“POLITICS ain’t beanbag,” it is often said. Whichever side you’re on, if you want to run for an elected office, you can expect your life to be an open book, and for your opponents to try and twist every last one of your words and deeds to their own advantage.

It comes with the turf.

If you are asking your fellow citizens – be it of Guam or the U.S. mainland – to hire you to be their senator, congressperson or president, you have to be willing to put yourself through one heck of a job interview process. You’d better be ready to convince a plurality of them that you have the intelligence, integrity and ideas to be a leader.

If you’re a voter, you’d better be ready to wade through a mountain of distortion, spin, empty promises, and just plain nonsense to discern what the candidates are really thinking, and what impact their plans might have on your life ... and that of the nation (or island).

That’s the way it’s always been in American democracy, and – on the whole – it’s served us pretty well.

I’d like to say that this is the way it’s always going to be ... but something is different now.

In a recent speech, President Obama said, “You can’t just make stuff up.” But that is exactly what more and more people are doing nowadays.

Not terribly long ago, candidates and their surrogates used to spin, distort, puff up and obfuscate to their heart's content, but it was done on top of a basic bedrock of facts. Outright lies and complete distortions were told, but when someone was caught, they generally paid a price in terms of their credibility.

Not any more.

And let’s call it like it is. People on the left are doing their share of distortion and spin, but the willingness to put out completely fact-free nonsense – and stand by it – is coming almost exclusively from the right.

Let’s look at a few of the claims that are spouted daily throughout the right wing echo chamber as if they were established facts:

Global warming isn’t real. Oh really? The overwhelming (95-plus percent) consensus of the scientific community is that it is ... and if that’s not enough, just ask some of our South Pacific friends who are now making plans for mass evacuation as their islands start to flood.

President Obama is a Muslim who was born in Kenya. Give me a break, we’ve seen the proof on both points.

President Obama is a socialist. Right, one who left all the big banks intact in 2009 after they nearly crashed the world economy, and appointed Timothy Geithner as treasury secretary instead of Paul Krugman or Joseph Stiglitz.

Evolution is an unproven theory. Yeah, just like the theory of gravity, or that Earth is round.

Trickle-down economics creates good jobs. Oh, like all those we created in the Bush years?

I could go on, but the grand prize for sheer ignorance and stupidity has to go to the idea that women who are raped have some mysterious biological mechanism that keeps them from getting pregnant. U.S. House of Representative member from Missouri Todd Akin has been thrown under the Republican bus for using the phrase “legitimately raped” to refer to this nonsense, but vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan co-sponsored a bill using the almost identical term “forcibly raped,” and Dr. John Willke, the quack who put forward this idiotic concept in the first place, was actually a Romney surrogate in 2008.

What really scares me, however, is the fact that Rep. Akin – a man so lacking in analytical skills and objectivity that he doesn’t seem to understand how babies are made – was chosen by the House Republican leadership to sit on ... what else ... the Science and Technology Committee.

Even scarier for Guam is that Akin is also chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Seapower and Projection of Forces – a crucial position for the buildup and all other Pacific-related defense policy.

Fortunately, the Republican leaders I’ve met on Guam are much more in the mold of traditional conservatives than Akin-style radicals. I do hope that the governor in Florida – and Frank Blas, if he should be elected – will put a high priority on lobbying for his replacement by someone with a little more common sense.