Ratfucking. Republican Ratfucking. A time-honored GOP tradition. I'll repeat, a GOP tradition. Not ours.
Ratfucking is an American slang term for political sabotage or dirty tricks. It was first brought to public attention during the Watergate scandal investigation that during the 1972 presidential campaign the Nixon campaign committee maintained a "dirty tricks" unit focused on discrediting Nixon's strongest challengers.
Cont.
According to Woodward and Bernstein, Nixon aide Dwight Chapin hired fellow USC alumnus Donald Segretti to run a campaign of dirty tricks (which Segretti dubbed "ratfucking") against the Democrats in 1972. The purpose of the operation was to create as much bitterness and disunity within the Democrat primary as possible. One notable example of Segretti's wrong-doing was a faked letter on Democratic presidential candidate Edmund Muskie's letterhead falsely alleging that U.S. Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a fellow Democrat, had had an illegitimate child with a 17-year-old.
Among the tactics were: canceling meeting-hall reservations just prior to rallies, putting out false press releases or "leaked documents" in the name of political opponents, spying on rival campaigns, putting plants into rival campaigns, purloining speeches and information, vote contracting, jamming phone lines, ordering vast quantities of food for delivery in the name of rival campaigns, hiring "rioters" and "activists, conducting deceptive or offensive get out the vote phone canvasses, push polls, and similar activities.
Before the 1972 election, Edmund Muskie was viewed as a frontrunner for the Democratic Presidential nomination. Although Muskie won the Iowa caucuses and went on to win the New Hampshire primary, his campaign faltered. The collapse of Muskie's momentum early in the 1972 campaign is partly attributed to dirty tricks. Prior to the New Hampshire primary, the so-called "Canuck Letter" was published in the Manchester Union-Leader. The letter claimed that Muskie had made disparaging remarks about French-Canadians—a remark likely to injure Muskie's support among the French-Canadian population in northern New England.
I'm amazed by the Breitbart Ratfuck Du Jour. Breitbart Ratfucks an administration official, the media and the administration fall for the dirty trick, and guess who catches the blame? The victims of the fraud, because they fell for it. Breitbart himself is just doing what comes naturally. Ratfucking. He's a force of nature. He can't help himself. He Ratfucks because he's a Republican Ratfucker. It's like wishing the wind wouldn't howl or the earth wouldn't quake. It's going to happen. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice... won't get fooled again!
Ambitious Young Republicans absorbed the Segretti Ratfucking Lesson, namely oneKarl "Ratfucker" Rove. In college in 1970 he stole letterhead from a Democratic candidate and invited hundreds to the Dem's HQ for free beer and food. He bugged his own office and blamed it on the campaign of the Democratic incumbent running for TX Governor. "Nothing was proved, but the negative press, weeks before the election, helped Rove's man win a narrow victory. FBI agent Greg Rampton removed the bug, disrupting any attempt to properly investigate who planted it." Sound familiar? He also orchestrated the "she's a lesbian" (oh noes!) whispering campaign against the brilliant Ann Richardson. Let's not forget John McCain's alleged "African-American "love child."" Then there's Valerie Plame. Suffice to say, the list is endless.
Karl Rove is one of those legendary mythological creatures: half doughy man-boy, half ratfucker.It's his nature. Once a ratfucker, always a ratfucker. Remove the Bush White House from the equation and he'll be ratfucking all over the place. Ratfucking in the private sector. Ratfucking at the mall. Ratfucking in the self-checkout aisle at the grocery store. Seriously, have you considered what he can accomplish with those touch-screen checkout computers? He'll go in for a box of corn dogs and walk out as the owner of the franchise, and you'll be the one under investigation for shoplifting corn dogs.
Karl Rove... out there walking the streets. Lock your doors and check the ethnicity of your illegitimate children. That's right, Mr. Wealthy Future Next-Door-Neighbor of Karl Rove, one day, when you least expect it, you'll open your golf club newsletter and read all about your brand new illegitimate black baby. Your wife could be outted to Matt Cooper as half-Mexican. All so Karl Rove can hork that extra 1,000-square-foot easement on your property to build his whites-only hip-hop recording studio.
Rove was pre-dated by Master Ratfucker Lee Atwater (RIP, he did repent).
TOM TURNIPSEED: It was a Congressional race, I was the Democratic nominee. He came out and in kind of an underhanded way, in a sense, he got a reporter to ask him a question about, ``Well, isn't it true that Tom Turnipseed had some kind of psychiatric problem as a kid?'' He was the master at creating little juicy tidbits for the media.
LEE ATWATER: Well, I said that he had been hooked up to jumper cables, in reference to a bout he had had with mental illness in college which had been made public two years before. So I wasn't breaking any new ground.
LEE BANDY, Political Writer, The State, S.C.: That got quoted all over kingdom come down here. Lee Atwater said— accused Tom Turnipseed of being hooked up to jumper cables.
TOM TURNIPSEED: ``Hooked up to jumper cables.'' I'm laughing now, but it ain't funny.
From Jumper Cables to Willie Horton, Atwater Ratfucked Us All.
With Bush trailing former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis in the polls, Atwater knew there was no way Bush could win on the issues.. So when he learned convicted felon Horton had raped a white woman while on a weekend furlough from a Massachusetts prison, he had the ammunition necessary to attack the Democrats. The Dukakis campaign refused to sink to Atwater's level and did not respond to the ads. Forbes's interview with Dukakis provides an emotional punch; he still seems haunted by the scurrilous attacks.Whether the decision not to fight back was right or wrong pales in comparison to the media's lack of interest in verifying the accuracy of the allegations. Veteran ABC news reporter Sam Donaldson pointedly observes that most of what Atwater was putting out to the American public was "lies." He adds, "We [the media] should have checked every one of the claims they were making and we didn't."
Which brings us to the puny, incompetent, sad, desperate Ratfucker Wannabe Andrew Breitbart.
It's a neat trick. Andrew Breitbart, the pathological liar, race-baiter, propagandists and rabidly partisan dirty-trickster, posts a deceptively edited video (again), to which media and Democratic officials cowardly knee-jerk in reaction (again), before the video is ultimately discovered to have been a deceptively edited hoax. Then, rather than copping to having been a pathological liar, race-baiter, propagandist and rabidly partisan dirty-trickster, Breitbart criticizes the media and those others who bought into the hoax that he himself perpetrated.
You see, it was all the media's fault for being irresponsible enough to buy into his own bullshit. Well played, Mr. Breitbart - you pathological liar, race-baiter, propagandist and rabidly partisan ratfucker.
Breitbart's nothing new. What's new (to me, anyway) is this insistence on blaming the victims (Obama, Vilsack, etc.) who fell for the Dirty Ratfucking Trick.
Pardon my French Freedom.