The strategy is to get a falsehood advertised with the maximum of emotional impact so as to fix it in the mind of the public.

There are many examples of false commonplaces, such as the American landscape peppered with Soviet era nuclear suitcases, which despite being debunked continues to be an issue with rightwing pundits. The Team B findings have been debunked yet continue to make up an integral part of chickenhawk readings of history. False scholarship on alleged Soviet ties to Italian judges produced by the CSIS at the behest of Berlusconi continues to be used in Italy to attack the judiciary branch.

My impression is that deception, imposture and falsehood are the main staple of political conflict-  and not only- throughout history. Ideally, one might hope to educate youth to analyse public discourse and perceive false reasoning and hokum as second nature. I would like to recall Tudor England in which public school teaching was based on the Trivium- Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric- the three fundamental instruments we have for interpreting reality with a no-shit Sherlock attitude. Of course, educated commoners may not have significantly reduced the ruthless pretences of Tudor elites in the final analysis but it certainly contributed to progress in all human endeavors.

Back to think tanks, the American rightwing realized as early as the Sixties that the best way to sell their ideology was to package it in mock-liberal pseudo-scientific jargon. Rightwing think tanks that resort to militant and stridant discourse simply are not taken seriously, despite Rush & Company (I'd say they pace the mood and keep attention high regardless one's attitude). It is far better to attack, say, Chomsky's theses, from a mock-left position rather than an arch-conservative stance. This has become so commonplace especially in the golden age of Reagan that the baricenter of American political discourse has markedly shifted to the right, thanks above all to liberal punditry and the institutions that manufacture opinion. As has been often remarked here, the American left is conservative by European standards. We owe it to the seizure of public discourse as you no doubt may agree. But it does involve more actors than recognizably conservative think tanks.