Did I mention that the blog's name is literal?

It's been a busy day here at The Big Con. But when I get to sniffin' out conservative conning, I feel a certain wind beneath my wings.

I've been reading up on the latest Republican presidential candidate, and in an article in the new Weekly Standard

The conference call began around 2:00 pm. Ken Rietz, a top executive with Burson Marsteller and a close adviser to Thompson, welcomed the participants."

Kenneth Rietz. I knew I'd heard of that name before.

I used my MacIntosh's function that lets you search for any string of characters that's on your hard drive. I found what I was looking for in my "Watergate" file. The following is a quote from my favorite book about the Nixon presidency, Jonathan Schell's The Time of Illusion (page 221):

In Washington, a taxi-driver was hired by the
Nixon reelection committee to join the Muskie campaign. He was taken
on as a volunteer, and was eventually assigned the task of carrying
the Senator's mail between his Senate office and his campaign
headquarters. On the way he would give the Senator's campaign
documents, including internal memoranda and drafts of speeches and
position papers, to a Republican operative whose code name was Fat
Jack and who held a post in the Office of Economic Opportunity. Fat
Jack would photograph the papers in a downtown office rented for that
purpose, and would pass the film along; for the first few months...to
Kenneth Rietz, director of the youth division...and then, after Rietz
withdrew...to E. Howard Hunt on a Washington Street corner.

A current Republican presidential contender has a Watergate spy as a "close advisor": surely interesting, and perhaps even relevant to the character of the candidate.

But it only rose to the level of a Big Con post when I looked up Kenneth Rietz's name in the digital archives of the Washington Post, and came on the following Jack Anderson column from December 19, 1975:

REAGAN HIRES FORMER NIXON 'SPY'

Ronald Reagan has signed on a key member of a Nixon campaign 'spy' team, Kenneth Rietz, and assigned him a major role in his campaign...

One of his undercover operatives, a George Washington University student, was paid $100 a week to infiltrate a peace vigil at the White House and set up the demonstrators for arrest on drug charges.

Nixon's right-hand man, H.R. Haldeman, was so pleased with the results that he began grooming Rietz to be the next Republican national chairman. Rietz actually was preparing to take charge of the 1974 Repubican congressional campaign when his spy activities hit the headlines. He resigned under fire.

The conservative movement gave him a home. Reagan made him the chief California organizer for his 1976 presidential campaign; for a time, Rietz's house was Reagan for President headquarters in California.

Apparently, he's been thriving in conservative politics ever since. Imagine that.

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