INGRAHAM. It's becoming increasingly clear that the new congressional majority is going to take seriously what Donald Segretti used to call "ratfucking" -- low-tech political creepery of a peculiarly scummy variety -- in the context of the last few elections. While a lot of people rightly were concerned about hacked voting machines and organized voter suppression, and other forms of massive fraud, a whole universe of relatively less complicated dirty tricks got organized around the national Republican political apparatus. We got a glimpse of it in 2002, when the Republicans ran a phone-bank-jamming operation in New Hampshire that's subsequently sent a couple of people to the sneezer, a scandal with an actual criminal body-count that very few NH Democrats believe has been plumbed fully to its depths yet. This time around, there was the robo-calling that actually hit the media in real time, and which seems to have caught Harry Reid and Barack Obama's attention. Now there's this.
There's a big old First Amendment rock in the road here, to be sure, but, because Laura was so interested in the sanctity of our national institutions between the years 1992 and 2000, I'm sure she'd want just as much attention paid to this as was paid to, oh, I don't know, Whitewater, maybe.
--Charles P. Pierce
