Over at Rockin’ on the Right Side, Tom Balek is a liar and a racist.

Pretty harsh, wouldn’t you say, without offering at least a shred of evidence? Yep, but Balek himself is perfectly happy to toss around those sorts of charges without any evidence at all.

In one recent post, Balek accused the Obama administration of lying repeatedly about Benghazi. I asked for evidence, and he provided a lame link to a Fox News story that, as far as I could tell, established no lies at all. He then asked me to drop the subject. I responded with this post:

I have still seen no evidence that the “attack was carefully planned and executed.” Everything I have seen indicates that Susan Rice was accurate in everything but one respect: She said that the attack apparently was in response to demonstrations going on in Cairo and elsewhere. That still appears to be true. Her only error was in suggesting the possibility that a demonstration also was going on in Benghazi at the time of the attack. That apparently was not true. But she made it very clear from the outset that the demonstration, if there was one, was hijacked by well armed militant groups that may have been affiliated with Al Qaeda or may have been Al Qaeda itself. The only information she withheld, understandably, was classified information about actual suspects.

Now, that’s how I understand it. If I’m wrong, please show me where. That Fox News story doesn’t make your case. And yes, I will go away now. Truth obviously is not a desired quality on this blog.

I’ve been a busy boy and haven’t followed this story perhaps as closely as I should. If my understanding is wrong, then I would welcome anybody who can set me straight.

Balek is far less open to evidence. He scrubbed my post, plus another one responding to his absurd claim that the New York Times is racist. The New York Freakin’ Times? And he scrubbed one responding to his implication that Hillary Clinton was lying about her medical condition. Balek not only isn’t interested in actual facts, he openly resists them.

His condition, unfortunately, is increasingly common in today’s bifurcated politics, particularly among those who traffic in the closed illusions of right-wing media. Any lie is forgiven, if it comes from our team; any slur is OK, if it targets the other.

So Balek is a liar and a racist, until he proves otherwise.

Yes, I’m still alive and will try to post more often than just on major holidays now that an arduous semester is finally to an end. My wife flew to Texas for Christmas, and my daughter was at her in-laws, so it was a mighty quiet Christmas around my house, and I took advantage of my first day off since Thanksgiving by doing not much of anything except drinking and cooking up a batch of enchiladas. Plenty to eat, not quite enough sleep.

Pretty good Thanksgiving at our house. It was my first real day off since August, I think, and it felt so good I took nearly all of Friday off, too. After Thanksgiving dinner at friends, we   saw crowds lined up to get into Walmart. When my daughter called to wish us a good Thanksgiving, I asked if she had been in line for Black Friday at Walmart.

She asked, “Do you mean the picket line?”

That’s my girl.

Then on Sunday we went to see “Lincoln.” Excellent film, with an unbelievable portrayal by Daniel Day-Lewis. Forget the Oscars. I think we should make him president.

The 47 percent gets its revenge.

In a post bizarre even by his standards, Dave Budge wants somebody to call Obama a liar, then, in comments, says he isn’t calling Obama a liar. Then he says that Obama is a liar. Then he says that the example he cited in his post wasn’t a lie. Therapy could help!

The question really is not whether the Obama ad is a lie, it’s whether it’s a fair shot: I say: fair shot, although I don’t much care for the demagoguery either.

Here’s why it’s fair: Obviously, Romney is trying to be as ideologically supple here as possible. He says he would sign a federal bill outlawing all abortions if the national consensus favored such a bill. He doesn’t say how he would determine what constituted a consensus. In his full remarks, he seems to imply that passage of such a bill by Congress would indicate consensus. If the election goes his way, it’s a fair bet that Congress would pass such a bill. The House probably would pass it right now.

Would Romney sign that bill? Oh, yeah. Fair game? Oh, yeah.

George McGovern was the first presidential candidate I ever voted for. It would be a better world today if he had won.

And since I’m exposing my liberal cred, here’s my blatant Obama endorsement.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and the Outpost editor, a thoroughly natural man, rushes to fill the vacuum left by the end of Ed Kemmick’s column, here and here.

At last, I guess, some good news for Lee Enterprises, if you can believe press releases.

The Outpost editor rants on.

If everything you knew about what happened in the Middle East last week came from talk radio, you might perfectly understandably believe that Barack Hussein Obama personally parachuted into Libya and attacked the U.S. consulate single handedly. On the other hand, NPR listeners might have gotten the impression that complicated forces were in play competing for air in the post-dictatorship worlds of Egypt and Libya.

But no. Talk radio made the correct course of action seem so simple: 1. Get rid of Obama. 2. Kill some Muslims. 3. Scare the hell out of the survivors.

That’s how you win respect in the Middle East.