I’m not much of a political animal myself; but I am coming to a rapid understanding of how exactly the tail wags the dog.

The national example-du-jour of Shirley Sherrod speaks volumes about what a powerful weapon of opportunity the unprincipled right has found in the distribution of misinformation through new media.  Ms. Sherrod maintains that she was told to pull over on the road and resign her post immediately because Glenn Beck was going to target her on the rabid Fox.

Of course the whole thing turned out to be a red-herring, but the partisans at Fox and their Republican back-slappers have managed to get plenty of political capital out of embarrassing the White House while distracting the entire country from all of the truly relevant happenings of several news cycles.  And it ain’t over yet.

Is this the shape of things to come in the era of multi-tasking media consumption? Has the Cynical Right found the ideal way to exploit our ever-shortening attention span?  Gone are  the inhibitions that used to restrain fantasy in traditional news outlets.  Not only can you make any outlandish misrepresentation of the facts that serves your agenda, but now, you may also have every expectation that your broadcast lies will impact policy decisions in the highest offices.  And the beauty of it is that there is absolutely no downside for the lying liars and their corporate sponsors. Like Pavlov’s dog, the public has been conditioned by reality TV and celebrity tweets to gorge themselves on scandal and speculation.  They’ll believe anything for five minutes, so long as it’s slathered in breathless hyperbole.  Just keep it coming and for godssake don’t give ’em time to reflect!

This got me to thinking about that dubious Dubie link Julie talks about down below.  Wisely, Julie challenged the poster to provide more context, which was never forthcoming.  Now, this could be an attempt by some individual who genuinely doesn’t  support Dubie, but I think it’s equally possible that this is another red herring, on the same lines as the Sherrod ruse but much less artful, designed to entrap and embarrass his Democratic opposition.  What makes this seem even more likely to me is the error in identifying Dubie as running for “re-election” that appears in the opening statement.  It is so glaring as to be easily overlooked by the casual viewer who is just waiting for the video clip to begin.  Were anyone to take the bait, weak as it is, Dubie’s promoters could have had a field day attacking the Democrats for perpetuating misinformation.  Most attractive about this scenario, from Dubie’s standpoint, is that it would serve as a marvelous distraction, providing cover for Dubie to dodge truly relevant issues for many days to come.  Bait and switch, bait and switch.

Now, as I said before, I am a political neophyte; and Dubie himself doesn’t strike me as all that crafty…all that ANYTHING.  So I may be completely out-of-order here.  Still, I can’t help but wonder if all those road trips to court campaign funds might have also netted him a mess of DC dirty tricksters.