THE MACHINE IS WARMING UP

And by that I mean the Republican Noise Machine. (Via Atrios) Digby has a link to an LA Times article about the "Hillary is the Anti-Christ" machine.

GOP activists circling Clinton's campaign
Conservatives don't hold back on early attacks.
'I know how to defeat them,' she says.
By Stephen Braun, Times Staff Writer
February 18, 2007

Clinton is being targeted by conservative and Republican-allied activists intent on derailing her campaign before the start of next year's primaries. They have surfaced with a flurry of planned projects: a Michael Moore-style documentary film, book-length exposes, and websites such as StopHerNow.comand StopHillaryPAC.com.

"People are doing what they're doing because they want to defeat her before she has a chance to win. You can't hold off your silver bullet to the end," said veteran Republican operative David N. Bossie, who is involved in the film project with Dick Morris, a former advisor to Bill Clinton.

"Those Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were the real heroes of the 2004 election," one online exhortation reads. "We at the StopHillaryPAC want to do the same thing to Hillary." That group's website, headed by former Rep. John LeBoutillier (R-N.Y.), collected enough early funding to launch a round of negative television ads on Iowa stations timed to Clinton's visit there in late January.

Bossie's film, scheduled for release by year's end, is being funded through appeals from Citizens United, a conservative interest group.

Citizens United's chairman is Floyd G. Brown, a GOP media consultant who worked on the 1988 "Willie Horton" ad that blamed Democratic presidential candidate Michael S. Dukakis for the weekend furlough of a convicted murderer who went on to commit a rape. Democrats charged that the ad exploited racial fears.

Bossie worked with Brown in the 1992 presidential campaign and later served as chief investigator for a House investigation of Clinton administration fundraising scandals. Bossie was fired from that post in 1998 for releasing transcripts of prison conversations involving Hillary Clinton's convicted former law partner, Webster L. Hubbell.


"We're doing our own thing," said Dick Collins, a Dallas businessman who gave $135,000 in StopHerNow.com seed money. The site is a spinoff from a PAC originally aimed at Clinton's Senate reelection by New York GOP strategist Arthur Finkelstein. [NOTE: Finkelstein went to Massachusetts to marry his male partner]

L. Brent Bozell III, who heads the conservative Media Research Center, said Brock's group does the same, only as "part of the Clinton machine." Bozell has more than a passing interest in Clinton's campaign. He is working on his own Clinton book, aiming to expose "media complicity in Hillary's attempted makeover as a centrist."