The DNA of Dirty Tricks

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Now that James O’Keefe has struck again, this time stinging another bogeyman of the right wing, NPR, we are left to wonder what is left on the Left to bring down. 

This 26 year old Republican activist, who was mentored by another manipulator of the media, Andrew Breitbart, has already brought down ACORN, targeted the Census, a Democratic senator and a reporter from that bastion of the “liberal media” CNN.

Clearly what these targets have in common, is that ACORN, the Census, NPR and the “liberal media” are long-standing symbols of a mythical power that inflames the right-wing’s delusion that they are an oppressed underclass of beleaguered white men, fighting against a vast left wing conspiracy. 

Having worked at Pacifica radio for years I know better than anyone what a lie that is.  Unlike the well-heeled Right, who really do dominate the media, Pacifica is facing bankruptcy. 

Like the proverbial circular firing squad, “radio powered by the people” is dying from self-inflicted wounds.  Having burdened the only alternative network with an expensive Soviet governance structure designed to create a racist and sexist-free perfect world at a radio network.  They are dying from a crippling competition of identity politics as airtime is allocated by ossified leftist ideologues.  Instead of inspiring their audience to action, as Limbaugh and others in the full spectrum of right wing shout shows do, Pacifica punishes their audience in the name of the revolution.

Meanwhile non-profits like O’Keefe, Breitbart and company can tap into a vast well of tax-deductable funding from movement billionaires who may or may not share the fervent belief system of the far right faithful.  And there is no doubt that the rank and file truly believe America is being led astray by “the liberal media”.  But there is no question that the Koch’s, Murdoch’s, Scaifes, Olin’s and Coors etc. get amazing value for their money, and so does the Republican Party. 

ACORN registered mostly minority voters who are likely to vote Democrat.  Now they are gone, out of business thanks to O’Keefe and a pimp’s costume.  Another target was that bogeyman of the Right the Census, which also enfranchises minorities.  And the only alternative to Limbaugh and right wing radio, NPR, is now facing a financial blow from a sting that struck them just as the Senate was about to vote on a House bill to eliminate the Corporation For Public Broadcasting.

Although they consider themselves journalists, or even investigative reporters, O’Keefe, Breitbart and David Bossie are really hacks, not in the good sense but in terms of how they hack the truth and selectively edit tape to distort and manufacture a story. 

Bossie is famous for “Hillary The Movie” that was the basis for the revolutionary Supreme Court “Citizen’s United” decision that now enable the rich and powerful to buy our elections wholesale.  But Bossie earned his chops on Congressman Dan Burton’s witch hunting committee that was searching for sin in Arkansas to bring down the Clintons.  He edited the prison tapes of hapless Web Hubble to incriminate him in such a flagrant and manipulative way, that Burton was forced to fire him. 

And more recently, O’Keefe manipulated the ACORN  hidden-camera footage, and Breitbart did the same thing with a hit he did on an official with the Agriculture Department who was fired in a panic then apologetically reinstated. 

No such luck for the Schiller’s at NPR who, just like the ACORN employees, seem breathtakingly gullible when it comes to preposterous imposters posing as pimps or terrorists offering millions in phony money from fictitious fronts with flimsy paperwork.

Brietbart claims the Left started this with Abbie Hoffman and Paul Krassner, but one is dead and the other has retired to the desert.  True the garrellous governor of Wisconsin got punked by a prankster but there is no network of dirty tricksters working for the Democrats like the one that works with the Republicans, in perfect sync with their legislative agenda.

And if you look into the DNA of the Republican Party’s stable of dirty tricksters, you see a lineage from Nixon through Bush Senior to Junior and now to the Tea Party and the proliferating network of Astroturf and front groups emboldened and empowered by Bossie’s “Citizen’s United” ruling. 

From the dark recesses of Nixon’s crippled persona his White House drew in a coterie of college Republicans under Chuck Colson.  Colson went to prison but Roger Alies moved on to head up Fox News and David Bossie helped change our politics profoundly and possibly permanently for the betterment of the plutocrats.

These same dirty tricksters later coalesced around Lee Atwater during daddy Bush where Junior, Ailes and Karl Rove honed their skills.  Their scandal-mongering machine went into overdrive when the interloper Clinton got elected, with help from Perot.  And with relentless muckraking they diminished Clinton’s ability to govern, culminating with his impeachment for a private transgression that was demagogued into a political crime and a public humiliation.

Then they managed to get their boy elected with fewer votes than the Democrat, then slimed and defamed the next Democrat who ran against him.  Now they are aiming their arsenal of acrimony at Barack Obama, a decent man who sincerely believes in bi-partisan cooperation, but is routinely demonized as an un-American terrorist Muslim imposter with a fake birth certificate. 

As Edmund Burke warned us, “all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”.  But in America, we are told that nice guys finish last.  And while the nasty ones might be winning the political wars at the moment, we will all lose in the end.