Republican Party Dirty Tricks

Oh, yes. There is a Republican party dirty tricks apparatus:

"Donald H. Segretti (born September 17, 1941) was a political operative for the
Nixon White House during the 1970s. Segretti ran a campaign of dirty tricks
against the Democrats. His actions were part of the larger Watergate Scandal.

He went to prison in 1974 after pleading guilty to three misdemeanor counts of
distributing illegal campaign literature. A major part of this was a faked
letter on Edmund Muskie's letterhead falsely alleging that senator Henry
"Scoop" Jackson had had an illegitimate child with a 17-year-old.

Segretti was a lawyer — initially a prosecutor for the military and later as
a civilian. However, his license was suspended for two years following his
conviction. In 1995, he briefly ran for a local judgeship in Orange County,
California. He withdrew from the race shortly after his campign received
publicity, which awakened lingering anger over his involvement in the scandal."


--wikipdeia

"It's no accident that Karl Rove was one of Richard Nixon's moles. Using
techniques developed by his first mentor, dirty-tricks strategist Donald
Segretti, Rove infiltrated Democratic organizations on behalf of Nixon's
infamous 1972 campaign. Rove's formidable talents came to the attention of
George Bush Senior, then incoming Republican National Committee chairman, and
the rest is history. Seven presidential campaigns later, Rove masterminded a
deluge of disinformation against John McCain, whose upset victory in New
Hampshire had given him a shot at the Republican nomination. Word was spread
among South Carolina voters that McCain had fathered a black daughter out of
wedlock (McCain had, in fact, adopted a Bangladeshi girl), that McCain was a
homosexual, that McCain's wife had a drug problem and so on.

Now Rove is masterminding the Bush administration's press strategy, but it's
far more than a press strategy. It's the central strategy for how the public
understands what George W. Bush is doing to and for America. In an important
sense, it is the Bush presidency. Rove's methodology largely explains why
Bush's popularity remains strong despite the unremittingly awful economy
(mounting job losses, weak profits and a three-year stock-market slide) and
despite the shambles of the administration's foreign policy (Osama bin Laden
still at large, al-Qaeda as dangerous as ever, North Korea more menacing than
ever, Israelis and Palestinians as far away from the bargaining table as ever,
anti-Americanism rising across the globe and a pending war in Iraq lacking
clear justification)."

http://www.prospect.org/print/V14/2/reich-r.html


Walt