Courtesy of a link from Elizabeth Benjamin at her Daily News blog, we can now bring you links to audio files of that message left on Gov. Spitzer’s voice mail. And it ain’t looking good for Roger Stone.

Here’s the call.

And here’s a recording of Stone from a recent TV appearance.

As we explained last night, Stone is claiming that unnamed Spitzer operatives broke into his New York City apartment, presumably with a voice impersonator, and placed the threatening message to Spitzer’s father from Stone’s phone.

As Benjamin also notes, this is an interesting defense as it appears to closely mimic the defense Stone proferred during his last scandal. Back in 1996 the National Enquirer claimed that Stone (then a Bob Dole spokesman) and his wife Nydia (whose phone it appears to have been that placed the offending phone call) were practitioners of what I guess as Republicans they would call the ‘swinger’ alternative lifestyle and routinely placed ads looking for “muscular, well hung, single men” to join them in expanding the bounds of traditional marriage.

Stone denied the reports and claimed that a disgruntled domestic employee had stolen photographs, sexual descriptions and checkbook information to mimic the Stones and set up impersonating them as a wife-swapping sock-puppet in Swinger publications up and down the East Coast.

Meanwhile, we’re interested to know whether Stone has or plans to contact the NYPD to commence an investigation into the alleged break in to his New York City apartment. We’ve contacted Stone for a statement and we are eagerly awaiting the response.

TPM Reader KS hits it out of the park …

I think if people want to make the Korean War analogy, they should do it right. Bush sees the Korean War as a symbol of our commitment to fight aggression and lay the groundwork for development and, eventually, democracy, in South Korea. But we had achieved the liberation of South Korea by October 1950, mere months after the war began. We then made the disastrous decision to push into North Korea in an effort to topple the communist government there. That triggered Chinese intervention, and the
war developed into a stalemate that dragged on for three more years. The eventual ceasefire returned things essentially to the status quo ante, an outcome we could have achieved at much lower cost had we not chosen to expand the war.

So, yes, the Korean War analogy is quite apt. Just not in the way Bush means it. The decision to invade Iraq in March 2003 looks a lot like the ultimately futile decision to invade North Korea in October 1950.

There’s also the little matter of a US Army General whose names starts with an M. But that’s another matter.

This is a post of remembrance for my father who died one year ago today. You can learn more about him here.

On Tuesday House Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) sent out a request for information to 19 different government agencies, all of which apparently took part in a sprawling scheme by Karl Rove to use agency officials and resources to help Republican politicians win elections, a possible violation of the Hatch Act. In today’s episode of TPMtv we take a look back at some of the past testimony by government officials about these political briefings to try to figure out how such a surefire scheme yielded such poor results in the 2006 elections, and just how much work Henry Waxman has ahead of him.

So just to bring everyone up to date, Roger Stone, GOP dirty trickster, has denied making the threatening phone call to Pops Spitzer. He has also apparently been fired from his job representing New York State Republicans in their investigation of alleged dirty tricks done on behalf of Gov. Spitzer (D), which seems reasonable enough when you think about it.

So what of Stone’s accusation that the owner of his apartment building, who is also a Spitzer contributor, arranged for Spitzer operatives to break into Stone’s New York City apartment, use his phone and impersonate his voice, in order to set him up to look like he made the call?

In this morning’s Times, State Senator George Winner (R), who chairs the committee now investigating Spitzer and his deputies, suggested that Stone’s improbable claims might in fact be true and that the technology Stone refers to does in fact exist. In an interview with the Times, “Mr. Winner also noted that technology is available that makes it possible to mimic another person’s phone number on a caller identification machine.”

So we’re now trying to find out whether Sen. Winner believes Stone may have been the victim of a break-in by Sptizer forces and whether he plans to have his committee investigate the alleged break in.

We’ll bring you our findings shortly.

Late Update: One of the NYT’s blogs has a run-down of earlier literary interpretations of Mr. Stone and his career of dirty tricks, bamboozlement and sundry antics. Fun morsel: at 19 Stone was apparently the youngest of the Watergate dirty-tricksters.

Roger Stone makes the case for Rudy.

If you’re trying to get the U.S. to support you in a parliamentary scheme to topple Iraq’s prime minister, it helps to have a high-powered GOP lobbying firm on your side.

Edwards ratchets up attacks on Clintons with speech targeting “corporate Democrats.” That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Morning Roundup.

I’ve spoken to a number of people and thought a lot about President Bush’s recent round of analogies about the Iraq War — the latest of course being to the Korean and Vietnam Wars (see video of the key passages from the president’s speech yesterday). To get a grasp on an argument, to support it or take it apart, requires that it have some grounding in reality or actual fact. But like so much else that comes out of the White House (and has in recent years) what we have here are arguments which either completely disregard most of the relevant facts or just as often build points on the basis of ridiculous strawman arguments.

Like for instance, all those war critics who think that if only US troops would leave Iraq, all the killing would stop.

Have you met these people? You can find people who think the Earth is flat. Heck, you can even find people who don’t believe in evolution. Most of them seem to be running for president as Republicans. But I don’t think I know anyone who thinks all would be swell in Iraq if only US troops would leave. Indeed, the premise of most current criticism of the war is that we’re occupying a country that is in the midst of a slow-motion civil war and that there’s nothing we can do to stop it and that we should stop trying.

All that aside though what I find most telling about the current round of arguments is the president’s increasingly explicit use of ‘stab in the back’ rhetoric as the new basis of his policy.

Our troops are seeing the progress that is being made on the ground. And as they take the initiative from the enemy, they have a question: Will their elected leaders in Washington pull the rug out from under them just as they’re gaining momentum and changing the dynamic on the ground in Iraq? Here’s my answer: We’ll support our troops, we’ll support our commanders, and we will give them everything they need to succeed.

I guess ‘pull[ing] the rug’ is a kinder, gentler Americanized version of ‘stab in the back’. But the core message is the same. There are the troops on the one hand and their domestic enemies at home. And who will win? Andrew Sullivan has a good post on this today. Also look at Jon Chait’s piece in The New Republic on Bill Kristol and The Weekly Standard.

Militarism and proto-fascist thinking isn’t just something to be studied about the 1920s and 1930s. You can see it today as a growing part of our political discourse, even as the support for it in absolute terms diminishes. It is all of a piece. You cannot separate the bogus war for democracy abroad from the war against democracy and the rule of law at home.

Fox News signs on to plan to help the GOP steal electoral votes in California.