Media Platforms Design Team

As the Reign Of The Morons enters its third day, let us
pause 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 of
its petulant, kindergartenish glory. Let us raise a morning glass to Donald
Segretti, 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 is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. 

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7pr%2FQrqCrnV6YvK57zZ6urGWgpLmqwMicqmion6G2tbXCrGaaamVlhnF7w6ilmqSUYsCms9Geq62hXaeutbLKoqWgZWFlfXV9kmg%3D