GOP , SOP, SOB(s)

Cruz and Rubio,
respectively
if not respectably

The latest headlines have nominee wanabee Rubio and Congressman Trey Gowdy joining Trump in attacking nominee wanabee Ted Cruz for engaging in dirty tricks.   From the Wall Street Journal:  

SUMMERVILLE, S.C. — The rivalry between Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio has escalated rapidly in advance of Saturday’s GOP primary here, and on Tuesday Mr. Rubio’s campaign accused Mr. Cruz’s team of an “underhanded tactic” in a state whose primary contests have had a lengthy history of them. Mr. Rubio’s campaign indicated that it believes Mr. Cruz’s operatives have been circulating a Facebook post claiming to be from South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy, one of Mr. Rubio’s fiercest supporters who has appeared with him in close to a dozen events over the past several days.

Boo bloody hoo Rubio, and too-bad Carson before him.

These are nothing new, these are business as usual tactics for the GOP.

To protest them is to ignore or to attempt to deny that this is anything other than Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) on the right -- and nowhere more so than in South Carolina, election cycle after election cycle.  

The GOP is always the party of the dirty tricks, not the values party and not the party to which anyone who values religious standards for conduct should ever adhere. The GOP is the party of the gullible, the party of the-end-justifies-the-means. It's hard to know which is worse - the crooked political operatives who cheat and lie, or the stupid people who fall for their dirty tricks and bigot-pandering, in their voting and in their donations.  

 I fully expect to see these and more of the dirty tricks used routinely on the right pulled out of their 'rat-f*cking' Nixon-style bag of dirty campaigning methods.   One of the examples that comes to mind, the George Dubya Bush campaign in South Carolina promoting the false rumor that John McCain had a black child out of wedlock; the reality was that the McCains had adopted a child from Bangladesh. Let me review what those 'family values' Jesus-loving Republicans did to John McCain back in 2000 in South Carolina.

The Data Lounge highlighted a few - the race-baiting phone calls that McCain had a black child with a prostitute, that his wife was a drug addict, that he came back from being a prisoner of war too 'damaged' to be entrusted as commander in chief, and that McCain committed treason while a prisoner of war.  

This is the same party that not only cannibalized it's own rival campaigner for the nomination, but later ran the Swiftboat ads against John Kerry.   Are there ever dirty tricks on the left? Of course there are, but not on the scale or with the approval and participation of the mainstream political establishment to the same degree as the GOP.