The Post has a lengthy piece up tonight on the Allen “I didn’t know gramps was Jewish” story. A lot of it is as you’d expect, a lot of the same facts we’ve discussed on the site this evening, if in a more measured tone. But one new fun detail is the pointed effusion of malarkey from Allen’s campaign manager Dick Waddhams, a joker we had to deal with a few years back when he was working for then-candidate John Thune.
Yesterday, Wadhams accused Webb’s campaign and liberal bloggers of anti-Semitism for raising the issue of the senator’s religious background.
Bloggers, some of whom are on Webb’s staff, spent yesterday writing furiously about the debate question and Allen’s answer. “What does Allen have against Jews?” one headline read on a national liberal blog.
“Introducing religion at all into the debate was inappropriate. It makes no difference what anybody’s religion is,” Wadhams said.
Wadhams also accused Webb’s campaign of mailing an anti-Semitic flier to Virginia voters during the state’s Democratic primary this year. That flier depicted Webb’s Jewish opponent, Harris Miller, with money coming out of his pockets.
“They have been continuing that anti-Semitic strategy through their paid bloggers,” Wadhams said.
I should have known this was coming when I started getting wingnut emails a couple days ago getting on my case for not calling the Webb campaign out for its “blatantly anti-semitic stereotyping” in the said flyer.
In any case, here’s the flyer in question (click on it for a full view) …
Now, I’m not sure where to start here exactly. But I’m just not seeing it. Yes, as the Allen flacks point out, Webb’s primary opponent Miller is depicted as a money-bags corporate lobbyist with an unnatural love of outshoring jobs. But the deal breaker here on the anti-Semitism charge has to be the fact that Miller doesn’t have an obviously Jewish name. That, I guess, and the lack of any clear signs of anti-Semitic stereotyping in the whole thing.
As I say, I don’t see it. But by all means, click on the image and judge for yourself.
But this is where the Allen campaign is at the moment: the guy who hangs out with white supremacist groups, randomly comes up with syllable combinations that happen to also be racial slurs when he wants to call out brown people and has some real issue with his Jewish ancestry that makes him come up with ridiculous fibs to the effect that he was the last one to discover his grandfather was Jewish – that guy is calling out his opponent for using anti-Semitism as a tool of his campaign.
