First, for those of you who might have missed it when I first started using the term a few weeks ago, let me define the Old Game.

Simply put, the Old Game is the practice of throwing out sleaze as a means of discrediting messengers whose substance is inconvenient. It’s actually an offshoot of Rule #13 of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” But the Old Game predates Alinsky, as political hacks of all stripes have been heaping dirt on their opponents as long as there have been politics.
But what makes the Old Game identifiable with Alinsky is two things: Alinsky understood the value of demonizing an opponent personally in the context of the media, and so Rule #13 has almost always been executed via press releases and other performative measures aimed at attention-getting. And that the Left, and particularly the Democrats, have been the masters of the Old Game.
Have there been Democrats taken down with personal scandals? Yes. Have many of them been taken down by Republicans? Almost never. It’s other Democrats responsible for what Hillary Clinton, with no discernible sense of irony, called the “politics of personal destruction.” When Republicans have tried to play the Old Game against the other side, for example against her husband whose sexual peccadilloes included activities that seem an awful lot like old-fashioned rape, the results have usually been unsatisfactory.
No, the Old Game is a Democrat game. Because Democrats have controlled the playing field on which the Old Game is played, that is the legacy corporate Propaganda Press media space. And that field, at least in the former understanding of everyone in politics and media, could be tilted in whichever way would satisfy the needs of the right people wanting to use rule #13.
The example I used to describe the Old Game was the sleaze campaign conducted against Pete Hegseth, which has all but died. This week one of the truly despicable slimeballs the De...