But Rohrabacher's latest venture into audacious spin involves erasing history.
On Jan. 20, the Weekly reported that the Costa Mesa Republican known for his often inane ramblings had showered unexpected lofty praise on Hillary Clinton, a likely 2016 Democratic Party presidential candidate.
These are the exact words Rohrabacher typed into his Twitter account on Jan. 19:
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The statement must have alarmed or outraged the fringe rubber chicken circuit that usually celebrates Rohrabacher as a trusty pit bull for rightwing conspiracy theorists.
After Clinton testified for Rep. Ed Royce's House Foreign Affairs committee on Jan. 23, Rohrabacher quietly erased his words from Twitter without explanation.
I've personally confronted the congressman several times over the years about his tendency to toy with facts. For example, he likes to tell veterans that he's “bled for this country,” even though he carefully avoided all military duty when he was eligible to fight in Vietnam. In another case he publicly lambasted then-President Bill Clinton for allowing satellite technology transfers to communist China, even though I found a letter he personally signed calling for that same transfer.
So did the congressman–who first ran for Congress in 1988 hailing the necessity of “term limits” to clean up corruption in Washington and has remained in office for a quarter of a century–merely want to delete from the record his Clinton praise because of embarrassment?
Or, did Rohrabacher want to remove his claim that he is “not about to sling mud at” Clinton so he could violate that promise without looking like a hypocrite?
You be the judge.
After deleting the entry, Orange County's senior career politician called Clinton “the Queen of Deceit” at least three times of Twitter. Another time he called her a person who has made “deceit an art form.”
But the brazen flip flop isn't entirely what makes Dana Dana.
While slinging mud at Clinton and calling her names he was berating his own numerous critics on Twitter for, that's right, calling him names.
“Ur wrong 2 make attacks on the person with whom U disagree,” the pooka shell necklace wearing congressman declared to one.
That's the beauty of Rohrabacher. He's a con artist. He sees no contradiction in lecturing others about name calling while expertly practicing the art of the smear himself. He sees no problem lecturing Clinton on shameless deceit even while he slyly scrubs his own words from history.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.
