Has There Ever Been a Less Controversial Controversy?

Feb. 15, 2006— -- The same question has been swirling around about every major Democratic candidate for president: Should candidates apologize?

This is no accident. There is a reason why this question keeps coming up over and over about Democrats. It is because there is a concerted strategy on the part of conservatives to put Democrats on the defensive and destroy their political opponents by ginning up fake controversies.

I will explain the mechanics of how this works in a little bit. But first let me tell you how you can tell when an issue is a fake controversy as opposed to a real one. A great majority of the time the fake controversies are about what someone said, and the real ones are about what they did.

With that in mind, it's easy to see that two out of the three so-called controversies against Democratic candidates are completely manufactured.

The dustup about the bloggers who worked for John Edwards is a classic case of choreographed outrage. In this case, it wasn't even the candidate's words that sparked the fake outrage.

A couple of bloggers who worked for Edwards once challenged Catholic Church doctrine with colorful words. The vice president told a United States Senator to go f--- himself on the floor of the Senate. I don't think conservatives are in a position to question the foul language of others after their acquiescence in that stunt.

The bloggers also challenged church orthodoxy on things like contraception. Wow! Only an overwhelming majority of the country agrees with them. Has there ever been a less controversial controversy.

Barack Obama's comments about the lives of our troops being wasted in Iraq can be studied in textbooks for how you manipulate the media for political gain. Commentators like Sean Hannity pretended to be outraged about Obama saying the lives of our heroic soldiers are being wasted in Iraq. But he is not at all outraged that they are in fact being wasted -- by the actions of a careless, ego-driven president whom Hannity loves so much.

Cenk Uygur is the main host of "Young Turks" on Air America Radio.