Why sermonize about the superiority of your ideas and values when it was so much more effective to attack the motives and character of your opponents… - Rachel Maddow

Why sermonize about the superiority of your ideas and values when it was so much more effective to attack the motives and character of your opponents, to call them names, to question their love of country.

Maddow on Sarah Palin accepting Fed money after all: "You can see cake from her house, and you can eat it from there too."

To get his Nazi-approved material spread farther and wider, he knew he would need a justification for using Congress’s free postage to send out Lundeen’s mailings nationwide.

Senator Beall, they believed, owed the White House a favor because Nixon and Agnew had helped him get elected three years earlier. George and Glenn Beall’s father had lost his Senate seat in 1964; when it came up again in 1970, Nixon and Agnew personally helped Glenn avenge the loss by campaigning for him in Maryland, multiple times. And it worked: the Republican Party got that Senate seat back, and so did the Beall family. Now one of the Beall sons was going to try to destroy Spiro Agnew with this investigation? No. Nixon and Agnew decided it was time for Glenn Beall to return the favor and lean on his little brother, the prosecutor.