Serial butt-biting GOP operative sinks his teeth into Texas race

[Enrique]

Serial Butt-Biting GOP Operative Sinks Teeth Into Texas Race

http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/07/texas-green-party-gop-charles-hurth

Meet Charles Hurth III. The Missouri lawyer has a long history of setting up under-the-radar groups to help Republican operatives game elections. But the most sordid thing about Hurth's past is not his political scheming. He's also what you might call a serial butt-biter, with a well-publicized track record of sinking his teeth into the rumps of college coeds. He recently struck again in Texas—not by biting derrieres, but by spearheading an apparent GOP dirty trick to derail a Democrat's gubernatorial bid.

Last month, Hurth and two other GOP operatives—one a former top aide to Texas Gov. Rick Perry—were implicated in a scheme to bankroll a petition drive to put the Green Party on the ballot. It is an apparent ploy to siphon votes away from Perry's Democratic challenger, former Houston Mayor Bill White. He's an appealing target: Tied with Perry in the latest poll, White's the strongest gubernatorial contender that Texas Democrats have seen in years.

But Hurth's first claim to fame was being sued in 1987 for approaching a fellow law student in a bar and biting her on the buttocks so hard that she required medical attention. During the trial, Hurth admitted that he'd used the same toothy overture to approach two other women at fraternity parties—and he said that his latest victim should have taken the gesture as a compliment. The jurors didn't buy it, and Hurth was successfully sued for $27,500. Since then, he has dedicated himself to being a persistent pain in the butt for Democrats, setting up shop in a tiny Missouri town to create a clearinghouse for Republican electoral schemes. The latest came this spring, when Hurth and his allies succeeded in getting the Greens on the 2010 ballot.

In response, the Texas Democratic Party filed a lawsuit in early June against a Hurth-run nonprofit called Take Initiative America, as well as Arizona-based GOP consultant Tim Mooney and "unknown conspirators" for their role in the effort. Mooney has admitted that he funneled money through Hurth's organization to pay Free and Equal Inc., a Chicago-based petition-gathering company that ended up amassing 92,000 signatures for the Texas Green Party's ballot drive. According to a court document, Hurth's group spent $532,500 on the effort.

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[MajorChode]

1. Worse than a toe sucker