The Left's Secret Weapon: A Fake Right

In American society, we have a political spectrum from left to right, where Democrats fall somewhere around the middle and Republicans fall somewhere around the right side. In between and all around are Independents - some are members of recognized political parties, such as the Green, Socialist, Reform, and Libertarian, but the majority of Independents are completely unaffiliated with any political party (often because parties are not recognized in certain states). There are, in fact, more Independents than there are Republicans; and, while there are more Democrats than either, neither the Republicans or Democrats have enough votes to win a majority without courting the Independent vote.

One possible method of convincing Independents of your party's cause is to convince them that the other side is full of complete lunatics. Destroy the ethos of your opponent and you destroy your opponent. But we've long grown tired of mudslinging politics - so how can you accomplish such destruction without obvious mudslinging?

The obvious answer is to insert paid actors into the other side, pretending to be for their cause, but to have such horribly over-the-top self-righteousness toward the cause that moderates are driven away from it. It creates a belief in the minds of moderates that these actors (and, by extension all members of their cause) are full of wharrgarbl.

Now, I'm not saying that Democrats created Fox News as a Straw Man for the opposite side (see what I did there?), but whether or not Fox News exists for that purpose, it is accomplishing that purpose. Case in point - the Birther Movement. It is not conceivable, at least to me, that all Republicans are such utter morons as to believe the Birthers might be right when every single time their argument has been put forward in a new way, it's been completely and undeniably refuted. The latest example of this being the supposed birth certificate from Kenya that is so full of mistakes even George Jr. wouldn't fall for it. Yet Fox News keeps loudly putting it forward as gospel, both through their own talking heads and the poor dumb saps who fall for it and take copies of the birth certificate with them to town hall meetings. Sanity arrives only in the form of Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, who mercilessly ridicule the Fox News folks for espousing such views. By so doing, the Independents (and even left-leaning Republicans) are left examining the supposed views of the Right and finding them to be bat#!$@-crazy. Sphere: Related Content