilfully disseminating factually inaccurate information about Obama, here was his response:
“All the people I sent it to have zero chance of voting for Obama under any circumstance so it’s no big deal.”

But it is a big deal. The writer’s mailing list was quite long. Certainly many of those people turned around and sent the false e-mail to many of their friends and so on and so on and so on.

If these people don’t care much for Barack Obama and would never consider voting for him, fine. But shouldn’t they be denying Obama their votes based on factual information? On reality? On some standard of fairness?

And that may explain why the Obama campaign, in a masterstroke of strategy just unveiled a new website - fightthesmears.com - designed to immediately address a growing litany of lies being spread about the candidate.

It’s pretty obvious the Obama campaign learned a valuable lesson from John Kerry’s run for the White House four years ago when the candidate was all too slow in responding to the phony Swiftboat Veterans thugs who attacked his patriotism, his courage and the medals he received for his combat experiences in Vietnam.

The current fib-du-jour concerns a claim that Michelle Obama used the term “whitey” during a sermon at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. It’s a story that has been advanced by the right-wing drive-by bloviators like Rush Limbaugh, although there isn’t a shred of proof to substantiate the accusation.

And Associated Press story on the smear, noted falsehoods about the Obama campaign are among the hottest topics on websites like Urband Legends and Snopes - thus the need for fightthesmears.com.

The website has been busy, debunking notions such as the always popular “Obama is a Muslim,” the “Obama refuses to say the Pledge of Allegiance,” and “Obama took his Senate oath with his hand on the Koran.”

There is even, you might want to sit down for this one, an absurd suggestion that Michelle Obama’s playful fist pump with her husband on the night he clinched the nomination was really, as reported by those chuckleheads at Fox News, “a terrorist fist jab.” Oh sigh.

These insane rumors gain so much currency because, well, many people are dumber than a sack of storm drains.

But at least now, when you hear or read some bumptious claim like Barack Obama is really Osama bin Laden’s love child with Jane Fonda, you have a place to check out the truth.

The real question though is - will you?