Fade said:
Sorry Fisher, nobody died and made you boss of word usage.
Who died and made you king of rudeness? You say that it is arrogant to state that you do not appreciate how you are addressed? How much more arrogant it is to say that you don't have to respect Alan's wishes about how he is addressed. You may whine about your rights (you sound like a liberal) to do so but Alan has every right to object and when you don't respect that you show yourself to be nothing more than a loudmouthed bully.
As for using Google for your example; let's do.
Karl Rove dirty tricks-- Google hits = 43 thousand.
Obama dirty tricks-- Google hits = 359 thousand.
Republican party dirty tricks-- Google hits = 213 thousand.
Democratic party dirty tricks-- Google hits = 862 thousand.
Which merely goes to show that Republicans complain more than Democrats do. They own more media outlets and the Republican echo chamber is bigger and more credulous than the Democrat's.
Simple hit-counts do not tell the story about who has dirtier tricks since most articles are duplications of the same tricks. What's needed is a side by side comparison of dirty tricks. In thinking about them, though, the ones that come first to mind tend to be mostly Republican.
Of course there is reason to believe that JFK had his dad to thank for some key election successes. He was a Dem. That's likely true. Of course, JFK was later killed in office. He undoubtedly had made some enemies - so had his brother.
Nixon had his plumbers. Nixon was Republican. That little dirty trick eventually blew up when the cover up failed.
It was the republican George H.W.Bush with Gates negotiated with the Iranian hostage takers to hold onto the American hostages until after the Carter/Reagan race so as to not give Carter a boost going into the polls. This "October Surprise" is now pretty well documented though Republicans still like to claim otherwise.
Reagan's Contras was not a dirty trick in the sense of election fiddling but it certainly was dirty and though the details are pretty much known now they managed to avoid serious consequences by guiding the investigation (a la Warren Commission, a la 9/11 Commission, etc. because that's what these commissions are for).
The voter purges in Florida were a classic dirty trick and illegal. Most of the purged voters were not felons but were black. The supreme court selection of George Bush was clearly partisan and also the political connections in Florida that allowed the vote recount to be canceled was dirty. That was Republican.
The mysterious glitches in unverifiable voting machines in 2004 and the sudden failure of exit polls to predict what they had always been able to predict before (where errors exclusively favoured the Republicans) was highly suspicious and the subsequent move to ban exit polling so as never to have to answer these awkward questions again was also Republican.
The voter caging of 2004 and the phone jamming and fake announcements in Democratic districts of changes in polling stations and polling dates were all Republican dirty tricks.
In the mind of Republicans, going out and getting as many people to vote for your candidate the way the Democrats do it is a dirty trick - but preventing people who are likely to vote Dem from getting to the polls, or failing to count their votes afterwards are considered fair game.
