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"A lie will go 'round the world while truth is pulling its boots on."

— Mark Twain

Just to demonstrate how true that statement is, that statement is false.

Well, the sentiment expressed can hardly be disproved. But, a mildly diligent Google search undermines the widespread belief that it was ever uttered by the Great American Writer.

It certainly sounds like Twain, who did have quite a bit to say on the subject of truth and its opposite. But some of the more learned sources suggest that the first recorded use of the phrase should be credited to an otherwise unremembered British preacher, a contemporary of Twain, by the name Charles Haddon Spurgeon.

Ideas are cast out upon the sea of human communication, whether by Pony Express or Tweetdeck, and the way they are accepted and internalized is dependent on how each one fits into our preconceived notions of the world. But anything clearly has more staying power when people, especially Americans, think it the bon mot of someone like Twain.

Which makes me wonder how anyone can seriously believe some of the garbage that has been turning up in my email recently. It isn't attributed to Mark Twain, Ronald Reagan, The Salt Lake Tribune, The New York Times, Fox News or the Elves, Leprechauns and Little Men's Chowder & Marching Society. It just shows up, out of nowhere, with no more sourcing than "Lookee here."

The first in the recent spate of false findings was supposedly a photograph of members of Congress playing solitaire on their laptops while the nation neared a government shutdown.

Like anyone who has ever watched CSPAN, I knew it was not a photo of the House or any committee thereof. They don't have computers at their desks in committee, and on the House floor they don't even have desks. The truth of the matter, discovered in a minute on Google, was better than the supposition, at least for 49 of the 50 states. It wasn't Congress. It was the Connecticut Legislature.

Then came a resend of a resend of an old chain email about how the press has utterly failed to look into Barack Obama's background. This one drops the born-in-Africa bit for a long screed about how nobody in the press has ever been able to find anyone who remembers going to college — and he went to three of them — with the future president.

Again, Google to the rescue, turning up articles from the Associated Press, New York Times, Boston Globe and others laying out Obama's stints, distinguished and not so, from Occidental College of California, Columbia College of New York and Harvard Law School.

One article was from The Weekly Standard, the folks who gave us the idea that Sarah Palin is qualified to be president, quoting a platoon of Harvard Law classmates who not only remembered Obama, but practically swooned over him. If all these globe-girdling falsehoods were motivated only by Obama-hatred, they are also examples of laziness.

The mainstream media accounts that my correspondent claims don't exist could well be mined for some stuff to undermine the president's support, if that's the goal, especially among those who would be put off by the fact that a lot of his friends and roommates had names like Sohale Siddiqi and Mohammed Hasan Chandoo.

But that, apparently, would be too much work. (Hey, I even used up the last of my 20 free New York Times Web articles for the month checking out this hogwash.)

The worst of it for my contributor is that the other thing he sent me — a somewhat absurd photo of Obama speaking at a grade school, standing behind the presidential podium, flanked by two teleprompters and two Secret Service men — turned out to be real enough.

He was speaking to the press, not the students, at the time. His conversation with the sixth-graders at Graham Road Elementary School in Falls Church, Va., took place earlier, in a much less formal or scripted way.

But the photo did look silly enough to earn the president a good teasing from the supposedly liberal "Daily Show." I only know it's (mostly) real because I forced myself to look it up, rather than trust my hunch, influenced by the other dross I've been receiving, that it was a total PhotoShop fake.

Because so much of what's out there is just bunk, I had to help the truth find its shoelaces. And that wastes a lot of time.

George Pyle is a member of The Tribune Editorial Board. gpyle@sltrib.com, Facebook: facebook.com/stateofthedebate, Twitter: @debatestate. —

State of the Debate

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