However, after President Obama's election in 2008, the Right again demonstrated its mastery of the disinformation techniques. Unlike the Left, the Right could roll out the heavy artillery of a multi-layered media apparatus that pounded the public with barrage after barrage of conspiracy theories.
Falsehoods took on the color of truth simply by their endless retelling. For instance, the canard that Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii as his birth certificate shows, has gained credibility with large numbers of Americans including about half of Republicans, some polls show. Similarly, the Right has convinced tens of millions that Obama is a Muslim, though he is Christian.
The Right's media power has enabled the Republicans to portray Obama as some un-American "other," while the GOP has little fear that its spreading of racist-tinged conspiracy theories will hurt the party's election chances.
The latest example is Dinesh D'Souza's bizarre theorizing about Obama's channeling his late father's opposition to British colonialism in Kenya, a reincarnated dream which somehow has morphed into Obama's "socialist" agenda which is "alien" to American values.
Instead of roundly condemning D'Souza for this strange and racist article, Gingrich one of the supposed intellectuals of the Republican Party went out of his way to praise the nonsense as "profound."
As former Bush-43 speechwriter David Frum noted in a blog post, "With the Forbes story and now the Gingrich endorsement, the argument that Obama is an infiltrating alien, a deceiving foreigner and not just any kind of alien, but specifically a Third World alien has been absorbed almost to the very core of the Republican platform for November 2010."
Despite some internal GOP critics like Frum, the Republican Party clearly feels that it has a winning formula, using such psychological warfare to exploit a confused and embittered electorate. That confidence will be tested on Nov. 2, although if most prognosticators are correct, the Republicans have good reason to feel confident.
Whatever happens on Election Day, the longer-term challenge will be to rebuild an old-fashioned commitment to fact and reason within both American journalism and the broader political system.
Though lying is not foreign to U.S. politics and media, telling the truth has always been a fundamental American value, one that is vital to democracy.
The great task of restoring the Republic must include honest efforts to dig out recent history's ground truth, which can then be used to build a path out of the disinformation swamp and onto the dry land of rational political discourse.
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