1. Highlight a quote from the opponent out of context from a speech or interview.

This is what creationist-watchers call quote mining. Often, seemingly innocuous 'quote minerals' can yield impressively high-toxic end products if they are mined and refined by a skilled quote miner.

There are various ways to make life harder for quote miners, such as structuring your sentences so that removing the caveats or clauses - a favourite trick among skilled quote miners - will render the sentence nonsensical.

While all cranks and wingnuts use quote mining, reporters are particularly notorious for it. Guard your words around newsies.

5. Attack people and their credibility, making them rather than the issue the focal point of discussion.

Speaks for itself.

9. Be the first. The tactic is to be the first to escalate the emotional tenor of the argument and by the use of "hot button" code words and phrases, such as "infringement of my rights," "you are a bigot," and so on. This immediately puts their opponent on the defensive.

Reducing the debate to a mud-flinging exercise also provides an advantage to the side with the bigger megaphone, and serves to further shift the subject away from the substance (where the cranks and wingnuts would lose).

12. Nit-picking (combined with changing the subject.) A perfect example was the right-wing attack on the Killian memos. The subject was changed from Bush's dereliction of duty to a detailed discussion of typewriter fonts. All sense of truth was buried under the technical minutiae of the subject. Needless to say, the conservatives who began this were by no means expert on typography. When genuine experts examined the memos, nearly all the details pointed to as "clear evidence of forgery" were debunked. But by that time, it was too late. The entire Bush National Guard story was radioactive in the mainstream media.

Sow confusion. Change the subject. Use the fog of war to hide your own disposition of forces.

"If you can determine the enemy's disposition of forces while yours have no perceptible form, you can strike while the enemy is fragmented." - Sun Tzu

13. Flood the rhetorical space. Pack a sentence with numerous falsehoods, misconceptions and biases so that it is difficult, if not impossible, to rebut them all within a reasonable time. [...] By the time anyone has corrected all the errors of fact, any conceivable audience open to persuasion has fallen asleep.

Another classic. Creationist-watchers will recognise this tactic as well. Dubbed the Gish Gallop, after the ICR Fellow Duane Gish.

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The next class of tactics focus on breaking the opposition's ability to fight effectively, by discrediting its spokesmen. The purpose of this is to demoralise the opposition's foot soldiers and immunise your own supporters against the opposition's arguments.

3. While attacking liberals, promote the idea that it is conservatives who are under attack or marginalized, whether you actually are or not.

This serves to paint the opposition as the aggressors, and weakens justified claims of manipulation by making them sound like conspiracy theories on par with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

6. Find some vulnerability in the opponent and make that the focus for evaluating him or her. Pound away on that topic until the opponent is judged only in those terms.

7. To divert attention away from a liberal opponent's attack on a conservative position or individual, discredit widely one piece of their argument as a way of discrediting their entire argument.

If you dig diligently enough, it is always possible to find a hand-waving argument, a slip up or a poorly phrased comment in any person's or outlet's work or political position.

8. Accuse the opposition of doing the same underhanded things to you that you yourself refuse to acknowledge doing to them. [...] This also tends to make the attacks by conservatives more acceptable given that it is "really" the other side that is the problem.

Related to a number of other tricks already mentioned, this gambit further inculcates your followers with the perception that the opposition should not be listened to, let alone taken seriously.

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The last class of tactics deals with shifting the Overton window. Shifting the window of acceptable political discourse is arguably the most important long-term strategy of any successful political movement, and the results can be both catastrophic and herculeanly hard to undo.

2. Use loaded terminology to describe a disliked program. For example, use "death tax" instead of inheritance tax or "class warfare" to describe Democratic support of a more progressive tax to benefit lower-income Americans. (George Lakoff has discussed this in his work on political rhetoric.) An accompanying tactic is to make repeated negative associations with key concepts or constituencies so that they conjure up negative feelings (as with "Liberal" or "trial lawyer" [and, incidentially, "class warfare" - Jake]).

10. Expropriate liberal symbols and culture. No one seems to have noticed this, including Thomas Frank, and yet it appears to be a conscious tactic. For a very long time, the right has, whenever possible, attempted to expropriate people, songs, and texts associated with liberals and the left. [...] Among the effects this tactic has is that it dramatically narrows the intellectual/cultural space for opponents to draw upon. Rhetorically, it blurs the meaning of these icons and symbols and marginalizes liberals by stripping them of any unambiguously positive references.

11. Conflation Often, a conservative will write as if the words "liberal" and "socialist" describe the same politics. In the same article, or similar ones, they will claim that communism is identical with socialism. They will then use "liberal" as an adjective: "the liberal Democrat [sic] Party" which rhetorically brands all Democrats as communists, i.e., discredited enemies of America.

The single word that sums up the above three tactics is newspeak. One of the points on which George Orwell was prescient was his focus on how political actors can work to re-shape the acceptable language of a society - and through that, re-shape the political culture.

4. Give coverage--and thus credibility---to right-wing groups and individuals with an overtly biased perspective, while granting some limited coverage to the liberal opposition. Conservative media outlets used this style in covering the Swift Boat Veterans’ slam of John Kerry. It can set the agenda of what issues get covered (even in mainstream media), while maintaining one’s claim of objectivity.

This is the most direct way to move the Overton window, but by no means the only tactic employed in the effort to do so. It works to shift the window of acceptable discourse because of the implicit assumption that the opposing positions reported are equally mainstream. I.o.w., a Fellow of the American Enterprise Institute wingnut extremist is put on equal footing with a mainstream liberal or progressive.

The implication, of course, is that the "middle" is at least approximately midway between the two - when in reality it is far closer to the progressive than to the wingnut (and in the case of American politics, frequently way to the left of the so-called 'progressive').

Among other important strategies and tactics employed by the right with the same effect is the deliberate choice to never criticise anyone to the right of yourself. Right-wing politicians will happily use a 'study' written up by an extremist think tank gang of paid liars. Right-wing politicians will never distance themselves from racist, laizzes-faire and/or creationist groups unless the groups in question are embroiled in some truly spectacular media catastrophe.

At the same time, wingnuts will demand - stridently, loudly and repeatedly - that progressives distance themselves from communists, anti-fascists and assorted so-called 'extremists.' The left, unfortunately, does not seem to understand this mechanism, and will often happily grant the right their wish.

Of course, the right, not being the least bit concerned with truth, honesty or integrity, will simply repeat the demand ad infinitum. This has the treble effect of marginalising the groups that would otherwise move the Overton window leftwards, associating the mainstream leftists with the so-called 'extremists' and forcing the progressive to spend time distancing himself from other leftists that he could have spent actually arguing his case.

- Jake