I just saw on tv a smear ad by chicken-hawk / thief/ French-loving "Confederate good ole boy" Senator George Felix Allen attacking Webb for using Reagan's speech about him in his own ad (Kos has the back-story
here).
(NOTE: I only call him "French-loving," because it matters to his base: the decidedly French-hating (by way of ignorance of history) "Freedom Fries" crowd.)
Allen's ad quotes Nancy Reagan's letter asking Webb to pull it down. It says that Webb called Reagan some kind of idiot or something (but the screen attributes the line to some anonymous campaign worker)....
(Please follow below the fold)
... and yet the smear ad does not even hint at what the actual content of Webb's ad was. I don't understand why Webb doesn't have more money to get his ad out there. The real shock is how Allen could even hint that there's anything wrong with Webb's ad. Webb's campaign has great comebacks in the press, but most people don't see or hear those comebacks. For example, in response to the beginning of this smear, a Webb staffer had a beautiful line to the effect of: "If Allen has any footage of Reagan speaking on his behalf, we encourage him to use it" and "Let Reagan speak for himself." (Again, see Kos
back-story).
And I just read about the second smear in the Washington Post this morning. Apparently, Allen had a press conference with four or five female military officers who went to school with Webb 27 years ago, when he apparently wrote a macho-chauvinistic article advocating keeping women out of combat.
This second smear is in ways more shocking than the first because Allen is the one with all the real skeletons in his closet:
(1) He's not a good ole boy, his mom is a French-speaking North African immigrant who, according to Allen's own sister, "prided herself for being un-American. ... She was ashamed that she had given up her French citizenship to become a citizen of a country she deemed infantile."
(2) he spent the Vietnam war years in "glass dude ranches" (another little-heard great Webb campaign line),
(3) he's the one with the creepy history of nooses on display, confederate flags on his lapels, and photo-ops with KKK members.
(4) And, oh yeah, he's a thief--just last week, he literally stole Senator Durbin's work and claimed it as his own on the Senate floor. (someone explain to me why taking someone else's work and claiming it is yours, with intent to permanently deprive them of their claim to it, is not common law larceny). As usual, the only real reporting on this on tv has come from ... Stephen Colbert:
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I can't believe he can get away with these things. I can't believe people aren't pouring money into Webb's campaign to simply state the facts about the miscreant who currently represents the state of Virginia.