The Alabama race for a U.S. Senate seat is starting to remind me of Mr. Dooley, an Irish-American character created by the late 19th century Chicago newspaper columnist Finley Peter Dunne.
“Sure, politics ain’t bean-bag,” Mr. Dooley said. “’Tis a man’s game, an’ women, childer, cripples an’ prohybitionists’d do well to keep out iv it.”
Covering politics ain’t bean bag either, at least when it comes to uncovering the alleged sexual transgressions of Republican candidate Roy Moore.
Moore, a former Alabama Supreme Court judge, has found himself at the center of a storm concerning claims he had inappropriate relations with teenage girls when he was in his 30s. Many prominent Republicans have withdrawn their endorsements, and a number have called for Moore to drop out of the race.
Moore, though, has insisted that he is the victim of a vicious political attack by the liberal media, and he has vowed to stand and fight.
In the days after the story broke, an Alabama minister reported getting a phone call from a man claiming to be a reporter for the Washington Post. The man called himself Bernie Bernstein, and he offered a reward of between $5,000 and $7,000 to women willing to make damaging remarks about Moore.
The Post, of course, has no reporter named Bernie Bernstein, and the email address the man gave went nowhere.
When she learned Post reporters were contacting people she knew, Moore’s wife, Kayla, posted one of the reporters’ personal cellphone numbers on her Facebook page, and one of her followers posted a copy of that reporter’s resume, which included the reporter’s home address.
Sources for the stories, meanwhile, have reported receiving threats.
Blake Usry, who told the news site AL.com he knew girls Moore had tried to flirt with, said he had received threatening phone calls and Facebook messages, as well as texts claiming he had been sued for defamation.
One message claimed Alabama’s U.S. attorney, Jay Town, had “verified defamation cases” against Usry and others quoted in the stories.
“I just thought, here they go, trying to intimidate me, …” Usry told the Post. “It doesn’t intimidate me, but it’s caused me misery all day long.”
Town called the claim that his office was pursuing defamation cases “patently absurd.” He noted that defamation was a civil matter, not a crime.
Moore’s lawyers, meanwhile, have sent letters to the Post and other news outlets claiming they are preparing to sue the news organizations for “making false reports.”
Dean Young, a Republican political consultant in Alabama, said he didn’t know who was responsible for the calls from fake Post reporters, but he suggested it might be the newspaper itself.
“Who says you all aren’t paying someone to do that?” he said. “Go pay more people to say stuff. It’s a waste of money because people here know Judge Moore, and we know he does believe in a Christian God, so that fake stuff doesn’t work with us.”
Martin Baron, the Post’s executive editor, had a different take.
“The response to our meticulously reported story about Roy Moore has been a stunning level of deceit, deception and dirty tricks,” he said. “The Moore campaign and others have lied about our motives and lied about our methods. And at least one individual – we’re still not sure who – has also pretended to be a Post journalist so as to falsely portray our journalistic practices.”
None of these tactics is entirely new. Politicians have been attacking the messenger at least since the days of Mr. Dooley in late 19th century Chicago.
Only the technology has changed.