IT DOES PAY TO SURF THE WEB :-)

I remember reading about psychological research that indicated that it may not be worth it to debunk false politically motivated claims and George Monbiot at The Guardian provided me with the link to the original story:

The Power of Political Misinformation
By Shankar Vedantam
Monday, September 15, 2008
Washington Post

Here's the really troubling part:

Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler provided two groups of volunteers with the Bush administration's prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. One group was given a refutation -- the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded in 2003. Thirty-four percent of conservatives told only about the Bush administration's claims thought Iraq had hidden or destroyed its weapons before the U.S. invasion, but 64 percent of conservatives who heard both claim and refutation thought that Iraq really did have the weapons. The refutation, in other words, made the misinformation worse.

This makes me a little reluctant to debunk wingnut claims on public forums like POLITICO comment threads.