Yesterday saw ace RTD columnist-cum-video star Jeff Schapiro trying to gin-up a fight between Eric Cantor and Mark Warner over the federal budget. It was a rather sad effort, but one that can as easily be fobbed off as a need to fill column inches.
Today, though, finds Jeff mucking about in that most familiar and comfortable of confines, his anxiety closet. Here reside the horrors of which conventional wisdom nightmares are made — conservatives running roughshod over the pastoral Virginia landscape, pillaging and burning with unreserved glee (and many of them clad in what looks suspiciously like a shade of Confederate gray). This rabble has been captained by whichever conservative, or Republican, happens to have a claim on Jeff’s subconscious at the time — be it the “Hanover Hun” Bill Bolling, Pat Robertson’s sleeper agent, Bob McDonnell, the Rasputin-like Ken Cuccinelli, and even sometimes that most determined of foes, Doug Wilder.
But no one captures Jeff’s ire, and consumes so much of the real estate inside that cramped anxiety closet, as does George Allen. In Allen, Jeff finds the perfect vessel into which he can dip his poisoned pen — a faker, a poseur, a liar, cheat and overall fraud who finally got his comeuppance in 2006 (and in the process, provided fresh pots of bile with which Jeff can season his pen).
In this brief video column, Schapiro archly ladles out heaping helpings of his latest Allen toxin, mixing in as much macaca, veiled racism and a weird dash of “nice Jewish boy” to show that Allen is his own worst enemy in the pending senatorial showdown. It’s the sort of concoction that would curl the toes of any wicked witch, but it’s also one that misses its intended mark. Rather than diminishing Allen, it withers Schapiro, exposing him as little more than bow-tied version of Count Fosco.
Still, I see this salvo as a mere audition tape for the nastiness to come. Should Allen win the GOP nomination, Jeff will rifle every nook, cranny and mouse hole in the anxiety closet in order to concoct a brew strong enough to bring Allen down.
If it’s anything like this first attempt, though, the far more likely outcome is that Jeff will be the one laid low…by a hearty guffaw from the peanut gallery.
(Cross-posted at The Score)
