The Trump He May Be Crazy...But He's Playing By The Rovian/Atwater/Ailes Rules.

DothSides
Don'tVille


All kinds of folks are aghast that Donald Trump said crazy things about John McCain's war record recently.

But this is absolutely nothing new.

In point of fact, it is taken directly from 'The Playbook Of The Smear' that Karl Rove exhumed from Lee Atwater's tomb so that he could foist George W. Bush on the world.

Driftglass, fly-over blogger extraordinaire and former denizen of Steve Gilliard's salon, explains (with an assist from an 11 year-old piece by Richard Gooding in The Atlantic):

"...On February 2, 2000, John McCain arrived in South Carolina red-hot, a 19-point-upset victor in New Hampshire over George Bush. In the final days there, some of Bush’s aides had pressed him to turn aggressively negative. Bush had resisted. His political guru, Karl Rove, overconfident for too long, had agreed.

Now, in South Carolina, Bush had lost close to a 50-point lead. With just 17 days before the vote, his back was firmly against the wall...

...At a meeting of Bush’s top staff that first day, the signal went out “to take the gloves off,” Time magazine reported at the time...

...The “revolting” e-mail—alleging that “McCain chose to sire children without marriage”—was from Richard Hand, a professor of the Bible at Greenville’s Christian-fundamentalist Bob Jones University, Bush’s very first campaign stop, on February 2. With the school’s ban on interracial dating still in effect then, the veteran political reporter Curtis Wilkie told me “he might as well have gone to a goddamned Klan rally” as go to B.J.U.

...“This whole thing, it was orchestrated by Rove, it was all Bush’s deal.… It was pretty rank,”...

...McCain’s closest aides were so stunned by the angle of the attack that at first they tried to shield him from it. “We expected one thing, and it was quite the opposite,” said Fletcher, who personally saw the “Negro child” flyers “all over every car” at the debate. “We figured they would go after him on some sort of philandering issue. McCain had pretty well knocked all that down [by admitting in his 1999 autobiography that, at some point after his five and a half years in a North Vietnamese prison, he’d been unfaithful to his first wife], but I always figured that would sort of be the underground thing there. But, man, the child thing.… I’ve seen the worst form of racist sons of bitches in the world in David Duke, but this was unbelievable.”...

...There were other whispers as well: McCain had slept with prostitutes and given his wife V.D.; he’d turned traitor in the “Hanoi Hilton,” or was mentally unstable from his captivity, or was a Manchurian Candidate, brainwashed to destroy the G.O.P...

...For just meeting with the gay Log Cabin 

Republicans, McCain was labeled the “Fag Army” candidate..."

In 2000, Team Bush destroyed McCain using tactics far, far more despicable than Trump's offhand remark today. And for his sins, the Party of Lincoln nominated George W. Bush for President.

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And the real thing, here?

Crap like this almost makes Scott Walker and the Canadian guy seem reasonable.

If you get my drift.

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That last bit came up in Driftglass' and his partner Bluegal's latest podcast...Go give it a listen...And keep this in mind when you start to hear all this mealy-mouthed codwallopanarianism about how the Fed-Dippers' negative ads are somehow equivalent to what the CPC smear machine is doing with endless fear mongering, trumpeting of Hey Zeuss' love of C-51, and terrorist propagammon videos.

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