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If you’re going to do a slimy and dishonest direct-mail hit, you at least want to get all your facts right. Unless apparently you’re the RNC. On Thursday we noted the new RNC mailing — now available for viewing in the TPM Document Collection — to South Dakota voters which claimed that Senator Tim Johnson was involved in voter fraud in the state. (Headline: “Tim Johnson and the Democrats are Hiding the Truth about Voter Fraud”).

The mailing includes pictures of four newspaper story headlines about the supposedly burgeoning voter fraud story. One of the four, from the Rapid City Journal, screams “A Violation of Trust.”

Only that story wasn’t about voter fraud at all. It was about embezzlement in Pennington County, South Dakota.

Oops.

At first I thought maybe they were going by the new Gingrich Rules of accuracy. As in “Hey, buddy, we just put a headline there in our mailing about voter fraud. We didn’t say that headline was about voter fraud. You’re assuming too much.”

Today’s Argus Leader reports the problem and the RNC’s Mindy Tucker had to apologize: “We regret that one of the four (newspaper headlines) was included by mistake and should not have been included.”

Oops …

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