Thought I’d post a “head’s-up” to someone more up on the history of this particular GOP criminal act than I.  Found this AP story over at the Guardian.

First, Ken Mehlman’s “solemn word”:

Earlier this week, RNC chairman Ken Mehlman, the former White House political director, reiterated a “zero-tolerance policy” for any GOP official caught trying to block legitimate votes.

“The position of the Republican National Committee is simple: We will not tolerate fraud; we will not tolerate intimidation; we will not tolerate suppression. No employee, associate or any person representing the Republican Party who engages in these kinds of acts will remain in that position,” Mehlman wrote Monday to a group that studied voter suppression tactics.

That carefully worded bold section does not bind their hands, however, in paying the legal bills for someone who did engage in one of these activities.

Flip, flip, flip to review…

WASHINGTON (AP) – Despite a zero-tolerance policy on tampering with voters, the Republican Party has quietly paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to provide private defense lawyers for a former Bush campaign official charged with conspiring to keep Democrats from voting in New Hampshire.

James Tobin, the president’s 2004 campaign chairman for New England, is charged in New Hampshire federal court with four felonies accusing him of conspiring with a state GOP official and a GOP consultant in Virginia to jam Democratic and labor union get-out-the-vote phone banks in November 2002.

A telephone firm was paid to make repeated hang-up phone calls to overwhelm the phone banks in New Hampshire and prevent them from getting Democratic voters to the polls on Election Day 2002, prosecutors allege. Republican John Sununu won a close race that day to be New Hampshire’s newest senator.

There’s a pattern emerging here.  More and more, we see what look like just plain, old dirty tricks.

There’s an old word in the political lexicon for this sort of behavior: Nixonian.  And the GOP machine is run by Nixon alum.  Karl Rove is a protégé of Donald Segretti, a dirty trickster paid by Nixon’s re-election campaign.

And as with that classic tale of corruption from yore, there’s a simple rule to which one should adhere:

Follow.  The.  Money.  

Again, from the AP story:

Paul Twomey, a volunteer lawyer for New Hampshire Democrats who are pursuing a separate lawsuit involving the phone scheme, said he was surprised the RNC was willing to pay Tobin’s legal bills and that it suggested more people may be involved.

“It originally appeared to us that there were just certain rogue elements of the Republican Party who were willing to do anything to win control of the U.S. Senate, including depriving Americans of their ability to vote,” Twomey said.

“But now that the RNC actually is bankrolling Mr. Tobin’s defense, coupled with the fact that it has refused some discovery in the civil case, really raises the questions of who are they protecting, how high does this go and who was in on this,” Twomey said.

People already have a bitter taste in their mouth about the performance of the GOP since last November’s election.  Time to show that the rotten fruit is merely a symptom of a corrupt and decayed root.

The GOP is the Party of Corruption.

Pass it on.