The Texas Republican money machine used sham companies to steal a bunch of cash on the spot energy markets (and from third-world countries) in the late 1990's and early 2000's, funneling the money to the political career of George W. Bush. Bush became President, boosting the fortunes of Texas money men and Fox News alike, but the sham companies suddenly collapsed in a cloud of dust when the recession of the early 2000's hit.
Then terrorists attacked New York and Washington and after a quickie invasion of Afghanistan, the GOP laundered some useless intelligence through the British and used their version of the information to drum up support for a much larger-scale invasion of Iraq, a country with no ties to the attacks on the US. At first the invasion appeared to be going well, so the Republicans staged a ceremony on the deck of an aircraft carrier and Fox News anchors (and Chris Matthews) spent a week talking about how Bush looked great in his uniform.
Then after the invasion went pear-shaped and started to become unpopular, the Republican administration began blaming British intelligence for their shoddily sourced "dodgy dossier" but maintaining that the Iraq invasion was still a success. The GOP lost Congress and then the Presidency amidst a rapidly collapsing financial system and two failed wars, each with several satellite countries nearby in various stages of unrest and collapse.
Then when the Democrats took over the White House, the GOP licked its wounds and Fox News returned to its Clinton-era mode of scandal-hyping and rumormongering, implying among many other things that the new president was not an American, that he was secretly a muslim sympathetic to terrorists, that he was a Communist who would destroy the free enterprise system and turn the economy over to black people as slave reparations, and that he planned to use universal health care bills to convert the Unites States to Nazism.
Now we find out that over this entire period Fox News' parent company has been spying on numerous British government officials including the Prime Minister, accessing his bank records, impersonating officers of the court and even Brown himself, and bribing active duty police officers to collect personal information on Brown from police computers.
The best part:
In October 2006, the then editor of the Sun, Rebekah Brooks, contacted the Browns to tell them that they had obtained details from the medical file of their four-month-old son, Fraser, which revealed that the boy was suffering from cystic fibrosis.
Stay classy, GOP.
