Yesterday a poll was released saying some astronomical percentage of Republicans in the deep south think the president wasn't born here, or he's a Muslim, or he once played soccer.
Immediately, Democrats' hands wring and the names start coming out about how stupid or crazy those hicks in the fly-over area must be.
Why not look at this differently?
OK -- you are a Democrat.
You get a phone call from a pollster about Rick Santorum having an affair with a guy or questioning Mitt Romney's large Cayman Islands bank accounts or Newt Gingrich's virility. It really doesn't matter, but what is put onto the plate is really outrageous.
What are you going to do?
The pollster is setting the volleyball right in your sweet spot just this side of the net. Of course, you are going to leap up and spike that question for all it's worth.
Yeah, have some fun with the question. Put the GOP in the worst light possible. "Yeah, I heard that Rick Santorum was a male stripper too, and that after foreclosing on little old ladies Mitt Romney takes their cats personally to the SPCA to be put down, and Newt Gingrich..." (damn -- I can't think of anything that outrageous enough that Newt would do that he hasn't already tried in real life.)
You are doing it to get under the other side's skin and to turn the knife a little bit.
Now I want you to think about being a Republican for a minute. I know it is hard, but I want you to get into their skins and motivations. You love watching liberals whine. You probably have a whine-o-meter in a closet somewhere.
You know it gets under liberals' skin to run with something that is patently false.
The pollster calls you. He's a GOP pollster and he knows the game here too. He sets the ball for the GOP side of the net. "Is President Obama a Muslim who went to Jeremiah Wright's church for 20 years as a cover for being the Indonesian candidate?"
Come on, you know the real answer to this, but it is too much fun and too easy to watch the liberal media's collective heads pop off. We're all in the game here. So you spike the ball -- "Hell yeah! And he bites the chicken's head off before feeding the bird to his kids raw..."
What the oh-so-smart Democrats on TV aren't getting is that they are being gamed. They are being played like a violin.
There are a lot of dumb-like-foxes folks out there watching and laughing at the big deal being made every time one of these pitched polls comes out.
I just don't know what is funnier -- the responses to the questions or the pundit's responses.