Roger Stone, heterosexual

Much deserved fun is being had at the expense of Roger Stone, the sex-clubbin' [1] GOP dirty trickster caught delivering a foul-mouthed threatening phone call to New York Governor Elliot Spitzer's 83-year-old dad, and who now seems to be claiming Spitzer's people broke into his apartment [2] and commandeered his phone in "the ultimate dirty trick.... Putting together a voice tape that sounds like me wouldn’t be hard to do.”

Well, Roger would know. My interest in this business is in nailing home one of the key themes of The Big Con: that though conservative Republicans love to claim themselves the heirs of Ronald Reagan's supposed sunny optimism, they're really heirs of the ratfucking-era Richard Nixon. Literally.

In Roger Stone's case, as a young staffer for White House scheduler Herbert Porter, he was assigned to make out a check for $200 to anti-war Republican Congressman Pete McCloskey, who was symbolically contesting Richard Nixon for the 1972 nomination. The catch was that the check was made out in the name of the Gay Liberation Front. He was to forward the receipt to right-wing newspaper editor William Loeb, who could be expected then to report that McCloskey was the fave of the fags, thus destroying his public reputation as a macho Marine combat vet.

Only Stone, apparently fearing for his own reputation as a heterosexual stud, chickened out, and made out the contribution from the Young Socialist Alliance instead. He's gotten better at his work since.