A few weeks ago, Senator George Allen, mildly exasperated with the Democratic political operative shadowing him from speech to speech, acknowledged him with a mild epithet that caused the journalistic sky to fall on him, at last proving Chicken Little right.
Result: Daily—we repeat, DAILY—scheduled and relentless attacks on Senator Allen in the Washington Post, nearly always on page A-1 for the first weeks of this classic Story That Would Not Die (STWND). In addition, the STWND spun off numerous hellspawn, including Allen's "secret" Jewish identity, "proven" racist past, "shady" financial dealings, you name it. Thus, this popular former Virginia governor and potential presidential candidate in 2008 has been wiped out of that race in advance and is in some danger of losing the seat he was once favored to win.
Comment: The problem with being a Republican today is that your religious and personal purity has to be roughly on a par with Pope Benedict's (see previous post) or you, your name, and your family will be disgraced forever for something you might have said when you were 16, or for experimenting with marijuana while inhaling at college. Folks wonder all the time why we "can't get better candidates" to run for public office. The 24/7 assault by the Post on the fundamentally decent Senator Allen, lashed on in turn by the Pot's pals on the Democratic left, offers a compelling answer to this question.
Fear: If this dirty trick succeeds, the Dems will be tempted to keep this sort of thing up with potentially disastrous results for both parties. Already, it's difficult to get any politician to say honestly what's on his or her mind, given that one slip of the tongue could be the end of the campaign. It's no wonder you can't get a straight answer out of these people anymore. This sort of thing just makes it worse, especially for Republicans who never get a break. We recall a relatively recent TV appearance by WV Senator Robert Byrd (D), who patronizingly used the "N-word" (the word that dare not say its name) on a cable talk show. The resulting flap lasted all of one day and was quickly buried, since Byrd is a Democrat, and being a Democrat is never having to say you're sorry.
Second Fear: The Post is replicating, in a small way, the undying, relentless crusade it carried out against Richard M. Nixon once they got hold of the story of a petty burglary by minor political operatives at the Watergate. (And, of course, Nixon helped them out by covering up what amounted to an amateurish incident of political spying.) Realizing that increasingly urbanized Northern Virginia (where Wonker lives) is doing the predictable and skewing Democrat, they are pitching the region's large number of fence-sitting voters and hoping to create just enough of an anti-Allen bandwagon to demoralize his supporters and break the hold the Republicans have on the rest of the state. If they succeed, they'll then start trumpeting a Democratic bandwagon for the 2008 presidential sweeps. They probably already have a series of articles on this waiting in the editorial wings.
It's not helped, indirectly, that Virginia's Republican-controlled legislature has made asses of themselves for two years running by failing to deal seriously with Northern Virginia's Santa Monica Freeway-style traffic issues.
Additionally, as a general side note, one observes with horror that—as leftist politics completely ruins states like Masachusetts and California by raising taxes and excusing high rates of crime that result the ensuing impoverishment of workers who lose jobs as companies flee elsewhere—fed up Democratic ticket punchers abandon the ruin they've caused and flee for once reliably Republican states like New Hampshire (and even Vermont) and Colorado. Once there, they begin to skew the demographic once again, endangering Republican seats once thought safe, clamoring for more services, higher taxes, and better benefits for those who don't like to work.
Like a plague, these people have been infesting Northern Virginia lately like a relentless tide. Areas like Arlington (actually once part of the District of Columbia until just after the Civil War) and Alexandria, long fully or relatively urbanized, were the first to succumb. But now Fairfax and Loudoun Counties are going down. This is an alarming trend to watch, and it could, along with the Post's assault aimed precisely at these Democrats, bring George Allen down.
Frankly, we tend to think that Allen will win, although not with a comfortable margin. The Dems, in control of the media and how it reports and distorts the news in their favor, have tended to overplay their hand recently. But the Northern Virginia Democratic menace is growing, and the state's Republicans had better get serious about countering this alarming trend. They might start by sending some of the state's revenue surplus up here to do some serious work on the transportation infrastructure. They might think this suggestion is a joke, but they're up for election and the multitudes are pissed. Ask Senator Allen what it means when the state gets swarmed by lefties and when the Post goes 24/7/365 to put their pals in power.
Post-Script: Virginia "Political Analyst" and professor (of course) Larry Sabato claimed, in absolute language on the reprehensible Chris Matthews cable-screed "Hardball (for Republicans)" that he absolutely knew Senator Allen, a University of Virginia college classmate, had used the N-word back in undergraduate days. This created quite a stir and Sabato remained tight-lipped for a time, eventually admitting, with weak defiance, that he'd never actually heard Allen use the word, but that super-reliable people had told him this was true. Since they were all Democrats, it was, therefore, true. Sabato's bogus claim had begun to grow legs, until it was proven patently dubious if not outright false. (Read here and here.)
The main problem here is that Sabato has passed himself off for years as nonpartisan, when it has long been obvious that he was anything but. (The fact that he makes a taxpayer-supported living as an academic should have been your first tip-off. The second is his political prognostication website which cites only reliably lefty newslinks.) Nonetheless, he has actually "moderated" televised political debates in the state in recent years. Now that Sabato has been exposed as a Democratic hack, maybe Republicans will stop being patsies the next time he's scheduled to moderate a political debate. It's high time to bring in someone who's nonpartisan to serve in that role. Like, maybe, Sean Hannity.
No comments:
Post a Comment