I don’t know when I learned that everyone has false beliefs. But I see it all the time, both in myself and in others. I’d hate to have my fate decided by some fact I got wrong. Wouldn’t you?

For instance, I never questioned a belief I had held for years: that the hijackers that flew planes into the World Trade Center on 9/11 came through Canada. On twitter I said that to do anything about 9/11, President Bush would have had to fix security in Canada.

It was then that I learned the hijackers all came through from US airports.

I had no reason, up to that embarrassing moment, to challenge my belief. It’s not that I had a particular bond to my false recollection, it’s that it just never occurred to me that there was anything to challenge. Afterward I realized that the hijackers would have complicated their mission greatly by choosing a foreign country as their takeoff point.

It’s difficult to challenge our own beliefs. That’s why we believe them.

I heard of a nurse recently who said it wasn’t until nursing school that she learned rabbits don’t lay eggs.

When I was in the seventh or eighth grade (ca 1977, just a few years after Roe v Wade), we had a required quarter of Home Economics. At some point during the class, we were talking about abortion and I must have asked the teacher the rape question.

“Well, I don’t think that under those conditions a woman would be … relaxed enough,” she said coyly, moving her hands as a harpist would, “to become pregnant.”

That response stuck with me, even though I didn’t believe it, because it seemed from her manner that she was implying a woman must experience orgasm to become pregnant.

So when Todd Akin said that “the female body has ways to shut that whole thing down,” [1] I saw that A) he was about the same age as my Home Ec teacher and B) everyone knows something that isn’t true.

People who have yet to get past these remarks need to do so.  As Dana Loesch said,

We act as though we have decades and years of elections to jack around until we get a perfect, stain-free candidate. We, an imperfect, selfish people act like we’re picking the next Messiah, not a citizen candidate. While we hesitate to push someone into a seat the left acts faster and fills it. While we focus on the trees and fight over tactics, the left solidifies strategy and focuses on the forest.

If what Akin said was more contemptible to you than anything McCaskill has ever said or her voting record, you were never going to vote for him anyway.

The criticism of Akin has been counterproductive for some time. Do people really think it’s better to try to distance the Party from Akin, when we won’t be able to, anyway?

People got mad that Akin made a huge gaffe, and threw him under the bus. Todd Akin, who jumped in to the Congressional Tea Party Caucus when others tested the waters. He stood by you, and you fled him.

We didn’t want to have to fight for Missouri. It was supposed to be in the bag. Unfortunately, we don’t have the luxury of living in the reality we want, only the reality we have — unless you want to cling to something that’s not true, that is.

If Republicans don’t start supporting Todd Akin, or at least don’t stop bashing him and telling the media he can’t win, we’ll likely end up with this woman retaining her Senate seat:

Barack Obama brought you this economy. Claire McCaskill brought you Barack Obama:

Todd Akin didn’t say. “George Bush let people die on rooftops in New Orleans because they were poor and because they were black,” but Claire McCaskill did.

Claire McCaskill’s first vote would be for the despicable Harry Reid as Senate Majority Leader.In all likelihood, her second vote would be against repeal of Obamacare.

Todd Akin has a lifetime 90% rating with FreedomWorks, and an ACU rating of 97%.

Claire McCaskill has a lifetime 21% rating with FreedomWorks and an ACU rating of 15%.

It could come down to this:

• If we lose Missouri, we lose the Senate
• If we lose the Senate, we are stuck with Obamacare forever
• If we are stuck with Obamacare, all further elections will be about dividing the pie between health care and defense
• Once we start arguing over the pieces of the pie, Democrats and statist Republicans will win every time
• Once Democrats and statist Republicans win every time, there will be no more need for a Republican Party, and your country will not be recognizable as a constitutional republic.

Republicans, conservatives, libertarians and tea partiers need to decide: is it worth losing the country because our candidate knew something that wasn’t true?