everyone's entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts

"Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts." … attributed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan among a number of others.
We are entering the dawning of the New Year 2008 ushering in a time calling upon us – that’s you and me – to make a number of decisions, not the least of which is to select among the current political contenders a new President of these United States of America. Not an easy task when facts available to us have been selectively filtered so as to render them utterly useless devoid of any honesty. The apparent ground rules in today’s political arena are to define and present one’s opinion as fact. And summarily “we” – that’s you and me – are suppose to accept it as such on face value. And quite interestingly, for the most part voluntarily “we” do.
Presidential political contenders are not alone in their use of opinions as fact as in Arizona “we” accept the prevailing governmental mantra of unrestricted growth as environmentally sustainable. That virtually every source of our drinking water is in one form or another contaminated and polluted is by convenience buried out of sight and out of mind. That the two fundamental ingredients required by mankind to support life are continuously and profoundly being compromised daily does not appear on either our individual or collective radar scopes. The air we breathe and the water we ingest we treat as nothing more than garbage receptacles into which we summarily dump the trash we produce during the course of our daily lives.
That “we” appear unable and unwilling to choose to make the time to concur on “the facts” we unflinchingly contribute to permitting any opinion to become in the eye of the beholder – fact. The resulting milieu is therefore devoid of fact and represents nothing more than a collective of unsubstantiated opinions. From this condition “we” are asked to formulate decisions about who to cast our vote for to serve as President of our country or ascertain whether the information presented by corporate controlled mass media is substantive fact or jingoistic propaganda designed to ring up and add to the financial bottom line of the supporters/advocates of unrestricted environmentally unsustainable growth.