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enters its third day, let uspause for a moment to pay tribute to a political visionary whose entire career presaged the current moment,anticipating the essential dynamic in play in Washington right now in all ofits petulant, kindergartenish glory. Let us raise a morning glass to DonaldSegretti, the ratfucker.

(As any student of Watergate knows, "ratfucking" was the

word used by Segretti and a number of other officials in the Nixon White House

for the dirty tricks they ran in student elections when they all were at the

University of Southern California. Segretti -- as well as his pal, Dwight Chapin

-- simply transferred these techniques to our national elections.)

There are two basic philosophical foundation stones to

ratfucking. The first is that political sabotage for its own sake is a worthy

enough goal. There doesn't necessarily have to be an obvious purpose or obvious

logic behind it. Everything is simply tactics. Those tactics either work or

they don't. To believe this, of course,

one must first believe that all politics is a essentially a zero-sum game of

power; you win and the other guy loses. Who rules? Period. One cannot for a

moment contemplate the notion that politics -- and therefore, government -- has

anything to do with the public good. I trust I don't have to spell out the

parallels between this elemental basis of ratfucking and what the Republicans

are about in their current campaign of vandalism. This has now entered a time

in which we are seeing sabotage for sabotage's own sake. Remember, the

conservative rump faction has brought this shutdown upon the country because

its members refuse to agree to a federal budget that contains lower

discretionary spending than even Paul Ryan contemplated. That's because now --

as Congressman Marlin Stutzman pointed out clearly yesterday -- this isn't about

the budget, or even about economics, it's about who wins and who loses. It's

about whether or not John Boehner, the castrato Speaker Of The House, can keep

his job. The public, as was said during our previous Gilded Age, be damned.

The second basic philosophical tenet of ratfucking is that

it is essentially bullying. It is essentially about ridicule and deceit as ends

in themselves. Segretti's activities were meant to bring embarrassment and

public scorn upon his targets. They were not aimed at proving to voters that

the opposition was wrong. They were aimed at making it look ridiculous. Hubert

Humphrey's bastard child. Edmund Muskie's rallies cancelled. Sooner or later,

of course, the viciousness and the schoolyard taunting can't be contained.

Segretti's activities, while relatively harmless, opened the ballgame for the

late Lee Atwater's vicious race-baiting and for the entire public career of

Karl Rove, in which the latter has not drawn a single breath in which he did

not dedicate himself to the degradation of the political process and the

poisoning of the political debate.

We are seeing this aspect of ratfucking playing out now. We

saw it when Representative Randy Neugebauer bullied a Park Ranger. We saw it

when Rep Todd Rokita told CNN anchor Carol Costello, essentially,to sit there

and look pretty while he unspooled whatever the line of the day was. We saw it

when Rep. Darrell Issa flipped out at a reporter a few days before that. And we

are seeing it in the cynicism of the the now-daily Republican gimmick of

finding a government service that polls well and then pretending to care about

funding it, as though the whole party hasn't been running against "government"

since before Don Segretti was cheating the student body at USC. We will open

the National Parks, and all the other good stuff, and we can do it without really

paying for it. The last victory of pure Reaganomics is on display.

We are coming into the first weekend -- and therefore, the

first Green Room festival -- since the Reign Of The Morons began, so I suspect

we will see a lot of ratfucking gussied up as high rhetoric come Sunday. But,

for the rest of us, we are living through a living history of sabotage, through

a single extended dirty trick. We are all of us, milling around the public

square, wondering who cancelled the rally today and somewhere, in a Days Inn

near the airport, a clever young man snaps his suitcase shut and moves on to

the next town. There is always another rat to fuck, after all.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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