Did you ever wonder what some of the obnoxious trolls claiming to be Obama supporters are hoping to accomplish by insulting the supporters of Hillary Clinton? Their tactics aren’t likely to win converts, and seem designed to make enemies.

Maybe they aren’t really Obama supporters after all.

Maybe they are a special breed of GOP trolls called “ratfuckers.”

Part I

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.  Read more 

The last post I wrote on this site took us through the backdoor sliders that Rove and Atwater plunked on Democrats in the Republicans’ last successful bids. At first, I was going to examine how some of the previous backdoor sliders were being used today(The Dean Scream morphing into The Hillary Cackle, for example), but recent events have pushed that one to the far burner.

While it looks like the Rezko situation, which I first believed was going to be the Backdoor Slider that makes Obama freeze at the plate for Strike Three, and would give McCain the White House at that point, I’ve come to realize that Rezko will be the frontal assault – or the High-Inside Fastball that Rove and company will throw at him. McCain, thanks to the  Read more 

Maybe if he swore an oath—or better yet provided contemporaneous video of the process—that he wrote this under the severest interrogation available, including electrodes to the testicles if they make lead clips that small, somebody might yawn and decide to shop it for entertainment value since even with the above mentioned procedures there seems little likelihood that there’s a word of truth anywhere in this:

The auction for Karl Rove’s memoir drags on a month after the Republican strategist made the rounds of publishers with Washington power lawyer Robert Barnett at his side.

Heh, as they say. Oh, and on another jolly note,  Read more 

Via Froomkin:

Why is it taking White House officials so long to restore millions of deleted e-mails from the backup tapes they claim to have?  Read more 

James Madison must be rolling over in his grave as Republican operatives take to the media speaking about the “GOP Brand.” Perhaps Karl Rove is destined for Madison Avenue. In Rove’s wake (and at his direction) is a nation deeply divided – this is the very division that James Madison warned against in his Federalist Paper No. 10.

A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good.

Eerie – Madison (looking around him back then), the seer of many things to come - 200 years in the future.

Is there any wonder that our country is “polarized” when in nearly every case in which a citizen can make a decision there are only two choices? Bad or Worse.  Read more 

Yeah, it’s like Kremlinology back in the day, isn’t it? Where a bunch of dour-looking** hatchet-faced old guys all in ruthless bureaucratic infighter costume would line up on the missile-reviewing stand in Red Square, and we’d try to figure out what was really going on by who was smiling, and who stood next to who. Good times. Why is that?

But let that pass. CIA analyst Ray McGovern’s hat is making that krinkly sound:  Read more 

A la Rove: gut the Constitution – except when it suits us. And even then, misinterpret it to our ends. Who’ll challenge us?

On numerous recent media appearances, Karl Rove has justified the White House’s refusal to obey Congressional subpoenas with the following false argument:  Read more 

It’s ignorant shit like this—on WaPo’s page A01, no less—that’s got our country sliding down the greasy slope toward monarchy. The lead from loyal subject Peter Baker:

By the time He arrived in Prague in June for a democracy conference, Bush was frustrated. He had committed his presidency to working toward the goal of “ending tyranny in our world,” yet the march of freedom seemed stalled. Just as aggravating was the sense that His own government was not committed to his vision.

Gawd, Peter, get up off your knees, wouldja? The government is not “his” government. It’s our government. Do you understand? Is there any hope that you understand?  Read more 

Is this must-read from Boing Boing too true to be good?

Warning: What follows over the fold is not, not, NOT work safe, and in the interests of cranial integrity, I advise you to read no further.  Read more 

And by nuanced, I mean full of shit the usual lazy, obfuscatory narratives. Let the kabuki commence!

Well-paid WaPo stenographers Peter Baker and Michael A. Fletcher opine:

During the last 17 months of his presidency, Bush’s domestic front will consist of trying to preserve programs enacted in his first term, finding opportunities for discreet victories, and engaging in veto battles with Democrats over spending and taxes. Much of the focus will center on foreign policy, where the stakes remain greater and the outcome more uncertain, particularly regarding Iraq.

