Bob Beckel
(Originally posted to Politics at EraBlog on Sat, 18 Oct 2003 06:46:45 GMT)
I just read an interview on BuzzFlash with Bob Beckel. Beckel is a longtime Democrat political consultant. He’s now gone into the business of exposing the right wing’s dirty tactics at his website, BobBeckel.com.
We’re in the business of exposing their tactics, some of which I’ve had used against me before – like mailing official government-looking stationery to blacks in precincts in the South, telling them if they vote in the wrong place, they’ll get a $5,000 fine and a year in jail. It obviously drove down black turnout. That’s one that Jesse Helms’ thugs used against Harvey Gant in NC. One of the missions of bobbeckel.com is to expose these tactics with examples, and also what a campaign should do if something like this happens to them. The problem for campaigns dealing with these guys is the press tends to call it a political fight and not newsworthy.
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It seems to me that if the institutions that you’ve come to depend on, whether they are Congress or the press, fail to do their job or expose what is undoubtedly a vast Right Wing takeover of the Government, then for those of us who understand them, who’ve been up against them, and who’ve been victims of them – it’s our responsibility to carry it forward. And if it means having to do it the way they do it, we will. We’re not afraid of them.
It’s like Richard Mellon Scaife. The reason I’m after that SOB is he’s trying now, after trying to destroy the Clinton’s, to clean up his image. This guy has been funding dirt projects which are then carried out by people like those involved with the Arkansas Project, a bunch of thugs and crooks. Then Scaife turns his back and says: I don’t know what they’re doing. How much longer are we going to put up with that? We can’t.