There’s this thing that seems to pop up every election year. The left and right undertake causes so stupid, you can only laugh at them.

But you don’t.

You go along with them. You are outrageously outraged by them. Suddenly, everyone and their mom is screaming about Sarah Palin hunting wolves (the horror!). Suddenly, a black woman holding an umbrella for Sen. John McCain during a Martin Luther King, Jr. rally is a sign that he wants to oppress minorities. Suddenly, the president’s two decade old memoir, in which he states in the introduction there are “composite characters,” is evidence that he’s a liar (and if you read between the lines on Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, he’s also gay and not born in the United States).

Bachmann

And with last week’s announcement that Michele Bachmann would endorse Mitt Romney for president, it seems like the perfect time to introduce PhillyNow’s new feature for the campaign season, that’ll mostly likely overtake all “Election 2012″ coverage: FAKE OUTRAGE.

Why Michele Bachmann’s speech? Because within minutes of the announcement, the left streamrolled the Interwebs with all sorts of “Bachmann’s Best Anti-Romney Quotes” articles — which are meaningless. When she was running for president, she said Romney was inconsistent? You don’t say! If Democrats truly believed one former candidate endorsing another former candidate they once talked trash about was disqualification for endorsement, then they must have been pretty angry when Barack Obama chose Joe Biden as his vice president, since Biden stated during the 2008 debates that Obama wasn’t ready for the presidency; and Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State—because my God, do you remember that? The accusations thrown out during those months were almost as deceitful and phony as the Right now claiming Obama’s new campaign slogan, “Forward,” is actually Sekrit Socialism.

Others that’ve come and gone: Romney’s Dog on Car, Obama’s Dog sandwich, Bill Maher’s misogyny, Obama “spiking the football.”

Fake Outrage isn’t limited to national campaigns. We’ve been waiting on the Tom Smith/Bob Casey Senate campaign to really get going for over a week now. Someone throw the first fake outrage punch! All U.S. Congress seats in Philadelphia are up for grabs (one of which is debatably competitive, all of which are important for statewide voting reasons).

Luckily for Pennsylvania’s Senate candidates, neither has done or said anything too offensive during their times in public life, at least not that’s come out yet.

But if Casey’s last campaign is any indication, he takes Fake Outrage pretty seriously. Six years ago, John Kerry was trash talking President Bush over Iraq and told students to study hard otherwise “you get stuck in Iraq.” He was, of course, talking about President Bush being an idiot and not knowing how to get out of the quagmire he created in the Middle East. But Right Wing pundits, intentionally misunderstanding Kerry, took his statement to mean Kerry thought all U.S. troops are stupid. Then Bob Casey cancelled an appearance with Kerry!

See how that works? Stay tuned because we hear Romney’s talking about the April job numbers announcement–and is outrageously outraged the president hasn’t create 500,000 jobs a month, a feat achieved four times in the last 50 years.