A few weeks ago, the Washington Post decided to once again insert itself into Virginia’s elections with its vaunted “macaca” maneuver and help its chosen candidate over the finish line. For those who don’t know, to “macaca” (.verb) is when a news outlet seizes upon a gaffe by a politician it doesn’t like and then repeatedly pounds on it day after day, week after week in order to sabotage its target’s chances of victory. The Washington Post debuted this campaign tactic against Senator George Allen in 2006 which eventually led to Jim Webb as the now senior Senator from Virginia.
This time it was the Governor’s race between liberal Democrat Creigh Deeds and conservative Republican Robert McDonnell. Twenty years ago, while a graduate student at Regents University and in his thirties, Bob McDonnell wrote;
Republican concerns for fiscal austerity are easily impaled by an additional $1.3 billion a year in expenses. Surely the leadership recognizes that existing federal child-care programs already cost more that $6.9 billion in 1988. Further expenditures would be used to subsidize a dynamic new trend of working women and feminists that is ultimately detrimental to the family by entrenching a status-quo of non-parental primary nurture of children.
Washington Post “macaca” operative Amy Gardner read the above few sentences, stripped it bare of context and reported it thus;
Robert F. McDonnell submitted a master’s thesis to the evangelical school he was attending in Virginia Beach in which he described working women and feminists as “detrimental” to the family.
Needless to say, Amy Gardner’s er … “report” provoked Outrage!!!™ on the Left, with shrieks for McDonnell’s head on every Lefty blog, and front page stories and editorials in the Washington Post as it moved to “macaca” Bob McDonnell. Unfortunately for the Left (both online and offline) and their allies running the Washington Post, the people of Virginia are not buying the attempt to convince them that McDonnell is going to transform Virginia into some facsimilie of the planet Gor and have women stripped naked, chained to stoves and relegated strictly to cooking, cleaning and bearing children.
In retrospect this was probably foredoomed to failure since the Left never bothered to investigate any further past Amy Gardner’s deliberately misleading hit piece to launch the Washington Post’s “macaca” operation against Bob McDonnell. As it turned out, Virginians got introduced to Bob McDonnell’s career-having wife, two working daughters with advanced postgraduate degrees (one of whom served in Iraq) and his many choices of Deputy Attorneys General who happen to be women.
Nonetheless, the Online Left is still outraged at Bob McDonnell’s obvious sexism and hatred of women. Outraged, I tell you!
Whose writings are not provoking outrage on the Online Left?
