Recognize and Organize Against Your Enemies…

…Republicans will NEVER cooperate

President Joe Biden had a long and distinguished career in the United States Senate. Through both personal and national tragedies, Biden maintained a bipartisan, conciliatory approach towards some of the most intractable problems we have faced. As a life-long Democrat, he was loyal to his party’s platforms and principles, but he also wanted to work with Republicans in the hopes of achieving joint solutions to the problems this country experienced. In that way, he reasoned, we would accomplish our goals in a truly bipartisan way, fulfilling the promise of democracy: common solutions to common problems.

Unfortunately, Republicans don’t think or feel along those lines. Since the advent of Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon in his first political campaign in 1946, dirty politics has been part of the Republican Party’s DNA. And not only vile, despicable “tricks” were played on their Democratic opponents, but even questionable campaign slogans were used as a way to gain attention for themselves.

But perhaps the worst episodes of reprehensible politicking was in the “ratfucking” campaign, orchestrated by Donald Segretti, the Chairman of the Committee to Reelect the President, in 1971–72, culminating in the Watergate scandal, which led to “Tricky Dick’s” resignation from the presidency in August 1974.

Segretti, along with Dwight Chapin, Ron Ziegler and other entitled rich kids attending the University of Southern California’s campus in Los Angeles, learned at an early age that they couldn’t win by fighting fair, so they fought foul, arranging for the publication of false news stories, distributing false campaign literature about their opponents (Ed Muskie, then George McGovern), claiming that Daniel Ellsberg’s “Pentagon Papers” was a completely fabricated, communist plot to discredit America’s military misadventure in Vietnam, and accusing the Democratic Party of being a front for the takeover of American democracy.

Not surprisingly, a later generation — Lee Atwater, Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, Ted Cruz, and many others — learned at the knee of the “U.S.C…