blah blah... Typical snoty, condescending WP editorial by Marc Fisher....

"WHO?" indeed!

Marc Fisher, editorialist for the terminally corrupt and arrogant (and useless) WASHINGTON POST, asks of VA Senator George Allen's critics "WHO ARE THEY?" and "WHERE HAVE THEY BEEN?" (In his headline, no less.)

WELL, Mr. Fisher, we might ask, "WHO THE HELL ARE YOU, and WHERE HAVE *YOU* been, as Republithugs in Congress and in certain connected Republican-owned companies have instituted DIEBOLD, ES&S, and SEQUOIA VOTING MACHINES throughout the nation, on the taxpayer dime and mandated by the federal government... VOTE COUNTING MACHINES that WOULD NOT PASS MUSTER of a routine software integrity inspection performed by state auditors on TENS of THOUSANDS of gambling slot-machines every year?"

(A few lines inserted into a slot machine's program can SKIM OFF a few dollars a day or month... a few VOTES, SKIMMED off a no-audit, no-oversight, NO VERIFICATION voting machine, is MUCH MORE of a crap-shoot than a manipulated slot machine, for vote-counting machines determine WHO WILL CONTROL - BILLIONS of dollars - of federal tax-and-spend powers, and literally LIFE and DEATH legislative and executive decisions on everything from prenatal and premature pregnancies, to job safety, to wars, to job outstourcing overseas, to heavy metal toxins in the food and water supply, and to whether or not women can access safe and accurate medical advice for their pregnancies, wanted or unwanted).

"WHERE HAVE *YOU* BEEN, Mr. Marc Fisher, as the Bush-Cheney administration turns * FEMA * - America's DISASTER MANAGEMENT AGENCY - into yet another dumping ground for incompetent, partisan hacks and Bush cronies?

"WHERE HAVE *YOU* BEEN, Mr. Fisher, as Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and Mr. Rumsfeld PUT TAX CUTS for the hyper-wealthy (people who will never have to worry about paying the bills for the basics in life) AHEAD OF body-armor, Humvee armor, and other necessities for combat troops in Iraq?

"WHERE HAVE *YOU* BEEN, Mr. Fisher, as the Bush-Cheney administration used ARTIST's DRAWINGS of alleged "Iraqi bio-weapons facilities" as "PROOF" of Iraq's WMD program, among many other fraudulent-on-their face lies (up to and including the Rove-Cheney-Libby White House "outing" AN ENTIRE CIA UNDERCOVER OPERATION as means of smearing and intimidating a goverment whistleblower, in that case Ambassador Joseph Wilson, husband to CIA undercover spy Valerie Plame, who in turn was ONLY ONE "NOC" member ("non-official cover," i.e. NO, ZERO, ZIP US government protection if arrested in a foreign country) of the CIA cover company, "Brewster-Jennings Energy Consultants"?

"WHERE HAVE *YOU* BEEN, Mr. Fisher, as the Bush administration spends BILLIONS on their New Orleans crony-enrichment, er, reconstruction plan, WITHOUT AN OVERALL long-term ENVIRONMENTAL PLAN, and target for local neighborhoods and local homeowner involvement? As we all know (except the derelict editors and writers of the Washington Post), if you spend BILLIONS for a reconstruction project without an overall plan, you are probably WASTING money and DUPLICATING alot of the work/spending.

"WHERE HAVE *YOU* BEEN, Mr. Fisher, as the "religious" forces closely allied to the Bush-Cheney administration SEEK TO BAN, PROHIBIT, CENSOR the teaching of EVOLUTION from America's public schools? (Among many other Right-Wing Jihad goals in American public and private life.)

[note: prior to WWII, it was almost impossible to drive from the East coast to the West coast. Out west, for thousands of miles the only available roads were dirt roads that often washed out or were otherwise impassable during bad weather. WWII changed all that, and made America Number-One in the world for.. SYNONYMOUS WITH... HIGH TECHNOLOGY. Using British radar,decoding, computing, and jet engine science, European nuclear science and physics, and German chemical and rocket science, after WWII we Americans electrified even rural America, and led the entire world into 'the space age.' Today, cocksure and arrogant from the nuclear genie that all that FOREIGN technology has brought to America, "Reactionary America" wants to bow down to the gods of ignorance, regression, adn reaction, up to and including the BANNING, or CENSORSHIP, of science courses in public classrooms! Putting man on the moon required orbital calculations that take into consideration the pull of planets on dozen-year-orbits, and the placement of stars millions of light-years away. A galactic year is well over a 200 million years, the time it takes the solar system to orbit the galaxy. But in a raw pursuit of power based on religious clan-like identity, some substantial numbers of Americans - numbering into the millions - want to insist that the world is ONLY 6,000 years old, and that any science to the contrary MUST BE BANNED FROM PUBLIC SCHOOLS!]

We could run straight down the list of anti-American goals and platforms of the Radical Right-Wing agenda (which is to say the Bush-Rove-Cheney agenda), and ask "WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN, Mr. Fisher?"

Living off the fat of the land, collecting that big-shot WASHINGTON POST paycheck, WITHOUT ASKING THE TOUGH or unpopular questions of REAL JOURNALISM, is more than likely where Mr. Marc Fisher has been these last 5 years.

