Maybe Sabato was a serial “N” Word User in 2000 or he’s Just a liar or maybe he realizes that whether one used the “N” Word in the past, whether one be FDR, HST, JFK or LBJ, has no relevance to one’s fitness for office when one has a long record in office where one can judge is one tried to re-impose Jim Crow or slavery or hired blacks to work for one’s administration or staff.

Virginians have better sense than Sabato and AP think, just as the American people did when rather released the fake but true National Guard Docs. This incident will help Allen by showing the symbiotic relationship between the MSM and the Democrat Party and the depths to which they will sink to beat conservatives. Add this to Webb’s attempt to get a posthumous endorsement from Reagan, a man he slandered when he quit the administration.

The race is over. As it was from the beginning. Why? Allen is a reliable conservative that Virginians have learned they can trust.

Mark Levin is covering the issue well:

http://levin.nationalreview.com/

See NRO Sixers piece and Taranto:

http://sixers.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MmZiNDdmOTIwMDM5NmI5M2IwMWYwZGJjYzY3NDc4ZGY=

In October of 2000, Larry Sabato moderated a debate between then candidate George Allen and Senator Chuck Robb. The Washington Post covered the debate with an article titled, “Larry Sabato, Immoderating the Debate in Richmond.” (Pub. date 10/25/00) The article is available for purchase on the Washington Post’s website.

Here’s how Wa Post writer, Libby Copeland, phrased Sabato’s performance:

The debate’and Sabato’s proactive style’have caused their own small controversy in the final two weeks of the race. One analyst called the above exchange “good television” but “a waste of time.” It was the tone of the debate that was so troubling, political observers and party activists are saying. The questions seemed editorializing, overly cynical.

Some viewers came away from the hour with a sense that there were three candidates on the stage in Richmond. There was the grinning, colorfully talkin’ recent guvner; the measured, self-possessed senator; and’seizing nearly as much airtime’Sabato himself.

As one ranking Republican’frustrated by the debate’s “nasty” questioning’put it, “Who is Larry Sabato? Who in hell died and made him king?”

It wasn’t as if viewers weren’t warned. Sabato informed them early on that “this is going to be an unusually tough debate.” Then he set about to do something that, he says, few debates succeed at doing: revealing the “real” candidates.

The “real” candidate? Like revealing that one candidate is racist and uses the “n” word? Why did Sabato avoid the race issue in 2000????

Here’s what Sabato had to say on Hardball last night:

MATTHEWS: Well how did he have that reputation as a student, define that if you can?

SABATO: Well as you know and anybody who has followed politics recently knows, he had a long love affair with the confederate flag and other symbols of the confederacy, which frankly was a bit odd for somebody who grew up in an upper middle class family with every possible privilege in southern California. It was an unusual love affair.

MATTHEWS: Did you know about this at the time, in real time?

SABATO: Oh yes, yes, I did.

MATTHEWS: You knew that George Allen’s son, the son of the former great football coach for the L.A. Rams and for the Skins here in Washington, had a son who was’what did you call him?

SABATO: I said he was devoted to, I called him a redneck, but I think he would embrace that term himself, Some people called him neck. That was his nickname.

So we know that Sabato knew about Allen’s supposed past in 2000, yet didn’t bring it up at the debate. Sabato told Kathryn this very morning, “character matters enormously.” George Allen and the “n” word is a character issue today, but it wasn’t in 2000? There’s a higher character bar for a President than a Senator or Congressman??

Nonsense. And it’s not like Sabato didn’t question candidate Allen on gaffes he had made in the past. From Copeland’s Wa Post article:

The debate did have its moments of awkwardness’if that passes for candor. What Sabato called “the first tough question for Mr. Allen” drew on a controversial remark Allen made as governor, in which he exhorted his fellow Republicans to enjoy, figuratively speaking, “knocking [the Democrats'] soft teeth down their whining throats.” Sabato linked the remark with “other inflammatory statements” of Allen’s, and asked him if he could understand why Virginians thought Robb more senatorial.

Allen seemed truly thrown for a moment, his near-perpetual smile temporarily missing. “So what’s the question?” he asked.

“The question is very clear, Mr. Allen. Please proceed,” Sabato replied firmly.

Sabato had his chance to bring up Allen’s past and he sat on it. Sabato decided then, when he had every opportunity to bring it up, that it was not worthy of a Senatorial contest. What’s changed? The excuse that George Allen might one day run for President doesn’t cut it. There is absolutely no reason for Larry Sabato to have gone on Hardball last night and say what he did without backing it up. Nothing has changed from six years ago.

Back to 2000. Who won the debate? Copeland ends her article with this:

Then again, Holsworth added, “if either of these candidates at any point during the debate had turned to each other” and decided to forgo questions from Sabato and the panelists, and instead just shoot each other their own questions, “they would have been seen as the hands-down winners of the event.”

Sabato either needs to fess up his secret “n” word source or retract it.As Liddy Copeland reported back in 2000, nobody died and made Sabato king – yesterday, or today.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110008999

Sen. George Allen’s latest trouble is a report on the left-liberal Salon Web site that three of Allen’s college football teammates “say that the Virginia Republican repeatedly used an inflammatory racial epithet and demonstrated racist attitudes toward blacks during the early 1970s.” One of the accusers, Ken Shelton, also claims that during the same period, they were on a hunting trip on which “he remembers Allen asking [teammate Billy] Lanahan where the local black residents lived. Shelton said Allen then drove the three of them to that neighborhood with the severed head of the deer. ‘He proceeded to take the doe’s head and stuff it into a mailbox,’ Shelton said.” (Lanahan is dead, so this story is on Shelton’s say-so alone.) But Salon says it contacted 19 of Allen’s former teammates and college friends, and the other 16 say they don’t remember his ever behaving in a racist manner (though two were troubled by his display of the Confederate flag). Washington Post both picked up the story, treating the claims as legitimate. Not surprisingly, the Allen campaign is up in arms: “this Salon story is evidence of the Democratic Party growing comfortable with the alleged ‘Swiftboating’ tactics they’d previously decried,” declares a post on the campaign’s official blog..

We’d say a fair-minded observer would have to give Allen the benefit of the doubt–which is what was said about Kerry in 2004. One may, of course, be more inclined to believe the charges about Allen than about Kerry, or vice versa, because of one’s own personal or partisan prejudices. Every one of us is human.

But newsmen are supposed to strive for objectivity and fairness. That the press reported the Swift Boat story largely as a smear campaign against Kerry whereas it is treating the Allen charges as legitimate and serious suggests a strong partisan bias at work.

Thomas Edsall told Hugh Hewitt the other day, “whatever you want to call it, mainstream media, presents itself as unbiased, when in fact, there are built into it, many biases, and they are overwhelmingly to the left.”