Senator Allen's Staff Tackles Blogger

 

		Staff members of GOP senator George Allen of Virginia appear in a video to have physically accosted a blogger who asked questions at a rally in Virginia. The blogger, Mike Stark, says he will press charges.
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    Senator Allen's Staff Tackles Blogger
    By Jason Leopold
    t r u t h o u t | Report

    Tuesday 31 October 2006

    A physical confrontation caught on tape broke out Tuesday morning in the lobby of the Omni Hotel in downtown Charlottesville between aides to Republican Senator George Allen and a person identified as Mike Stark, a man who has spent the past several months following Allen around the campaign trail and peppering him with some hard-hitting questions.

    Stark, an ex-marine who is currently a law student at the University of Virginia, showed up at a campaign rally for Allen and was tackled and put into a choke hold by aides to the Republican senator for allegedly asking Allen what his staff claims were multiple inappropriate questions about Allen's wife.

    In an interview Tuesday afternoon with a reporter for the website TalkingPoints Memo, Stark said he was "within four feet" of Allen when he started firing off questions.

    "My question was, 'Senator Allen, Democrats are making this election about accountability. You can shut them up by telling us what was in your police records from the seventies,'" Stark told TalkingPoints Memo. "He kind of muttered to himself, kind of, 'I'm not gonna go there.' Immediately his campaign staff started pushing me around, shoving me around, trying to form a human wall between me and him. I continued to pace him out into the lobby. My next question was, 'Is it true that you spit on your wife?'"

    "Then somebody said, 'Now you're getting personal,' and wrestled me to the ground,'" Stark said, adding that he intends to press charges against Allen's staff.

    Stark released a statement Tuesday evening saying he posed legitimate questions to Allen about his divorce - the records of which have been sealed - and despite the substance of the queries, Allen's staff crossed the line when they attacked him.

    "I demand that Senator Allen fire the staffers who beat up a constituent attempting to use his constitutional right to petition his government," Stark said in a prepared statement. "I also want to know why Senator Allen would want his staffers to assault someone asking questions about matters of public record in the heat of a political campaign. Why are his divorce records sealed? Why was he arrested in the 1970s? And why did his campaign batter me when I asked him about these questions."

    Allen's staff swiftly responded to Stark's version of events, claiming Stark became physical first and his campaign tried to subdue Stark.

    "As the Senator was trying to exit the room with a campaign staffer, the Democrat activist, identified as Mike Stark, pushed the Allen staffer," according to a statement released by Allen's office. "Later, volunteers restrained him and asked to leave the building when he approached the Senator a second time, asking inappropriate questions."

    A videotape of the incident, however, does not show Stark becoming physical with any member of Allen's staff. Stark said he intends to vigorously pursue criminal charges against Allen's staff.

    "I spent four years in the Marine Corps," Stark said. "I'll be damned if I'll let my country be taken from me by thugs that are afraid of taking responsibility for themselves."

    With Tuesday's Allen fracas, Stark has officially ventured into the type of gumshoe reporting where mainstream reporters fear to tread. He's no stranger to Allen's campaign staff.

    According to reports on several progressive blogs, Stark launched a website, callingallwingnuts.com, in 2002 to provide the public with an inside view of the horrors of war - something pro-war pundits, Stark said, were leaving out of their coverage. That's when he started to direct his questions squarely at the media he believed was distorting the message.

    "I started calling local radio talk shows whenever I had the time and sharing what I knew about the Iraq situation," Stark told a reporter for the website MyDD.com earlier this month. "I wanted people to be careful - I wanted to remind them that they shouldn't believe everything they heard."

    But Stark doesn't limit his ire for those solely on the right. There have been a few notable Democrats who have been caught off- guard by Stark's tough questions.

    "I love asking politicians questions that they don't want to answer," Stark told MyDD.com. "And that includes people on my side. As we've found, a lot of people are prone to being lazy or safe. If they're shocked by a question from someone on their side that they don't want to face, it reminds them that they're going to have to be accountable, that they have to work to keep our support." But Stark is surprised people think that what he's doing takes guts. "I'm thinking, how have I exposed myself to any risk here? There's nothing anyone can do to harm me. I'm just willing to confront people who are doing something I think is wrong. Of course, I know a lot of people are afraid of confrontation. But in this case, they've got it backwards ... because it's the politicians who should be afraid of us. They're the people who, if they're not careful, will make complete asses out of themselves in their effort to keep their power."

    Over the summer, the part-time blogger showed up at another event for the embattled senator and asked him whether he has ever used the N-word. Allen, the incumbent from Virginia, came under fire in mid-August for twice using the racial slur "macaca" to refer to S.R.Sidarth, who was filming a campaign event as a "tracker" for Democratic challenger Jim Webb's campaign. Sidarth was born and raised in Fairfax County, Virginia, but is of Indian ancestry.

    Stark, in his late-30s, pressed Allen at an event held at the Holiday Inn in Staunton, demanding that the senator respond to questions about the reasons he kept a Confederate Flag and a noose in his district office.

    Allen never answered the questions, but Stark was asked to leave the event by Allen aide David Nepp. It's unclear whether Nepp was one of the men caught on tape assaulting Stark. Neither Allen, his spokesperson, or Stark were immediately available for comment. Webb, the Democratic challenger, is reportedly slightly ahead of Allen in the polls, according to local Virginian news reports.

    Stark's guerilla-like reporting tactics have also roiled some well-known conservative pundits. He's made numerous phone calls to the Bill O'Reilly show in an attempt to get the Fox News talk show host to respond to tough questions about the domestic and foreign policy issues, resulting in several on-air threats from O'Reilly, and he has pushed Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity's buttons as well.

    Stark, the father of a 14-month-old girl, admits, however, that being a vocal activist has its drawbacks.

    "Every time I make a decision on whether to go to Washington, or attend any political event, I'm taking time away from being with my daughter," he told MyDD.com.

    But he said he's driven by a passion to change the political landscape in Washington.

    "These are pretty momentous times, and I think the people who are in charge of things right now are pretty close to just plain evil," he told MyDD. "We have a responsibility to our country and each other to get involved."