'After 10 full years inside the GOP, 90 days among honest criminals wasn't really any great ordeal'

That quote comes direct from Allen Raymond's new tell-all book, How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative.

In it, according to Josh Marshall at TPM, "upon a limited initial perusal, the normally low-key and laconic Paul Kiel concludes that it is 'awesome.' So that's saying a lot."

Nothing new that GOP operatives are sleazy scum bags better attuned to hacking deals out of child slave labor in the Marianas than policy initiatives that would actually, you know, help the public. But it looks like we might get some concrete documentation from Mr. Raymond who has actually spent 90 days in the pen with  'honest criminals' for his GOP efforts, as he  puts it.

In case you don't remember, the phone jamming case was where the New Hampshire Republican party (almost certainly with the knowledge and probably with the cooperation of the national party) hired a phone bank to jam the phones of the Dems' and the local firefighters' Get Out The Vote phone banks.

The guy close to the center of the whole scam was the media operative/consultant hired to run the operation, Allen Raymond.

Alas, Dems probably had the majority votes, most the time, but thanks to gentlemen like Allen Raymond, that wasn't enough to win. But ...

Of all the phone-jam scammers, Allen Raymond was the only one who not only took his criminal justice lumps but seemed genuinely to want to wash his hands of the whole rotten business. The rest, as you'd expect, are back on the GOP payroll in most cases after a short pitstop in the can.

Check out his book. It ought to be worth a night or two reading anyhow.

Here's a short description:

Fresh out of grad school, Allen Raymond joined the GOP for one reason: rumor had it that there was big money to be made on the Republican side of the aisle.

From the earliest days of the Republican Revolution through its culmination in the second Bush White House, Raymond played a key role in helping GOP candidates twist the truth beyond recognition during a decade of crucial and bitterly fought campaigns. His career took him from the nastiest of local elections in New Jersey backwaters through runs for Congress and the Senate and right up to a top management position in a bid for the presidency itself.

It also took him to prison.

Full of wit and candor, Raymond's account offers an astonishingly frank look at the black art of campaigning and the vagaries of the Republican establishment. Unlike many "architects" of the political scene, the author takes full responsibility for his actions -- even as he never misses a trick.