you read it here first

--During the years of the Clinton Administration ... relentless “investigations,” demanded by Republicans on Capitol Hill, created a series of trumped-up “-gates”... [and] explored techniques that would inform dozens of political prosecutions under Bush. ... The Republican project of the past seven years has been to build on that success, to transform the legal apparatus of the United States into an instrument of partisan force... The former political director of the Texas Republican Party, Royal Masset, actually told the HOUSTON CHRONICLE in 2007 that it is an “article of religious faith that voter fraud is causing us to lose elections,” but then acknowledged that such faith was unfounded. What he did believe, according to the CHRONICLE’s paraphrase, was that “requiring photo IDs could cause enough of a drop-off in legitimate Democratic voting to add 3 percent o the Republican vote.... [USDA Inglesias in 2004] reacted to Republican complaints about a highly effective voter-registration program run by a grassroots activist organization, ACORN, by creating special task force of FBI agents and prosecutors to fully investigate the allegations. [Inglesias, whose earlier life was played by Tom Cruise in A FEW GOOD MEN was later fired, in part for not prosecuting an ACORN registrar in 2006] [A study] found that between 2001 and 2006 the Justice Department had initiated 375 investigations of public officials. They also found that 298 of those investigations targeted Democrats and 67 of them targeted Republicans ... the odds of this imbalance occurring randomly were one in ten thousand. HARPERS, March 2008, p 37 f