Dirty Trick of the Day

Burqa-clad pension stealers:

Dirty Trick of the Day: Desperate-looking Web Videos

Serving a candidate with a subpoena at the beginning of a press conference: begrudgingly ballsy.

Making a web video out of the incident that looks like it was made by shitty break dancing teen melodramas: dick move.



[via BS]

[We almost forgot about this recurring feature and seems as good a time as any to resurrect it.]

Q: What do You do When You Lose Your Race for State Assembly?

A: Take up Dumpster-diving:

The document was found in Dumpster outside of an ACORN office in San Diego, a House Republican aide said. Derrick Roach, an unsuccessful Republican candidate for statehouse in California, took thousands of documents last week from the trash outside the office. An ACORN spokesman confirmed the veracity of the document.

Unfortunately, that's a typo: there is no suburb of San Diego called Dumpster, California (alas!).

I couldn't care less about ACORN and not disposing of confidential material properly is just one of myriad reasons why, but isn't this something you get a private investigator to do? Maybe even an intern? Does the actual candidate himself have to spend an afternoon sifting through trash looking for incriminating documents?

Dirty Trick of the Day

From the Dirty South.

Dirty Trick of the Day (Tomorrow's Dirty Tricks Today Edition)

The GOP vs. Obama. I thought this was rather interesting:

Some Republican operatives say trying to push the idea that Obama is secretly Muslim (or otherwise playing up his foreign-sounding name) isn't just blatantly unfair, it's also ineffective. The party's polling and focus groups show that many voters see those attacks as out of bounds, and they wind up sympathizing with Obama because of them.

Apparently the strategy would mostly concentrate on labeling Obama "inexperienced" and "too liberal," at least in so far as the official McCain campaign is concerned. God only knows what will come from independent groups.

Dirty Trick of the Day

Laziness:

Dirty Trick of the Day

The National Enquirer:

The cover prominently features a picture of him along with the headline "Obama's secrets... His close friendship with terrorist."

And it's not just the national tabloid press that's taking some gross liberties with the truth, there's at least one Wisco blogger who is shameless/lazy enough to pass on viral smears without doing an ounce of fact-checking.

Hillary's Base

I can't help but wonder what kind of message -- explicitly or implied -- the Clinton campaign's treatment of Samantha Power sends to her base of middle-aged white women. Suddenly her campaign doesn't seem like the chummy Girls Night Out it would have many women believe and more like a scene from Mean Girls.

Personally, I'd like to see some backlash from this episode and hope it serves to wipe away the veneer that Clinton's candidacy is somehow the culmination of 50 years of feminism or 15 years of Girl Power (or whatever) and is really just about the acquisition of political power. Samantha Power is an enormously successful female academic, the very person Hillary's presidency is supposed to represent, and instead she's being cut down mercilessly. Somewhere some successful middle-aged white woman should be thinking to herself, "What if that were me? Would Hillary have any problem throwing me to the wolves?"

I think we all know what the answer to that question is now.

Dirty Trick of the Day

From South Carolina:

[Sen. Lindsey] Graham, who has angered conservative Republicans by siding with McCain on issues ranging from immigration and torture to a bipartisan deal on federal judicial nominees, faces not one, not two, but five potential primary challengers.

Buddy Witherspoon, an orthodontist and former Republican National Committee member, has already run a series of cable TV ads featuring illegal immigrants entering the U.S. with a Spanish narrator saying, "Gracias Lindsey Graham," and has suggested the first-term senator might abandon his constituents to join a future McCain administration.

[emphasis added]

Dirty Trick of the Day

Zimbabwe edition:

BBC News reports that Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe has launched his reelection campaign by calling his opponents “witches, prostitutes and charlatans,” as well as “traitors and two-headed creatures.” Here’s his full quote:

Let the people’s voice thunder across the whole country on 29 March, rejecting and damning once and for all the bootlicking British stooges, the traitors and sell-outs, the political witches and political prostitutes, political charlatans and the two-headed political creatures.

Dirty Trick of the Day

Via TNR:

Dirty Trick of the Day

Smear Cinema.

Dirty Trick of the Day (Reprise)

Religious Bigotry:


More at VotingForSatan.com.

[via Hit & Run]

Dirty Trick of the Day

Nonsensical (yet still offensive) Homemade Placards:


And if you're hungry for more equally inane examples of Amateur Hour at the Propaganda Club, check out Cracked.

[via Andrew Sullivan]

Dirty Trick of the Day

Push Polls!

MORE: Pollster.com thinks otherwise.

Dirty Trick of the Day (Nightcap)

The Race Card.

The Clintons wasted no time in pulling the trigger on this one.

MORE: From the Hotline:

On the other hand, MSNBC's Buchanan points out, Bill Clinton "is smiling tonight" because the racial-polarization strategy "is working."

EVEN MORE: Here's an absolutely astonishing quote from Bill Clinton:

"Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in '84 and '88. Jackson ran a good campaign. And Obama ran a good campaign here."

Apparently there was no context to this being said, no reporter asking Clinton if he could compare Obama's victory to Jacksons' in the 80s. Bill apparently just came out and said this completely on his own (or at least that was what Eugene Robinson was saying on TV last night).

MORE STILL: Craig Crawford insists that this isn't playing the race card so much as it is noting historical facts.

Dirty Trick of the Day

Good old fashioned xenophobia.

Dirty Trick of the Day

The Soar Grapes Lateral Smear.

A former Fred Thompson staffer has started boycottchucknorris.com ... for some reason. I'm not really sure if this qualifies as a dirty trick -- the web site looks like it was made by a 9th grade Intro to HTML class. And as Blake Dvorak puts it: "It's a pretty angry site and certainly doesn't cast its creator in the most generous light."

Anyway, you get the picture: instead of going after the candidate directly, why not go after his quirky pop-cultural campaign gimmick?

Take that, Kung fu man!

MORE: Sean Hackbarth over at the American Mind is childish enough to support this idiotic attempt at smearing the washed-up b-movie action star who is apparently the ire of recovering Fredheads.

Gentlemen, get over it. Fred lost because he sucks. In fact he sucks so much that fucking Chuck Norris was enough to beat him. You have no one to blame but the shitty candidate y'all decided to back.

Dirty Trick of the Day

Phone-jamming.

Links to Allen Raymond's Daily Show appearance last night and an excerpt from his book How to Rig an Election, at TPM Muckraker.

Dirty Trick of the Day (Nightcap)

This one's just good old fashioned lying:

Teresa Clanton was home doing chores when her phone rang.

An automated voice rattled off names of Republican presidential candidates as if conducting a poll. When Clanton indicated that she supported Fred Thompson, the voice asked if she knew that the former Tennessee senator supports abortion, gay marriage and illegal immigration.

He doesn't.

The McClatchy article from whence this excerpt came has a pleasant little retrospective featuring the Palmetto State's Greatest Hits over the last 30 years...

Which makes this a great time to shill for the documentary coming out this summer on the patron state of South Carolina hardball, Lee Atwater. Should be fun.

MORE: Voila!