Republican senators reject latest White House torture ‘compromise’.
Question for the Day:
The Economic Freedom Fund, which we’ve been reporting on over at TPMmuckraker, is the 527 group funded by Swift Boat funder, Bob Perry. They appear to be targetting only Democratic incumbents, at least so far, presumably to force the Democrats to divert funds from Democratic challengers to potentially endangered incumbents.
So here’s the question: Where’s the Dem-leaning 527 returning fire in these districts where EFF is already on the ground?
Anybody know the answer?
Doth he protest too much?
From Sen. Allen’s statement on his campaign website …
Yesterday, I found it especially reprehensible that a reporter would impugn the attitudes of my mother, as Ms. Peggy Fox did in her first question at the Fairfax County Chamber of Commerce Senate debate. My mother and father both taught me to abhor bigotry, and Ms. Foxâs suggestion to the contrary was deeply offensive.
Here’s the question Fox asked: “It has been reported … your grandfather Felix, whom you were given your middle name for, was Jewish. Could you please tell us whether your forebears include Jews and, if so, at which point Jewish identity might have ended?”
Is that reprehensible? Is she impugning the mom’s “attitudes”? She’s asking him whether some of his parentage/ancestry is Jewish.
Here’s the video of Allen’s reaction to the question from Fox at the forum.
Late Update: A friend of mine speculates that since Fox opened her questions with a reference to the Macaca imbroglio that Allen might have gotten all charged up for a pre-canned ‘enough Macaca we’ve all got to come together speech’ only to see her question had nothing to do with that. I think he may be on to something because Allen’s reaction, in addition to I think revealing a rather intense distaste for possible Jewish ancestry, the answer’s just weird.
Even Later Update: Kos rightly asks why, if Allen’s parents taught him to abhor bigotry, he’s out there getting his picture taken with the leaders of white supremacist groups.
Pretty Damn Late Update: Possible new Allen campaign slogan: “He’s here, he’s white, get used to it!”
Tart words from TPM Reader NF …
Josh, It is clear to me and should be to others that George Allen is lying when he claims that he just found out about his Jewish ancestry from a “recent” news article. I think this revelation may actually go a long way in explaining Mr. Allen’s public persona. He apparently believes that he must over compensate with the good ‘ol white boy routine for what he obviously seems to think is an unfortunate fact about his parentage. He stated during the debate that his mother had some “Spanish” in her background. I think this was his own code word for “Sephardic,” as in Jews from Spain. His comments are even more laughable when he claims he was taught to abhor bigotry. People who abhor bigotry do not place confederate flags on their vehicles or hang nooses in their offices. This guy is a self-hating head case. And that is what makes him dangerous as a public office holder.
This is a fairly rough take on the matter. But I don’t see any other interpretation of Allen’s claim that he just found out his mother’s family was Jewish. Many non-Jews were imprisoned in German concentration and death camps during World War II. But given that Allen has long known that his grandfather (after whom he’s named) spent part of World War II in a Nazi concentration camp (or as Allen rather distantly phrases it, “was incarcerated by the Nazis”), it really does strain credulity to believe that the idea that he might be Jewish never crossed his mind.
Late Update: A reader helpfully reminded me of this post from August by TNR’s Ryan Lizza. Bob Gibson, a veteran columnist for the Charlottesville Daily Progress told Ryan …
It’s funny, but the only time that George Allen ever wanted a correction from me in 27 years of covering his races was when I wrote about his mother’s Jewish family origins. He insisted, through a press secretary, that his mother was raised a Christian.
Yep, sure sounds like the idea never occurred to him.
I’ll be shocked if I wake up November 8th to find that Sen. Jon Kyl has lost his battle for reelection. But look at this new SurveysUSA poll out on the Arizona senate race. SUSA has Kyl at 48% and Pederson (D) at 43%. I’m not holding my breath on this one. But it’s looking like a real race.
Deval Patrick easily takes Democratic nomination for governor in Massachusetts.
Controversy over that bullet proof vest ad Vote Vets is running against George Allen in Virginia. Is it “left over from the Vietnam war” or an “80s era kevlar PASGT flak vest.”
We report; you decide. (But whenever they’re from they don’t seem to work that well.)
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.
Was it fair for the reporter to bring up Allen’s mother?
We’ve already devoted a lot of space to this. But let’s not forget one thing: Allen’s campaign started its downward spiral when he called one of Jim Webb’s Indian-American campaign workers “Macaca”. In Colonial-era North Africa, particularly the Francophone areas, ‘Macaca’ is a rough equivalent of ‘N-ger’.
That’s a seemingly distant connection, except when you consider that Allen’s mother happens to be from the then-French colony of Tunisia, a fact that in itself pretty much puts the lie to Allen’s clumsy fib.
This whole brouhaha, including the question that set Allen off, got rolling because of Allen’s preposterous claim and the reporter’s question about whether he’d learned the word from his mother.
It may not be pretty. But it’s all the fruit of Allen’s lies.