Oh My... I DO Love The New Meme... Greenwald Is Correct, He's Just Bad At It...

[backscatter712]

31. Ratfucking: the right-wing tradition of dirty tricks and sabotage

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratfucking

Ratfucking is an American slang term for political sabotage or dirty tricks. It was first brought to public attention by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in their book All the President's Men.

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Woodward and Bernstein's exposé All the President's Men reports that many staffers who had attended the University of Southern California such as Donald Segretti, Tim Elbourne, Ronald Louis Ziegler, H. R. Haldeman and Dwight Chapin had participated in the highly-competitive student elections there. UPI reporter Karlyn Barker sent Woodward and Bernstein a memo "Notes On the USC Crowd" that outlined the connection. Fraternities, sororities and underground fraternal coordinating organizations such as Theta Nu Epsilon and their splintered rival "Trojans for Representative Government" engaged in creative tricks and underhanded tactics to win student elections.[1][2][3] Officially, control over minor funding and decision-making on campus life was at stake but the positions also gave bragging rights and prestige. It was either promoted by or garnered the interest of major political figures on the USC board of trustees such as Dean Rusk and John A. McCone.[4][5] It was here that the term ratfucking had its origin. It is unclear whether it was derived from the military term for stealing the better part of military rations and tossing the less appetizing portions away or if the military adopted the phrase from the political lexicon.

It's a term that originated in the Nixon era - that was what Nixon's "plumbers" did.

So let me be honest.

We're looking at a large group of people (or "people" given how common sockpuppeting is these days) who are using every dirty trick in the book to disrupt, discourage, divide, and prevent people from having constructive discussions here. When I look at their posts, I see patterns - pieces of sentences copied & reused almost verbatim, sudden thread pouncing by swarms minutes after one of their opponents posts the thread. They are not Democrats. They are not progressives. In other words, in the original sense of the term, they are the ratfuckers. They are liars and con-artists, and can be downright vicious to honest progressives here. They are our enemies. They don't belong here.

I'm not the least bit sorry for being nasty to them. Here at Democratic Underground, we damned well are nasty towards right-wingers, and I feel absolutely no guilt for making ratfuckers feel unwelcome here. The day Skinner figures out who's not here in good faith and puts them out the door with a big bootprint in their asses, I'll be popping champagne corks.