Meet Andy MARTIN, the originator of Birtherism (dating from 2004)

[UTUSN]

6. Whew, just slogged through it. I knew I'd need a shower afterwards but it was within bounds.

This is a *very* in-the-weeds treatise of very intricate and obscure politics of events long forgotten. No mention of the Dan RATHER episode, STONE's involvement I remember being speculated about back when the things were happening. I read Parts One and Two closely, skimmed three through seven, back to close with the rest. Detailed about Coup 2000, his shoddy book smearing LBJ with offing JFK, Joe KENNEDY's mob partnerships, especially good about STONE's "claimed achievements" in dirty tricks (claimed, not substantiated). It's got good links to other reporting on STONE. Maybe this will save some time.

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from PART ONE: [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"] [/FONT]

.... I don’t think Stone ever says what policy he is for in this memoir, and he might well consider a focus on policy a distraction. There is only winning and losing an election, and [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]five methods[/FONT] for achieving a victory recur again and again in races that Stone is involved with, four methods that create a mirror maze of [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]confusion, misdirection, and elimination[/FONT]. The [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]first is through association[/FONT], by having a candidate receive an endorsement from a person or group who potential supporters of the candidate are predisposed to view as an opponent, or through association with something unquestionably malevolent made via protesters, pamphlets, or other means funded by Stone’s campaign but without any fingerprints. The [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]second is by having a group, funded by allied interests, oppose a candidate or policy due to some larger moral principle[/FONT] that everyone can agree on – the issue is not candidate A versus B, but opposition to crime, gambling, or child abuse. The [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]third is the smear[/FONT], saying your opponent is corrupt, weak, racist, a rapist, a murderer, a pedophile, always helpfully done not through you, the opponent on which this tar might stick, but through a phantom proxy. This last is used very, very often by Stone. The [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]fourth, and one of the most effective, is through fragmentation of the vote[/FONT]. There is, say, overwhelming support for candidate A, who will raise the minimum wage, versus candidate B, who won’t. You split this overwhelming vote by funding another candidate, who wants to raise the minimum wage even higher, and who chastises candidate A for compromising their principles and being beholden to business interests for not asking for a higher wage. Through a vote split, candidate B, the one who says he believes the condition of workers must be improved, but not through easy sounding solutions like a higher minimum wage, scores a victory. At the same time, you make great efforts to keep the votes for your own candidate or issue from being fragmented. The [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]fifth is vote suppression[/FONT], of black and latino voters, who tend to poll democrat. The first four have been employed in elections that Stone has been involved in, with Stone often taking credit. The fifth has been employed alongside Stone’s efforts, though perhaps without the collusion of Stone.

from PART EIGHT:

.... ...Stone might well be like his best known client, Donald Trump, who represents an image of a part better than those who play the part far better. Trump is far better at creating a brash, crass entity, a full-figured emptiness, “an opera buffa parody of wealth” in Mark Singer’s phrase, that embodies arrogant capitalism far better than those who are actual successful and important billionaires, whether it be Warren Buffett or Bill Gates. “Deep down, he wants to be Madonna,” says a security analyst of Trump236. Deep down, Roger Stone wants to be Madonna, too. [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]Stone is better at creating an image of a political fixer than he is at the role[/FONT]. His race with Tom Kean was a razor thin victory, while the only presidential campaign he ever headed up, Arlen Specter’s, ended before the first primary. Warren Redlich beat him in the Libertarian primary. His candidate, Kristin Davis, finished dead last in the governor’s race. His two greatest achievements, the Brooks Brothers riot and the leak of Eliot Spitzer’s sexual life, are both [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]inventions, bought up by a gullible and stupid press[/FONT]. His “jokes”, like harassing Bernard Spitzer or his libeling Warren Redlich as a sexual predator, are obvious, cruel, and stupid. The mystery, the malevolence one associates with him are not his own, but the qualities of a political world, now, of secret money and secret power. He is a man who [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]tries to claw at fame by making himself the embodiment of that secret world, but he is one of the players of the least significance. Roger Stone is an evil genius without the genius part[/FONT]. That no large financial donor ended up backing Johnson, through the veiled power of a Super PAC, shows the lack of confidence on the part of secret money in Stone’s ability to pull off this bet. ....


from PART TEN:

.... After exiting his role as manager of the Donald Trump presidential campaign, Roger Stone would have a higher profile than he had in years. Most of this coverage was superficial, sycophantic, and an indictment of the wretched state of the American press. Many of the nether points of Stone’s career – the blood stained clients of BMS&K, the killing of Georgiy Gongadze, the suppression of black votes in the 1981 New Jersey election – all went unmentioned, for a portrait of a lovable mischievous dandy. The supposed dialogue which took place before the break-up which shows up in Marc Caputo’s “Sources: Roger Stone quit, wasn’t fired by Donald Trump in campaign shakeup” was laughably synthetic, a devil’s council re-written as idealistic wrangling by Aaron Sorkin. To my mind, the most realistic account showed up in “Inside Story: Behind Trump’s Breakup With Consultant Roger Stone” by Joe Conason, which most certainly relied on Stone as a source, but not without skepticism. Most of these profiles depicted Stone as a ne plus ultra consultant, somehow forgetting that his last few runs had been failures in the minor leagues, running the losing campaign for the mayor of Miami Beach and losing to Warren Redlich in the race for the New York Libertarian Party goverrnor’s ticket after a smear campaign in which Redlich was falsely accused of being a pedophile. Others saw Stone’s dismissal in favor of campaign manager Cory Landowski as an example of Trump’s amateurism, and I saw it as something different and [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]very frightening: Trump is very serious about becoming president, and had no patience for Stone’s rusty shenanigans[/FONT]. ....

This maneuver – [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]using an obscure publication as a source of a dubious quote about an opponent[/FONT] – was used by Atwater and his colleague Roger Stone against Charles “Pug” Ravenel in 1978 when Ravenel ran against Strom Thurmond for the U.S. Senate. ....

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