Allen's smear campaign ain't just negative, it's dishonest.

Now the Washington Post is noticing.  I'll let Marc Fisher take it from here:

Sen. George Allen's latest TV ad features yet another woman who says Jim Webb is a bad man who doesn't like women. This time, we're introduced to Janice Buxbaum, a member of the first class of women to attend the Naval Academy. Buxbaum, like the women in an earlier Allen ad, purports to be upset even all these years later about a 1979 article that Democratic challenger Webb wrote in Washingtonian magazine.

In the Allen ad, Buxbaum claims she is misquoted in Webb's piece. Which is odd, because if you read the story, you'll see she's actually not quoted at all. Her name does not appear in the article....

Buxbaum, on examination, appears to be a whole lot less certain about things than the ad makes her out to be. In an interview with The Post, she concedes that she can't recall what the quotes were that Webb supposedly was going to use in his Washingtonian story, and she concedes that whatever the offensive quotes were, Webb never used them.

The ad labels Buxbaum like this: "Democrat." She says in the spot that "I don't want him in my party. And I don't want him in my Senate." It's a powerful moment. Except that Buxbaum--like, ahem, Webb himself--appears to have switched teams at some point. Virginia doesn't have party registration, but state election records show that Buxbaum voted in the Virginia Republican primary in 2000, and, as the Associated Press reported, she gave $500 to the National Republican Congressional Committee in 2003. (She also donated $1,000 to Democrat John Kerry's presidential campaign in 2004, so quite possibly she's a party-neutral moderate, which is truly a lovely thing to be.)

Well, isn't that strange?  She wasn't quoted and isn't a partisan Democrat.  Fisher concludes:

So we're left with this: The Allen campaign has put out an ad and is spending $650,000 in TV buys--mostly in the D.C. market--to spread the word that Webb, as Buxbaum says in the spot, is "just not an honest man." And the ad that's supposed to send that message is, well, just a tad short on honesty.

And this isn't the first time an Allen smear ad has lied to its audience.  For a man that claims to want a campaign on the issue, there's a lot of false smearing coming from his own campaign HQ.  And Virginia is starting to notice that Allen is the source of the stench.

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