Bond issues, Contempt, and Rat-fucking
that's right, Rat-fucking...read it
Monday sucked for The Donald; but since Tuesday sucked worse, it didn’t matter much.
Corporate-owned media tried to spin the hearing on Trump’s $175 million bond in his business fraud appeal as a win. Unfortunately, Judge Arthur Engoron put in some stoppers in the weird bond arrangement made with Donald Trump’s friend, Don Hankey — the King of Sub-Prime Lending. Basically the bond is good, but the loopholes just got too small for a rat to get through.
The contempt hearing, which was held Tuesday, ended with the Judge telling Donald Trump’s attorney, Todd Blanche, he “had lost all credibility” with the court. Oh, and as I predicted, the Secret Service has a contingency plan for Donald Trump going to jail. Spoiler Alert: it involves the Secret Service going with The Donald to the Graybar Motel.
But, I digress. You read the word Rat-fucking and said either “gross” or “what does that have to do with Donald Trump?”
Some time ago, I answered a question on Quora, a website devoted to questions and answers. The question was basically “Why did Richard Nixon, who seemed to be well ahead in polls, risk everything by bugging the Democratic National Committee Headquarters?”
One of the more strange people interviewed by Woodward and Bernstein (Washington Post) in the course of reporting the Watergate scandal was a man named Donald Segretti.1
Smarmy looking little jerk, isn’t he?
Segretti described himself as part of the "rat-fucking squad" in Nixon's reelection effort. He was one of a bunch of people involved in the dirty tricks campaign group headed by Dwight Chapin
and overseen by/paid by Nixon's lawyer, Herb Kalmbach.
The "Rat-fuckers" forged letters, made embarrassing donations in candidate's names, and generally worked to undermine various Democratic presidential candidates. Interestingly, the "rat-fucking squad" had a young college kid named Roger Stone (yes, that Roger Stone), who dutifully carried out their criminal nonsense.
Of course that was not the only dirty trick that Herb Kalmbach oversaw or paid people to do. In addition to the assiduous work of Dwight/Donald/et al.'s rat-fucking capers designed to ensure that George McGovern, easily the most liberal candidate in the Democratic field, won the Democratic nod; Kalmbach also had the DNC bugged.
It was important to Kalmbach and the Committee to Re Elect the President (CREEP) — yep, they thought the anacronym was funny — that they had intelligence within the DNC to see what their plans were, and more importantly, to see if the Democrats knew about CREEP's involvement in political espionage against them.
The DNC was headquartered at the time in the Watergate Hotel/Apartment complex. So CREEP sent in a team to bug the offices. Shortly before the break-in (June 17, 1972), the bugs stopped working and there began a fear/paranoia/crisis that the Democrats were going to spring the bugging of their Headquarters on Nixon and CREEP and undermine his reelection (ironically, they did not comprehend that they were already undermining the democratic process by fixing the Democratic nomination for the worst candidate.).
As the Burns and Schreiber comedy team put it in their "Watergate Comedy Hour" album "We (CREEP) aren't bugging them to get stuff on them (the Democrats) but bugging them to see if they have anything on us."
Watergate was part of a larger plan to ensure a poor candidate who was not trusted on the economy, foreign affairs, defense, or anything else won the nomination. Nixon, who had lost in 1960 by a razor thin 112,827 votes and then won in 1968 with a somewhat bigger margin (a bit over 511,000 votes), was taking no chances.
Nixon wanted to beat Kennedy's election numbers (49.72% for a 303 Electoral College-EC victory), which he did not (Nixon won in 1968 with 43.4% and 301 EC votes). He also wanted to beat LBJ's election numbers (61.1% with 486 EC votes). Nixon missed that vote percentage by a mere 0.4%. That said, Nixon bested LBJ's EC vote numbers with 520 EC votes and to this day he holds the record raw vote margin of any Presidential candidate — more than 17,500,000 votes.
So, what’s this got to do with rat-fucking?
After the 1970 midterms, the political news shifted to who the Democrats would choose to take on Nixon. The Democrats had done pretty well in 1970; and given the nature of Nixon’s razor thin victory in a three way race, Nixon looked vulnerable.
And a bunch of Democrats jumped in the race, including Governor George Wallace, New York City Mayor John Lindsay, and Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm. A trio of Senators (Scoop Jackson of Washington, George McGovern of South Dakota, and Edmund Muskie of Maine), however, were considered the most serious contenders.
Senator Edmund Muskie, a former Maine Governor, had been Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s running mate in 1968. Muskie was a Cold War liberal. He (along with Jackson) seemed like the ideal foreign policy realist to take on Nixon.
So, Donald Segretti and the rest of the “Rat-fuckers” sabotaged his campaign. Between the infamous “Canuck letter”2 and spreading lies that Muskie’s wife was a drunkard and racist, Dwight Chapin and his minions destroyed Muskie’s momentum. Actually, it brought Muskie to tears, which was the final slug in his presidential campaign.
The net effect of this ratfucking was that the most liberal and perceptibly weakest candidate — George McGovern, the prairie populist — came into Miami3 with the wind at his back. The candidate, who was for “acid, amnesty, and abortion”,4 won the nomination and trailed badly in the polls thereafter.
Ratfucking, in the 21st Century, has been supplanted by tabloid lies and viral internet falsehoods.
Former National Enquirer Publisher David Pecker’s testimony about the “catch and kill” program was coupled with Pecker’s agreement with Donald Trump to spread lies about his Republican opponents.
Well one opponent, mostly.
Like 1972, Pecker and Trump aimed their their biggest lies at Senator Ted Cruz — an actual conservative idealist and evangelical Christian. From accusations of adultery to lies about Cruz’s wife and father (Trump and the Enquirer claimed he was in on the Kennedy assassination); the National Enquirer, with Pecker’s personal involvement, and Donald Trump upended Ted Cruz’s frontrunner status.
And Ted Cruz called it out,5 but by then, no one was paying attention to him.
In 2016, the part of Herb Kalmbach was played by Michael Cohen, David Pecker took on Dwight Chapin’s role, and the National Enquirer did the rat-fucking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Segretti
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canuck_letter
Miami was the site of the 1972 Democratic Party Convention.
This quote was reported by columnist Robert Novak and attributed to an unnamed Democratic Senator. It was later revealed that the quote was made by Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, who would be McGovern’s running mate for 18 days (he dropped out, when it was revealed he had undergone electro-shock therapy).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/04/23/trump-trial-cruz-national-enquirer/