Goes?

A front page article in today’s Washington Post reports yesterday's Allen campaign press conference bringing up James Webb 1979 Washingtonian article “Women Can’t Fight”, focusing on certain passages that the session’s attendees, all USNA grads, said made their time at Annapolis very difficult and "infected the brigade with hate and divisive anger."

The Post article is titled “Va. Senate Race Goes Negative on 1979 Essay”

My question is about the verb “goes”. Has Mr. Brother Shear’s been following this campaign? The tile suggests the negativity is a recent thing…when he knows full well it has not.

This campaign has been nasty going back to the early days of the Democratic primary. It reached new heights after Allen’s macaca comment, when the democrats-especially bloggers-used tortuous logic to assert that Allen had to know he was insulting a Webb staffer. Allen is now referred to as a racist on a regular basis. His campaign manager, Dick Wadhams, has his name re-jiggered by ardent Webbistas into an insulting name.

But now that something of Webb’s past has been brought up, and people who were injured by it are stepping up, only now has the campaign become negative?

Give me break. This race went negative a long time ago, and it will get worse. Let’s not act as if it only recently got bad.