The left attack machine starts early on Sen. Allen

David Holman notes that the Ryan Lizza piece starts with a false statement.

When a reporter botches the facts in his very first sentence, is he sloppy or dishonest? I respect Ryan Lizza's work, and the meticulous research invested in his profile on Sen. George Allen. Yet from the first sentence, the perspective through which Lizza is reading Allen is clear: Allen's a Southern racist hick, and a fake at that.

...

The article is a hit piece. Lizza brings up the old stories about Allen hanging a Confederate flag in his Earlysville home and a noose in his law office. He dutifully reports that Allen, like many Virginians, opposed placing Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Lee-Jackson Day. He joined a "Richmond social club with a well-known history of discrimination" (sounds like Augusta National).

Which part did TNR release to ABC? Lizza found Allen's high school yearbook picture, complete with Confederate flag lapel pin. He called up his acquaintances -- friends and enemies -- to find a football game day prank involving "racially tinged" spray paint. No one agrees what it said. Allen placed a Confederate flag on his Mustang, wore boots, and took to Johnny Cash. (And I thought Cash was cool.)

On top of that, Lizza depicts it all as an act. Allen "resembles a froufrou version of Toby Keith." (What is that supposed to mean?) His opinions "about red-state cultural aesthetics" are "finely honed." His "s[--]t-kickin' image may be the subject of certain Republican consultant fantasies." It's a "shtick" similar to President Bush's, but "that folksy act looks a little spent."


THE ONLY ACT THAT LOOKS SPENT is the postmodern portrait writer following the Southern Republican politician and finding a closet racist. Lizza is awfully suspicious of Allen's place among Virginians at one event in particular: Shad Planking.
I attended Shad Planking. From Lizza's reporting, we must have been in the same small group of reporters (less than 15 people) surrounding Allen late in the afternoon as he interviewed with a radio station, 800 AM WSVS.

So I find it curious that Lizza's very first sentence is "Senator George Allen is the only person in Virginia who wears cowboy boots." I wore cowboy boots that day, just feet from Lizza.

As did a young man I met minutes later, after Senator Allen left. Ben Marchi, a Vienna, Virginia resident, was there with his buddy Howard Cook, the Marine sergeant I mentioned in my article. When I read Lizza's line, I called Marchi and relayed it to him. Originally from Charlottesville and a Virginia resident all but a year of his life, Marchi said he "never leave[s] home without 'em." How many other Virginians wear cowboy boots? "South of the Rappahannock [River, which runs through Fredericksburg about 50 miles south of Alexandria], more than tune in to the New York Yankees." Admittedly, not a high threshold. Elsewhere in the state though, Marchi said, "I'd invite whoever wrote that article to visit Floyd County on a Friday night at the country store down there." And at Shad Planking? "I think around an event like Shad Planking it'd be pretty hard to miss people with boots on."

...

There is more. This smells like a Clinton type smear Piece similar to the ones done on Rudy Guiliani when he was in the Senate race against Hillary. The Clinton's are the masters of the politics of personal destruction. Look at the job they and their media coconspiritors did on Newt Gingrich and Ken Starr.