Really? I would have thought that getting lawyered up and avoiding criminal indictment would have been job one, but, then again, with the Beltway Dems as stone-free as they have been, perhaps I’m over-optimistic. And the second priority would be infesting “civil service” jobs, and the boards and the regulatory agencies, with as many loyal Bushie crime family friends, Christianist sleeper cells, Republican stay-behind agents, Conservative operatives, and owned-via-surveillance-blackmail moles as possible. (DHS—hat tip, Joe Lieberman—should be an especially rich target of opportunity for them, thanks to union protections being gutted.) Third, of course, will be preserving the unitary executive, but that’s only the theoretical expression of the first two goals.

The quote from Karen Hughes is especially rich:  Read more 

Check out the Edwards statement on Rove’s resignation.  Read more 

Bill Press:

NEW YORK CITY, June 21 - A new landmark was reached for New York auction houses today as Sotheby’s reported a record bid of $500 million for the Oval Office. According to anonymous sources, the winning White House bid was placed by New York political office collector Michael Bloomberg, who also held the previous record of $155 million paid for the New York mayoral office. “I could never capture the Oval Office the old-fashioned way,” Bloomberg told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, “so why not buy it?

Of course, if Bloomberg needed to be paid, you’d have to ask who’s cutting the checks:  Read more 

Look! Ari Fliescher is offering the Democrats some helpful advice!

And that’s one of the beauties of this thing of ours the press has with Republicans—Once you’re out of the administration, you get to be quoted as offering putatively objective commentary, as if you weren’t still part of the VRWC. It’s so beautiful it brings a tear to my eye. Look who Times stenographer Sheryl Gay Stolberg gets a quote from on subpoenas for Rove. They’re serious!

“There’s a big problem for both the White House and Congress on these subpoenas, and that is that everybody looks bad,” said Ari Fleischer, Mr. Bush’s first press secretary. “The White House doesn’t want to get into a visible public executive privilege court fight because it makes it look like they’re hiding something. Congress shouldn’t go down this subpoena line because they’re only cooking their own goose. It’s great for the base, but lousy for the country.”

Thanks for your concern, Ari. We’ll take that under advisement.

[Reach me that bucket, wouldja hon?]

And now take a look at the headline:  Read more 

Karl had it all set up so nicely. And then GSA’s Lurita Doan shits the bed:

Here’s the scheme, as revealed over the past month: Rove and his deputies traveled to various agencies throughout the government, lecturing management there about Republicans’ political prospects. Which House and Senate members were in trouble? Which Democratic seats were vulnerable? What were the major issues in the election?

But there was a line to be drawn: no commands were to be given — because such a directive would be a blatant violation of the Hatch Act, which forbids the use of government resources for political ends.

On the contrary, the government officials receiving the briefing were supposed to get the hint — as Tom Hamburger reported, “employees said they got a not-so-subtle message about helping endangered Republicans.” The briefing simply gave them the tools to be helpful in the next election. They were supposed to take the ball and run with it.

This is, exactly and precisely, a strategy of working toward the fuhrer. But then Sweet Lurita has to say what should have been left unsaid:  Read more 

Great news! The guy Bush has tapped to investigate clear Karl Rove is a crony-hiring, gay-hating adjunct Professor who’s gutted his department and hired Christianists just of out of law school to replace the professsionals!

In other words, the guy’s a “loyal Bushie.”

Anyhow:

The obscure federal investigative unit known as the Office of Special Counsel is preparing to jump into one of the most sensitive and potentially explosive issues in Washington, launching a broad investigation into key elements of the White House political operations that for more than six years have been headed by chief strategist Karl Rove.

The new investigation, which will examine the firing of at least one U.S. attorney, missing White House e-mails, and White House efforts to keep presidential appointees attuned to Republican political priorities, could create a substantial new problem for the Bush White House.