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Who Are George Allen's Critics and Where Have They Been?
Marc Fisher
26 Sept. 2006
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2006/09/who_are_george_allens_critics.html

The crumbling of George Allen's political career is taking place before our eyes and Virginians ought to try to understand why this is happening.

This is a classic snowballing political story. Set off by a gaffe (the macaca incident), the story gathered speed because the candidate stumbled and wandered and lurched from explanation to explanation (macaca referred to on e thing, then another, then the senator had never heard the word before), and then another badly-handled situation came along (the Jewish question.) And through it all, reporters have been hearing from readers, Virginians and people who knew the Allen family in some way over the decades--all with stories that seem to connect to one or another of Allen's apparent flaws. By now, his honesty, his straightforwardness, his basic humanity all seem to be in doubt.

How could this happen to someone who has been in elective politics for more than two decades, to someone who ran for and was elected to the jobs of governor and senator, and was--for a few moments at least--a leading candidate for president of the United States?

Where are these people coming from who now say that they have known for years about Allen's racist attitudes, racist speech, racist actions? Who are these people who suddenly knew for decades about the Allen family's secret--a secret so essential to Allen's mother that she didn't tell it to her son until well into his late middle age?

Since last week, I have talked to half a dozen people who knew Allen's mother decades ago and somehow figured, or thought they knew, that she was Jewish. In that context, how does the senator's protestation of ignorance stand up?

Here's a sample of the kind of notes and calls I've been getting, both from random readers and from Virginians who have been close enough to the Allen family to have seen Etty Allen socially:

From Elaine Schwartzbach:


"Decades ago, when George Allen's father was coach of the Redskins, my husband and I (along with several other couples) were guests in the coach's private box. When Mrs. Allen (the Senator's mother) appeared, several people, upon noticing her Mediterranean coloring, wondered what her ethnic background was. We were informed she had been born in either Morocco or Tunisia, and that she was Jewish. A fair number of the guests were also Jewish, and nothing further was discussed. It was simply a matter of "cocktail party" chit-chat. However, I was so naive in those years, that I assumed the coach was also Jewish, since he had a Jewish wife! How could comparative strangers know a fact that Mrs. Allen's children were not aware of?
Here's what a Virginian who knew the Allens through the Redskins in the early 1970s says:

"Everyone figured Etty was Jewish. There wasn't much discussion about it, but it was just what everyone knew about her, and nobody thought it was a secret. There was no idea that the family was hush-hush about it."

These are either raw political opportunists or people who knew stuff but didn't think it was important enough for them to go out on a limb--until now. How are we to judge the motives and actions of all these people?

On one hand, there are several of them. They are political people (UVa professor Larry Sabato, no shrinking violet, now says that he knows for a fact that George Allen used the N-word when he was a student at the university in Charlottesville) and they are non-politicals, such as the former football teammates who have come forward to accuse Allen of racist language and actions. Also lending them credibility is the fact that several of these people have attached their names to their comments, opening themselves to considerable abuse from defenders of Sen. Allen. (Sabato told the Virginian-Pilot last night that he knows about Allen's use of the racial slur from Allen's classmates: "My sources are former classmates who came to me with stories that matched up," Sabato told the paper. "I never solicited them. They came to me during the past few months.")

On the other side of the ledger, where were all these people over all these years? If they knew this stuff, why didn't they come forward when he entered politics, or when he ran for governor, or when he was on the road to unseating a U.S. Senator? And what about those teammates who say Allen was no such bigot and did no such things? Sure, their comments have been solicited and touted by the Allen campaign, but they too have attached their names.

Each voter will have to assess the players in this burgeoning circus for themselves, but here's where I am so far: I am by nature suspicious of people who suddenly appear with untold stories of bad deeds from long ago. But in the natural cycle of news stories, there is a force that builds behind stories that connect to the pre-existing misgivings citizens have about our elected leaders. The various Clinton infidelity scandals would have died early deaths had they not struck people of most political backgrounds as "oh yeah, that's him" moments; people kept emerging to tell stories, perhaps for politically motivated reasons, but the continuing drumbeat of those stories over the years fit in with what we already knew or thought we knew about Bill Clinton.

Similarly, threads of this new coat that has been wrapped around George Allen have been around for many years. The racist trappings, the anti-Martin Luther King holiday position, the support for Confederate heritage causes, the noose in his office, the rebel flag he put up--it had all been reported over the years. So too had there been some early reports about Allen's Jewish heritage.

All of that fuels the current fire. All of that lends credibility to those who are now speaking out.

Is this a distraction from the serious debate over Iraq that Allen and Jim Webb had been having? Absolutely. Don't voters deserve a real campaign focused on those essential questions? You bet. But picking a senator is about both policy and personality; we decide on people based not only on what they believe in, but on who they are, because we need to know how they are likely to decide on issues that haven't even come along yet.

Where, I want to know, is that unflappable, likable, confident George Allen I had come to enjoy over the years? Why has he permitted these potentially tangential issues to take over his campaign? Here's my bottom line question: If that affable, amiable guy is the real George Allen, then why, in this testing time, have we instead seen a guy who is flitting from story to story, a man who is snappish, smart-alecky, and utterly insensitive? Have we somehow stumbled to the core and found a man with no center?