Maybe it has always been this way, but now it seems that political claims and counterclaims are following each other with such rapidity and in such volume that the average voter is being swamped.

Some of the material circulating online — such as a bikini-clad Sarah Palin with a rifle and scope, as shown on factcheck.org to be a fake — is obviously bogus and even kind of funny. But a lot of the other claims we read about or hear being made in a context of trying to persuade — from letters to the editor to television ads — sound plausible but are nevertheless more or less misleading.

There was, for example, the assertion in a letter to the Democrat-Herald that Sarah Palin had wanted “to remove certain books from the libraries?”

The library episode was mentioned in some of the early news stories after Palin was nominated and a few days later had morphed into the claim that the letter writer believed.

Snopes.com reports on its site that based on a report in the Anchorage Daily News, this story originated in the mid-1990s, before and just after Sarah Palin became mayor of her home town. According to the recollection of someone who was there, Palin had asked the town librarian what her response would be if she was asked to remove some books from the collection. No particular books were mentioned. The librarian recited the official selection policy for books in the Wasilla library, which follows a national guidelines for libraries. Nothing more was said, no particular books were mentioned and none was removed.

You can see the problem: Making the claim took one or two lines. Responding to it even in this shorthand fashion took a whole paragraph. And that doesn’t even count the actual labor, done by others, of having dug out what happened and putting it in context.

On the other hand, Palin has been repeating that she said no to the federal earmark for the “bridge to nowhere.” A number of national news organizations have checked into this. As mayor and later as governor she made every effort to get as much federal aid for her town and then for Alaska as possible. Every mayor and governor does the same thing. The bridge to nowhere actually would have gone somewhere — from Ketchikan to its airport — so a case could have been made for it, despite the huge expense. But when it became a celebrated example of pork, Palin did the smart thing and switched sides, according to these reports, telling Congress that if Alaska wanted to build that bridge it would do so itself.

Again, the claim takes a few words. Providing perspective and setting the record straight takes much more.

On the local front, an Albany voter chastises a councilman in a letterfor voting to spend taxpayer dollars to benefit a well-to-do private interest. Sounds terrible. The background: As part of a deal to land a huge job-producing factory, the city had made a commitment to explore enlarging its growth boundary to include some additional property. Then the city staff found it could not do the work and would need to hire a consultant to get it done, and the council majority went along. It did so not to benefit a wealthy owner but to make good on a commitment the city had made to obtain a larger good — hundreds of jobs. The upshot: Other things came up, the study was not done and the money was not spent.

Same old story: A damaging charge of a few words; lengthy explanation that puts people to sleep.

You can bet on this: Everything that somebody says about any candidate — left or right — that sounds really bad is almost certainly not exactly true. (hh)