Tactics of Truth Suppression #10

Number 10

Associate opponent charges with old news. A derivative of the straw man — usually, in any large-scale matter of high visibility, someone will make charges early on which can be or were already easily dealt with. Where it can be foreseen, have your own side raise a straw man issue and have it dealt with early on as part of the initial contingency plans. Subsequent charges, regardless of validity or new ground uncovered, can usually then be associated with the original charge and dismissed as simply being a rehash without need to address current issues — so much the better where the opponent is or was involved with the original source.

If you read message boards like I do, you’ll see a few common themes with Con supporters; they still bring up AdScam and they like to say that the Liberals have no policies (since they haven’t released a platform under Ignatieff but to be fair we haven’t had an election and look at Harpie’s record on platform releases). Anyways I digress.
They continually bring up these same old charges and have yet to come up with new ones, even when the opportunity is ripe.

The same goes for the Cons themselves, they like to still blame previous Liberal governments for mistakes, mistakes they have done nothing themselves to rectify. Now that the Cons are the previous government, they still enjoy blaming the Liberals past mistakes. They still do little to fix the problems for example the isotopes issue. The Cons had known for years there were problems and waited till they had no choice and yet they still blame the Liberals.

They also like to say that Ignatieff is “just visiting” whether this is true or not remains to be seen but they like to rehash this along with quotes Ignatieff has said in the past before he was even with the Liberal party. Although should someone bring up Harper’s past quotes they mention that things have changed.

The Cons like to deny, deny, deny and then deviate. Hey in our fickle society it tends to work so what can I say to that? The problem lies in the fact that people don’t demand more.