First, the inquiry comes from inside the administration, not from Democrats in Congress. Second, unlike the splintered inquiries being pressed on Capitol Hill, it is expected to be a unified investigation covering many facets of the political operation in which Rove played a leading part.

So who’s heading the investigation?

“We will take the evidence where it leads us,” Scott J. Bloch, head of the Office of Special Counsel and a presidential appointee, said in an interview Monday. “We will not leave any stone unturned.”

So, who is Scott J. Bloch? I’m glad you asked:  Read more 

UPDATE 3: Further Froomkin Fun, Same link as in Update 2 in the category of Credit Where Bloggy Credit is Due. Okay, he missed us [sob] but we’ll get over it:

Blogger Josh Marshall writes: “I can say that I am very confident … that orders from Pat Fitzgerald were the reason for the change in White House policy in 2004. So the change in policy was tied to yet another criminal investigation of the White House. And the White House and the key employees in question — namely Karl Rove and people working for him at the White House political office — were specifically on notice not to destroy the emails they sent through the RNC servers. And yet they took affirmative steps to continue destroying them, even after all of this had happened.”

It was in October 2004 that Rove suddenly turned over to Fitzgerald a July 2003 e-mail sent to then-deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley, that clearly showed that Rove had spoken to then-Time magazine reporter Cooper. In subsequent testimony, Rove says he had forgotten the conversation, in which he revealed Plames identity, but remembered it after his lawyers found that e-mail.

Michael Isikoff wrote in Newsweek in October 2005: “Why didn’t the Rove e-mail surface earlier? [Rove’s] lawyer says it’s because an electronic search conducted by the White House missed it because the right ’search words’ weren’t used. (The White House and Fitzgerald both declined to comment.)”

You’ve got to wonder which e-mail account Rove used for that e-mail — and how it was discovered.

And Glenn Greenwald blogs for Salon about the multitude of examples of the Bush administration’s “terrible luck with finding documents.”

UPDATE 2: Froom Fingers Fishy Finagling. Noting the “dog ate our emails” excuse for Rover…er I mean “Rove” and Rove alone, the best journalist at WaPo notes that Waxman is So Wise in the Ways of (Computer) Science:

These new, largely unexplained revelations were included in an extraordinary series of letters that Waxman, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sent to 17 government agencies yesterday demanding that they preserve any e-mails received from or sent to non-governmental e-mail accounts used by White House staffers.

So Rove’s end of the emails may be swept out, eh? Well, every mail has two ends at very minimum. Chop-block the recipients. It’s like gathering the shotgun pellets after they’ve been fired rather than while they’re still in the shell…but cops do this every damn day of the week. E-cops too. Go read the whole thing. [WaPo link changed to single-page version rather than their split-into-five-jumps-just-to-cheeze-out-extra-page-hits (or maybe discourage readership of material embarassing to their other staffers?) version.]

UPDATE: Document dump, as in the documents themselves, is now up at the House Judiciary Committee website. Document Dump Discussion, comparison, analysis, etc., is already in progress over at Talking Points Memo. That’s fast-moving so get there early (like now). This is live, realtime and messy so don’t jump to any “OMG!!” moments until you’ve read downthread and, preferably, consulted the original to see if it says what the poster says it says. Once burned, ya know.

*****

The parallel stories of Karl’s Missing Emails—the ones going through Republican National Committee channels which we will refer to as the “.com” ones, as well as the newly-discovered-to-be-(oops!)-“missing” from government files, hereafter called the “.gov” scandal—continues apace. This post will be today’s contribution to the effort to herd the Known Facts, the Unknown Facts, the Facts We Don’t Know We Don’t Know, well you get the point, into one place for convenience of readers.

There may be too much detail for some who have been following this right along. Sorry. There may be too little, particularly in links or supporting documentation, for those who are just hearing about this for the first time and still at the “WTF is the deal with this email shit?” stage. Sorry. We will endeavor to be clear on our sources, with links to reputable outlets who themselves cite sources where possible.

