What is truth? How do we know what we know? Philosophers have struggled with these questions for centuries, but Republicans have found an answer: if it wasn't filmed and uploaded to YouTube by a Teabagger, it didn't happen. Period.

The day the House finally passed health care reform, House Democrats made a big show of marching through the crowd of protesters to the Capitol for the vote, in order to show that they weren't intimidated by the teabaggers. Naturally, the protesters were whipped up into a frenzy by this brazen display of walking to work, and some bad things happened.

James Clyburn said Representative Emanuel Cleaver had been spit on, Barney Frank said he was called a fag, and John Lewis said he heard the word "nigger."

All of that made the enraged crowd of white conservatives look, you know, more like a mob than a patriotic band of Real Americans, so The Right decided that none of those things happened. None of them! Not one! They were invented by lying liberals and their MSM cronies!

Well, the "fag" thing happened inside the Capitol and was witnessed by reporters. There is video that appears to show a man spitting on Cleaver (Cleaver has acknowledged that it could've been accidental, and the Right has taken that to mean that he has "retracted" his "claim"). So that's two down.

But they're really sticking with the last one. John Lewis, American Hero, is just plain making shit up. There is a lot of great make-believe sadness that a man they are forced to acknowledge is a hero of the civil rights movement (a movement they disparage and despise) was forced to lie by Nancy Pelosi or something.

Their "proof" is that there isn't any particular video where you can specifically hear someone shout the n-word at John Lewis. There are videos where it sounds like someone might've said it, but apparently the fact that you can't clearly make out a racial slur in crappy web videos of a crowd of hundreds of people incoherently screaming is now definitive proof of a negative.

Honestly, maybe it didn't happen. Maybe Lewis misheard some other insane thing being shouted at him. The story, at this point, is that he asserted that a thing happened, but there is no corroborating proof. Some may surface later. But probably not! (Because, again, what Teabagger would upload the video of this, if they had it?) It is completely delusional, though, to become convinced that you have definitely proven that a thing never, ever happened because there is not video evidence of it.

Like, did you know that there is definitive proof that Abraham Lincoln was never assassinated? Did you know that the War of 1812 didn't happen? J.D. Salinger: beloved reclusive novelist or vast liberal mind-control plot? Reasonable people can disagree—but Republican bloggers know the truth!