Back in the tech stock boom, there were people who got paid to bash or praise various stocks on Internet buletin boards. The idea was to inflate or deflate the prices of volatile issues so that boiler room operations could take advantage of it. The intersting thing, however, was the fact that many of the people posting praise about a company would actually be people hoping to deflate the price of the stock. Their strategy would be to post praise in a way that sounded so idiotic that any sensible person reading the board would think that only idiots thought it was a good company. COnversely, they would post insults from an idiot's point of view when trying to support the company.

Anyway, reading much of the spam on this board about politics, I can't help but thinking there's a similar reverse psychology at work here. I'm a bleeding heart leftist, and the only thing I don't like about Kerry is he's not liberal enough for me. But I have plenty of extremely well-educated and/or intelligent friends who make great points for Bush, and have intelligent insightful criticisms of Kerry.

Those aren't the types of criticisms I usually see on this board. A lot (certainly not all) of the Kerry-bashing and Bush-praising I see here is so close to being non-sensical gibberish, coming from people who express neither civility, openmindedness, or a coherent thought that it really makes me wonder if the people posting it might actually be Kerry supporters trying to make Bush fans look stupider than the vast majority of them really are.

Just a thought.