We are still wrestling with it in the twenty-first century. In our politics, the battle has gotten bloody.

I think it behooves us during this year’s presidential campaign to ponder the answer to that question. There is so much at stake and unfortunately our national debate has reached a new nadir, being largely defined by bitterness, hatred and spin; ignoring the record of recent history and the proliferation of outright, bold-face lies.

I used to marvel at an editor’s ability to juxtapose columns with opposite points of view on the opinion page. How could one writer claim a president’s policies resulted in a measurable, robust economic expansion while another decried them as being only for the rich and making the poor, poorer?

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion. But the facts (i.e., the truth) are the facts and they do not exist in multiple versions like parallel universes. There is not one truth for liberals and another for conservatives (or Democrats and Republicans or saints and sinners; you choose your own set of variables.)

There’s no such thing as my truth and your truth. Truth is—and nothing can change that.

In discerning the truth however, we must separate those things that we can know to be true from those things that we cannot.

One plus one equals two is a true statement whether uttered by a communist or a capitalist. But there are issues that we cannot know with absolute certainty to be true or false. They are neither a priori nor provable by any objective means. We can only have suspicions about them, make assumptions and draw subjective conclusions.

There have been accusations that George W. Bush “lied to the American people,” principally about the reasons for going to war with Iraq. The argument goes something like this: The president got together with his buddies in the oil industry and, playing on American’s fears of terrorism fresh after the 9/11 attacks, was able to manipulate the US into a war with Iraq over oil. The US’s inability to find stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction proves the president lied to the nation.

Several things should immediately come to mind, the first being how could we possibly prove or disprove such an accusation? We are not mind readers so it is impossible to discern the intentions of George W. Bush.

Secondly, it is ridiculous to believe that the president, powerful as he is, is single-handedly capable of dragging the country into war. The Founding Fathers designed our government with checks and balances to prevent this type of tyranny. Congress could have stopped the president but chose not to. Members of the House and the Senate were privy to the same intelligence as the White House. And it doesn’t matter if the intelligence was good or bad. At the time when the decisions were made, the Legislative Branch sided with the Executive Branch. If you spend the time researching what the president’s most vocal critics of late said during the build-up to war, you will prove it to yourself that they are the ones suffering from two faces. But not to cloud a good spin with the historical record, something Ann Coulter pointed out begins anew every morning for liberals.

Those who maintain George W. Bush lied have some real problems that run deeper than an inability to discern truth from fiction.

One of them is denial, or at least the ability to wink at former President Bill Clinton’s impeachment for “lying to the American people.” I haven’t heard one journalist confront Michael Moore and his adoring sycophants on this issue.

Another is bitterness, rooted in the inability to get over Al Gore’s loss of the 2000 presidential election in Florida.

This very angry group of malcontents has conjured up a seething cauldron of vitriol aimed at anything and everything George W. Bush stands for. Their hatred has blinded them to the truth.

But I pity them. After spending nine days out of the country in Peru this past July, assisting Quechua evangelists in the work of spreading the Gospel in the Andes, and being completely sealed off from the dizzying spin of this year’s presidential election campaign, I was able to gain some perspective on the truth.

And it dawned on me why that famous rabbi refused to answer Pontius Pilate’s question. The Answer—The Truth—was standing in front of the man, staring him in the face.

Come Election Day, I hope you will see the truth staring you in the face and you will make the right choice as to who is the most qualified man to lead America for the next four years. n