In some cases there will be quotations for which attribution cannot be supplied because they are unable to speak on the record for legal or other reasons. Use whatever standards you usually apply in judging the veracity of these, or else the common sense God gave a goat as my grandmother used to say.

This will be added on to as the day goes on. Some posts may not seem directly related to the topic but mostly likely will as you read along, such as for instance this NYT: Bush Threatens a Veto Over Intel Bill from early this morning. It’s relevant, trust me.  Read more 

[UPDATE Now this story makes the LA Times.]

Why are we all so obsessed with the [the doctored image of a] Coptix brochure Rove carried at Porkers? (Love the name!) Let’s dolly back and look at the big picture, because the technical details are obscuring the real story. Because, as always, it would be irreponsible not to speculate.

The bottom line: Rove is trying to out-Nixon Nixon. Nixon didn’t destroy the tapes. But already, Rove may have destroyed his email (or at least put it beyond the reach of any discovery process*). Put yourself in Karl’s shoes:  Read more 

OK, so the maladministration rushes KSM’s laughable “confession” out so they can drive Abu Gonzales’s public, pre-resignation meltdown below the fold for a day or two, and what happens?

Well, the Hill was alive with the sound of winger spooge for a day or two, but now that the self-excitation from the Cheetohs-stained ones has died down, we can assess:

And it turns out—surprise!—that the publicity the administration was so willing to give KSM prejudiced all the other Al Qaeda cases—even in the kangaroo courts Bush had set up under the MCA! Here’s how:  Read more 

This Sunday in Tyre Lebanon
Image courtesy of Tyler Hicks, NYTimes
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

No, not the Bolton with the big, bushy mustache.

Josh Bolton is George Bush’s clean-shaven, intelligent, softly-spoken chief-of-staff, but like all members of this administration, however intelligent, however conversant with facts, he is all talking points, all the time, which makes him boring to listen to, of course, but far worse, dangerously deficient in the area of reality-testing.

Thus, quite a perfect spokesperson for this administration. BTW, this was Bolton’s first network interview since taking over for Andrew Card, an exclusive for Timmeh.

Nothing exclusive about the topics up for discussion, and God knows, nothing exclusive about what the Bush administration has to say on any of them - damn those talking points.  Read more 

Have we established definitively yet, that this gang of four isn’t just insane? It would certainly explain a lot.

Piggybacking on Lambert’s post Halliburton’s permanent presence in Iraq, , Reuters has a chilling story that illustrates just how unwilling the majority Republicans are to provide congressional oversight for Bush’s policies in Iraq, no matter their attempts to suggest otherwise.

You may remember that when panic set in among Republicans about the impact of the Iraq war on 2006, an amendment to a supplemental bill to fund our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan was passed unanimously that stated clearly none of the money was to be spent on permanent US military basis in Iraq.

Behind our backs, in a late-night Friday conference committee session, the language of the amendment was removed by Republicans.  Read more 

The Bad Magician has already not existed. He has already forgotten the future. The circle is complete but abstract. The Bad Magician awakens in the melting ice. The water runs along his fingers in streams of kinetic lines. His head elevated, his back arches, his cloak sweeps its blackness skyward. Rising, rising, rising. Time to go see the great Sinecure of Poison.

“I’m coming for you, Karl,” whispers the Bad Magician in the manner of the Crows. “And I carry your dead mother as my cross.”

+++  Read more 

+++

From “The Pissants of Pennsylvania Avenue”

Third Act, Scene 4

Day Room, the White House—Condi lies on her back on The Big Desk, Andy Card is passed out, George is hiding underneath the carpet, Ken Mehlman is busy in the upper-stage-right corner trying to get Scooter to sniff his armpits through his shirt. Various staff members are dressed as Hessians and Samurai.

Karl Rove enters the inner circle, carrying a large sword, which he plays with as he instructs those in attendance how best to deal with an inconsequential issue concerning treason…

+++  Read more